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14,055 | Humayun | Mirza Nasir al-Din Muhammad (Persian: نصیرالدین محمد, romanized: Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad; 6 March 1508 – 27 January 1556), commonly known by his regnal name Humayun (Persian: همایون, romanized: Humāyūn), was the second Mughal emperor, who ruled over territory in what is now Eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Northern India, and Pakistan from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to his death 1556. At the time of his passing, the Mughal Empire spanned almost one million square kilometres.
In December 1530, Humayun succeeded his father Babur to the throne of Delhi as ruler of the Mughal territories in the Indian subcontinent. Humayun was an inexperienced ruler when he came to power at the age of 22. His half-brother Kamran Mirza inherited Kabul and Kandahar, the northernmost parts of their father's empire; the two half-brothers would become bitter rivals.
Early in his reign, Humayun lost his entire state to Sher Shah Suri but regained it 15 years later with Safavid aid. His return from Persia was accompanied by a large retinue of Persian noblemen, signalling an important change in Mughal court culture. The Central Asian origins of the dynasty were largely overshadowed by the influences of Persian art, architecture, language, and literature. To this day, stone carvings and thousands of Persian manuscripts in India dating from the time of Humayun remain in the subcontinent. Following his return to power, Humayun quickly expanded the Empire, leaving a substantial legacy for his son, Akbar.
Humayun was born as Nasir al-Din Muhammad to Babur's favourite wife Māham Begum on Tuesday 6 March 1508. According to Abu Fazal Allami, Māham was related to the noble family of Sultan Hussain Mirza of Khorasan. She was also related to Sheikh Ahmād Jami.
The decision of Babur to divide the territories of his empire between two of his sons was unusual in India, although it had been a common Central Asian practice since the time of Genghis Khan. Unlike most monarchies, which practised primogeniture, the Timurids followed the example of Genghis and did not leave an entire kingdom to the eldest son. Although under that system only a Chingissid could claim sovereignty and Khanal authority, any male Chinggisid within a given sub-branch had an equal right to the throne (though the Timurids were not Chinggisid in their paternal ancestry). While Genghis Khan's Empire had been peacefully divided between his sons upon his death, almost every Chinggisid succession since had resulted in fratricide.
After Timur's death, his territories were divided among Pir Muhammad, Miran Shah, Khalil Sultan and Shah Rukh, which resulted in inter-family warfare. Upon Babur's death, Humayun's territories were the least secure. He had ruled only four years, and not all umarah (nobles) viewed Humayun as the rightful ruler. Indeed, earlier, when Babur had become ill, some of the nobles had tried to install his Brother-in-law, Mahdi Khwaja, as ruler. Although this attempt failed, it was a sign of problems to come.
When Humayun came to the throne of the Mughal Empire, several of his brothers revolted against him after he split the empire among them . Another brother Khalil Mirza (1509–1530) supported Humayun but was assassinated. The Emperor commenced construction of a tomb for his brother in 1538, but this was not yet finished when he was forced to flee to Persia. Sher Shah destroyed the structure and no further work was done on it after Humayun's restoration.
Humayun had two major rivals for his lands: Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat to the southwest and Sher Shah Suri (Sher Khan) settled along the river Ganges in Bihar to the east. Humayun's first campaign was to confront Sher Shah Suri. Halfway through this offensive Humayun had to abandon it and concentrate on Gujarat, where a threat from Ahmed Shah had to be met. Humayun was victorious annexing Gujarat, Malwa, Champaner and the great fort of Mandu.
During the first five years of Humayun's reign, Bahadur and Sher Khan extended their rule, although Sultan Bahadur faced pressure in the east from sporadic conflicts with the Portuguese. While the Mughals had obtained firearms via the Ottoman Empire, Bahadur's Gujarat had acquired them through a series of contracts drawn up with the Portuguese, allowing the Portuguese to establish a strategic foothold in northwestern India.
In 1535 Humayun was made aware that the Sultan of Gujarat was planning an assault on the Mughal territories in Bayana with Portuguese aid. Humayun gathered an army and marched on Bahadur. Within a month he had captured the forts of Mandu and Champaner. However, instead of pressing his attack, Humayun ceased the campaign and consolidated his newly conquered territory. Sultan Bahadur, meanwhile escaped and took up refuge with the Portuguese. Like his father, Humayun was a frequent user of opium. In a popular revolt Bahadur Shah recaptured all of Gujarat in 1536 and began an attack on Malwa.
Shortly after Humayun had marched on Gujarat, Sher Shah Suri saw an opportunity to wrest control of Agra from the Mughals. He began to gather his army together hoping for a rapid and decisive siege of the Mughal capital. Upon hearing this alarming news, Humayun quickly marched his troops back to Agra allowing Bahadur to easily regain control of the territories Humayun had recently taken. In February 1537, however, Bahadur was killed when a botched plan to kidnap the Portuguese viceroy ended in a fire-fight that the Sultan lost. Bahadur's passing caused a power vacuum in Gujarat, which ultimately paved the way for the Mughals to become the region's dominant force.
While Humayun succeeded in protecting Agra from Sher Shah, the second city of the Empire, Gaur the capital of the vilayat of Bengal, was sacked. Humayun's troops had been delayed while trying to take Chunar, a fort occupied by Sher Shah's son, in order to protect his troops from an attack from the rear. The stores of grain at Gauri, the largest in the empire, were emptied, and Humayun arrived to see corpses littering the roads. The vast wealth of Bengal was depleted and brought East, giving Sher Shah a substantial war chest.
Sher Shah withdrew to the east, but Humayun did not follow: instead he "shut himself up for a considerable time in his Harem, and indulged himself in every kind of luxury". Hindal, Humayun's 19-year-old brother, had agreed to aid him in this battle and protect the rear from attack, but he abandoned his position and withdrew to Agra, where he decreed himself acting emperor. When Humayun sent the grand Mufti, Sheikh Buhlul, to reason with him; the Sheikh was killed. Further provoking the rebellion, Hindal ordered that the Khutba, or sermon, in the main mosque be surrounded.
Humayun's other brother, Kamran Mirza, marched from his territories in the Punjab, ostensibly to aid Humayun. However, his return home had treacherous motives as he intended to stake a claim for Humayun's apparently collapsing empire. He brokered a deal with Hindal providing that his brother would cease all acts of disloyalty in return for a share in the new empire, which Kamran would create once Humayun was deposed.
In June 1539 Sher Shah met Humayun in the Battle of Chausa on the banks of the Ganges, near Buxar. This was to become an entrenched battle in which both sides spent a lot of time digging themselves into positions. The major part of the Mughal army, the artillery, was now immobile, and Humayun decided to engage in some diplomacy using Muhammad Aziz as ambassador. Humayun agreed to allow Sher Shah to rule over Bengal and Bihar, but only as provinces granted to him by his Emperor, Humayun, falling short of outright sovereignty. The two rulers also struck a bargain in order to save face: Humayun's troops would charge those of Sher Shah whose forces then retreat in feigned fear. Thus honour would, supposedly, be satisfied.
Once the Army of Humayun had made its charge and Sher Shah's troops made their agreed-upon retreat, the Mughal troops relaxed their defensive preparations and returned to their entrenchments without posting a proper guard. Observing the Mughals' vulnerability, Sher Shah reneged on his earlier agreement. That very night, his army approached the Mughal camp and finding the Mughal troops unprepared with a majority asleep, they advanced and killed most of them. The Emperor survived by swimming across the Ganges using an air-filled "water skin", and quietly returned to Agra. Humayun was assisted across the Ganges by Shams al-Din Muhammad.
When Humayun returned to Agra, he found that all three of his brothers were present. Humayun once again not only pardoned his brothers for plotting against him, but even forgave Hindal for his outright betrayal. With his armies travelling at a leisurely pace, Sher Shah was gradually drawing closer and closer to Agra. This was a serious threat to the entire family, but Humayun and Kamran squabbled over how to proceed. Kamran withdrew after Humayun refused to make a quick attack on the approaching enemy, instead opting to build a larger army under his own name.
When Kamran returned to Lahore, Humayun, with his other brothers Askari and Hindal, marched to meet Sher Shah 200 kilometres (120 mi) east of Agra at the battle of Kannauj on 17 May 1540. Humayun was soundly defeated. He retreated to Agra, pursued by Sher Shah, and thence through Delhi to Lahore. Sher Shah's founding of the short-lived Sur Empire, with its capital at Delhi, resulted in Humayun's exile for 15 years in the court of Shah Tahmasp I.
The four brothers were united in Lahore, but every day they were informed that Sher Shah was getting closer and closer. When he reached Sirhind, Humayun sent an ambassador carrying the message "I have left you the whole of Hindustan [i.e. the lands to the East of Punjab, comprising most of the Ganges Valley]. Leave Lahore alone, and let Sirhind be a boundary between you and me." Sher Shah, however, replied "I have left you Kabul. You should go there." Kabul was the capital of the empire of Humayun's brother Kamran, who was far from willing to hand over any of his territories to his brother. Instead, Kamran approached Sher Shah and proposed that he actually revolt against his brother and side with Sher Shah in return for most of the Punjab. Sher Shah dismissed his help, believing it not to be required, though word soon spread to Lahore about the treacherous proposal, and Humayun was urged to make an example of Kamran and kill him. Humayun refused, citing the last words of his father, Babur, "Do nothing against your brothers, even though they may deserve it."
Humayun visited Guru Angad at around 1540 after Humayun lost the Battle of Kannauj, and thereby the Mughal throne to Sher Shah Suri. According to Sikh hagiographies, when Humayun arrived in Gurdwara Mal Akhara Sahib at Khadur Sahib, Guru Angad was sitting and teaching children. The failure to greet the Emperor immediately angered Humayun. Humayun lashed out but the Guru reminded him that the time when you needed to fight when you lost your throne you ran away and did not fight and now you want to attack a person engaged in prayer. In the Sikh texts written more than a century after the event, Guru Angad is said to have blessed the emperor, and reassured him that someday he will regain the throne.
Humayun decided it would be wise to withdraw still further. He and his army rode out through and across the Thar Desert, when the Hindu ruler Rao Maldeo Rathore allied with Sher Shah Suri against the Mughal Empire. In many accounts Humayun mentions how he and his pregnant wife had to trace their steps through the desert at the hottest time of year. Their rations were low, and they had little to eat; even drinking water was a major problem in the desert. When Hamida Bano's horse died, no one would lend the Queen (who was now eight months pregnant) a horse, so Humayun did so himself, resulting in him riding a camel for six kilometres (four miles), although Khaled Beg then offered him his mount. Humayun was later to describe this incident as the lowest point in his life. Humayun asked that his brothers join him as he fell back into Sindh. While the previously rebellious Hindal Mirza remained loyal and was ordered to join his brothers in Kandahar. Kamran Mirza and Askari Mirza instead decided to head to the relative peace of Kabul. This was to be a definitive schism in the family. Humayun headed for Sindh because he expected aid from the Emir of Sindh, Hussein Umrani, whom he had appointed and who owed him his allegiance. Also, his wife Hamida hailed from Sindh; she was the daughter of a prestigious pir family (a pir is an Islamic religious guide) of Persian heritage long settled in Sindh. En route to the Emir's court, Humayun had to break journey because his pregnant wife Hamida was unable to travel further. Humayun sought refuge with the Hindu ruler of the oasis town of Amarkot (now part of Sindh province).
Rana Prasad Rao of Amarkot duly welcomed Humayun into his home and sheltered the refugees for several months. Here, in the household of a Hindu Rajput nobleman, Humayun's wife Hamida Bano, daughter of a Sindhi family, gave birth to the future Emperor Akbar on 15 October 1542. The date of birth is well established because Humayun consulted his astronomer to utilise the astrolabe and check the location of the planets. The infant was the long-awaited heir-apparent to the 34-year-old Humayun and the answer of many prayers. Shortly after the birth, Humayun and his party left Amarkot for Sindh, leaving Akbar behind, who was not ready for the grueling journey ahead in his infancy. He was later adopted by Askari Mirza.
For a change, Humayun was not deceived in the character of the man on whom he has pinned his hopes. Emir Hussein Umrani, ruler of Sindh, welcomed Humayun's presence and was loyal to him, just as he had been loyal to Babur against the renegade Arghuns. While in Sindh, Humayun alongside Hussein Umrani, gathered horses and weapons and formed new alliances that helped regain lost territories. Until finally Humayun had gathered hundreds of Sindhi and Baloch tribesmen alongside his Mughals and then marched towards Kandahar and later Kabul, thousands more gathered by his side as Humayun continually declared himself the rightful Timurid heir of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur.
After Humayun set out from his expedition in Sindh, along with 300 camels (mostly wild) and 2000 loads of grain, he set off to join his brothers in Kandahar after crossing the Indus River on 11 July 1543 along with the ambition to regain the Mughal Empire and overthrow the Suri dynasty. Among the tribes that had sworn allegiance to Humayun were the Leghari, Magsi, Rind and many others.
In Kamran Mirza's territory, Hindal Mirza had been placed under house arrest in Kabul after refusing to have the Khutba recited in Kamran Mirza's name. His other brother, Askari Mirza, was now ordered to gather an army and march on Humayun. When Humayun received word of the approaching hostile army he decided against facing them, and instead sought refuge elsewhere. Akbar was left behind in camp close to Kandahar, as it was December, too cold and dangerous to include the 14-month-old toddler in the march through the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Askari Mirza took Akbar in, leaving the wives of Kamran and Askari Mirza to raise him. The Akbarnama specifies Kamran Mirza's wife, Sultan Begam.
Once again Humayun turned toward Kandahar where his brother Kamran Mirza was in power, but he received no help and had to seek refuge with the Shah of Persia
Humayun fled to the refuge of the Safavid Empire in Persia, marching with 40 men, his wife Bega Begum, and her companion through mountains and valleys. Among other trials the Imperial party were forced to live on horse meat boiled in the soldiers' helmets. These indignities continued during the month it took them to reach Herat, however after their arrival they were reintroduced to the finer things in life. Upon entering the city his army was greeted with an armed escort, and they were treated to lavish food and clothing. They were given fine accommodations and the roads were cleared and cleaned before them. The Shah, Tahmasp I, unlike Humayun's own family, actually welcomed the Mughal, and treated him as a royal visitor. Here Humayun went sightseeing and was amazed at the Persian artwork and architecture he saw: much of this was the work of the Timurid Sultan Husayn Bayqarah and his ancestor, princess Gauhar Shad, thus he was able to admire the work of his relatives and ancestors at first hand.
The Mughal monarch was introduced to the work of the Persian miniaturists, and Kamaleddin Behzad had two of his pupils join Humayun in his court. Humayun was amazed at their work and asked if they would work for him if he were to regain the sovereignty of Hindustan: they agreed. With so much going on Humayun did not even meet Tahmasp until July, some six months after the former's arrival in Persia. After a lengthy journey from Herat the two met in Qazvin where a large feast and parties were held for the event. The meeting of the two emperors is depicted in a famous wall-painting in the Chehel Sotoun (Forty Columns) palace in Esfahan.
Tahmasp urged that Humayun convert from Sunni to Shia Islam in order to keep himself and several hundred followers alive. Although the Mughals initially disagreed to their conversion they knew that with this outward acceptance of Shi'ism, Tahmasp was eventually prepared to offer Humayun more substantial support. When Humayun's brother, Kamran Mirza, offered to cede Kandahar to the Persians in exchange for Humayun, dead or alive, Tahmasp refused. Instead he staged a celebration, with 300 tents, an imperial Persian carpet, 12 musical bands and "meat of all kinds". Here the Shah announced that all this, and 12,000 elite cavalry were Humayun's to lead an attack on Kamran. All that Tahmasp asked for was that, if Humayun's forces were victorious, Kandahar would be his.
With this Persian Safavid aid Humayun took Kandahar from Askari Mirza after a two-week siege. He noted how the nobles who had served Askari Mirza quickly flocked to serve him, "in very truth the greater part of the inhabitants of the world are like a flock of sheep, wherever one goes the others immediately follow". Kandahar was, as agreed, given to the Shah of Persia who sent his infant son, Murad, as the viceroy. However, the baby soon died and Humayun thought himself strong enough to assume power.
Humayun now prepared to take Kabul, ruled by his brother Kamran Mirza. In the end, there was no actual siege. Kamran Mirza was detested as a leader and as Humayun's Persian army approached the city hundreds of the former's troops changed sides, flocking to join Humayun and swelling his ranks. Kamran Mirza absconded and began building an army outside the city. In November 1545, Hamida and Humayun were reunited with their son Akbar, and held a huge feast. They also held another feast in the child's honour when he was circumcised.
However, while Humayun had a larger army than Kamran Mirza and had the upper hand, on two occasions his poor military judgement allowed the latter to retake Kabul and Kandahar, forcing Humayun to mount further campaigns for their recapture. He might have been aided in this by his reputation for leniency towards the troops who had defended the cities against him, as opposed to Kamran Mirza, whose brief periods of possession were marked by atrocities against the inhabitants who, he supposed, had helped his brother.
His youngest brother, Hindal Mirza, formerly the most disloyal of his siblings, died fighting on his behalf. His brother Askari Mirza was shackled in chains at the behest of his nobles and aides. He was allowed go on Hajj, and died en route in the desert outside Damascus.
Humayun's other brother, Kamran Mirza, had repeatedly sought to have him killed. In 1552 Kamran Mirza attempted to make a pact with Islam Shah, Sher Shah's successor, but was apprehended by a Gakhar. The Gakhars were one of the minority of tribal groups who had consistently remained loyal to their oath to the Mughals. Sultan Adam of the Gakhars handed Kamran Mirza over to Humayun. Humayun, though inclined to forgive Kamran Mirza, was warned that allowing his brother's repeated acts of treachery to go unpunished could foment rebellion amongst his own supporters. So, instead of killing Kamran Mirza, Humayun had him blinded, thereby ending any claim by the latter to the throne. He then sent Kamran Mirza on Hajj, as he hoped to see his brother thereby absolved of his offences. However Kamran Mirza died close to Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula in 1557.
In 1535, When Humayun was Governor of Gujarat, he encamped near Cambay (Khambhat). Humayun and his army was robbed and plundered by Kolis of Gujarat.
Sher Shah Suri had died in 1545; his son and successor Islam Shah died in 1554. These two deaths left the dynasty reeling and disintegrating. Three rivals for the throne all marched on Delhi, while in many cities leaders tried to stake a claim for independence. This was a perfect opportunity for the Mughals to march back to India.
The Mughal Emperor Humayun gathered a vast army and attempted the challenging task of retaking the throne in Delhi. Due to the Safavid role in Humayun's army, the vast majority of the army of the Shi'a faith, as one Shaikh Ahmad described to Humayun, "My king, I see the whole of your army are Rafizi...Everywhere the names of your soldiers are of this kind. I find they are all Yar Ali or Kashfi Ali or Haider Ali and I have, not found a single man bearing the names of the other Companions." Humayun placed the army under the leadership of Bairam Khan, a wise move given Humayun's own record of military ineptitude, and it turned out to be prescient as Bairam proved himself a great tactician.
Bairam Khan led the army through the Punjab virtually unopposed. The only major battle faced by Humayun's armies was against Sikander Suri in Sirhind, where Bairam Khan employed a tactic whereby he engaged his enemy in open battle, but then retreated quickly in apparent fear. When the enemy followed after them they were surprised by entrenched defensive positions and were easily annihilated. At the Battle of Sirhind on 22 June 1555, the armies of Sikandar Shah Suri were decisively defeated and the Mughal Empire was re-established in India.
After Sirhind, most towns and villages chose to welcome the invading army as it made its way to the capital. On 23 July 1555, Humayun once again sat on Babur's throne in Delhi.
The Gazetteer of Ulwur states:
Soon after Babur's death, his successor, Humayun, was in AD 1540 supplanted by the Pathan Sher Shah, who, in AD 1545, was followed by Islam Shah. During the reign of the latter a battle was fought and lost by the Emperor's troops at Firozpur Jhirka, in Mewat, on which, however, Islam Shah did not loose his hold. Adil Shah, the third of the Pathan interlopers, who succeeded in AD 1552, had to contend for the Empire with the returned Humayun. In these struggles for the restoration of Babar's dynasty Khanzadas apparently do not figure at all. Humayun seems to have conciliated them by marrying the elder daughter of Jamal Khan, nephew of Babar's opponent, Hasan Khan and, by causing his great minister, Bairam Khan, to marry a younger daughter of the same Mewatti.
With all of Humayun's brothers now dead, there was no fear of another usurping his throne during his military campaigns. He was also now an established leader and could trust his generals. With this new-found strength Humayun embarked on a series of military campaigns aimed at extending his reign over areas in the east and west of the subcontinent. His sojourn in exile seems to have reduced his reliance, and his military leadership came to imitate the more effective methods that he had observed in Persia.
Edward S. Holden writes; "He was uniformly kind and considerate to his dependents, devotedly attached to his son Akbar, to his friends, and to his turbulent brothers. The misfortunes of his reign arose in great part, from his failure to treat them with rigor." He further writes: "The very defects of his character, which render him less admirable as a successful ruler of nations, make us more fond of him as a man. His renown has suffered in that his reign came between the brilliant conquests of Babur and the beneficent statesmanship of Akbar; but he was not unworthy to be the son of the one and the father of the other." Stanley Lane-Poole writes in his book Medieval India: "His name meant the winner (Lucky/Conqueror), there is no king in the history to be named as wrong as Humayun", he was of a forgiving nature. He further writes, "He was in fact unfortunate ... Scarcely had he enjoyed his throne for six months in Delhi when he slipped down from the polished steps of his palace and died in his forty-ninth year (Jan. 24, 1556). If there was a possibility of falling, Humayun was not the man to miss it. He tumbled through his life and tumbled out of it."
Humayun ordered the crushing by elephant of an imam he mistakenly believed to be critical of his reign.
On 24 January 1556, Humayun, with his arms full of books, was descending the staircase from his library Sher Mandal when the muezzin announced the Azaan (the call to prayer). It was his habit, wherever and whenever he heard the summons, to bow his knee in holy reverence. Trying to kneel, he caught his foot in his robe, slipped down several steps and hit his temple on a rugged stone edge. He died three days later. His body was laid to rest in Purana Quila initially, but, because of an attack by Hemu on Delhi and the capture of Purana Qila, Humayun's body was exhumed by the fleeing army and transferred to Kalanaur in Punjab where Akbar was crowned. After young Mughal emperor Akbar defeated and killed Hemu in the Second Battle of Panipat. Humayun's body was buried in Humayun's Tomb in Delhi the first very grand garden tomb in Mughal architecture, setting the precedent later followed by the Taj Mahal and many other Indian monuments. It was commissioned by his favourite and devoted chief wife, Bega Begum.
Akbar later asked his paternal aunt, Gulbadan Begum, to write a biography of his father Humayun, the Humayun nameh (or Humayun-nama), and what she remembered of Babur.
The full title is Ahwal Humayun Padshah Jamah Kardom Gulbadan Begum bint Babur Padshah amma Akbar Padshah. She was only eight when Babur died, and was married at 17, and her work is in simple Persian style.
Unlike other Mughal royal biographies (the Zafarnama of Timur, Baburnama, and his own Akbarnama) no richly illustrated copy has survived, and the work is only known from a single battered and slightly incomplete manuscript, now in the British Library, that emerged in the 1860s. Annette Beveridge published an English translation in 1901, and editions in English and Bengali have been published since 2000. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Mirza Nasir al-Din Muhammad (Persian: نصیرالدین محمد, romanized: Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad; 6 March 1508 – 27 January 1556), commonly known by his regnal name Humayun (Persian: همایون, romanized: Humāyūn), was the second Mughal emperor, who ruled over territory in what is now Eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Northern India, and Pakistan from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to his death 1556. At the time of his passing, the Mughal Empire spanned almost one million square kilometres.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In December 1530, Humayun succeeded his father Babur to the throne of Delhi as ruler of the Mughal territories in the Indian subcontinent. Humayun was an inexperienced ruler when he came to power at the age of 22. His half-brother Kamran Mirza inherited Kabul and Kandahar, the northernmost parts of their father's empire; the two half-brothers would become bitter rivals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Early in his reign, Humayun lost his entire state to Sher Shah Suri but regained it 15 years later with Safavid aid. His return from Persia was accompanied by a large retinue of Persian noblemen, signalling an important change in Mughal court culture. The Central Asian origins of the dynasty were largely overshadowed by the influences of Persian art, architecture, language, and literature. To this day, stone carvings and thousands of Persian manuscripts in India dating from the time of Humayun remain in the subcontinent. Following his return to power, Humayun quickly expanded the Empire, leaving a substantial legacy for his son, Akbar.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Humayun was born as Nasir al-Din Muhammad to Babur's favourite wife Māham Begum on Tuesday 6 March 1508. According to Abu Fazal Allami, Māham was related to the noble family of Sultan Hussain Mirza of Khorasan. She was also related to Sheikh Ahmād Jami.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The decision of Babur to divide the territories of his empire between two of his sons was unusual in India, although it had been a common Central Asian practice since the time of Genghis Khan. Unlike most monarchies, which practised primogeniture, the Timurids followed the example of Genghis and did not leave an entire kingdom to the eldest son. Although under that system only a Chingissid could claim sovereignty and Khanal authority, any male Chinggisid within a given sub-branch had an equal right to the throne (though the Timurids were not Chinggisid in their paternal ancestry). While Genghis Khan's Empire had been peacefully divided between his sons upon his death, almost every Chinggisid succession since had resulted in fratricide.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After Timur's death, his territories were divided among Pir Muhammad, Miran Shah, Khalil Sultan and Shah Rukh, which resulted in inter-family warfare. Upon Babur's death, Humayun's territories were the least secure. He had ruled only four years, and not all umarah (nobles) viewed Humayun as the rightful ruler. Indeed, earlier, when Babur had become ill, some of the nobles had tried to install his Brother-in-law, Mahdi Khwaja, as ruler. Although this attempt failed, it was a sign of problems to come.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "When Humayun came to the throne of the Mughal Empire, several of his brothers revolted against him after he split the empire among them . Another brother Khalil Mirza (1509–1530) supported Humayun but was assassinated. The Emperor commenced construction of a tomb for his brother in 1538, but this was not yet finished when he was forced to flee to Persia. Sher Shah destroyed the structure and no further work was done on it after Humayun's restoration.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Humayun had two major rivals for his lands: Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat to the southwest and Sher Shah Suri (Sher Khan) settled along the river Ganges in Bihar to the east. Humayun's first campaign was to confront Sher Shah Suri. Halfway through this offensive Humayun had to abandon it and concentrate on Gujarat, where a threat from Ahmed Shah had to be met. Humayun was victorious annexing Gujarat, Malwa, Champaner and the great fort of Mandu.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the first five years of Humayun's reign, Bahadur and Sher Khan extended their rule, although Sultan Bahadur faced pressure in the east from sporadic conflicts with the Portuguese. While the Mughals had obtained firearms via the Ottoman Empire, Bahadur's Gujarat had acquired them through a series of contracts drawn up with the Portuguese, allowing the Portuguese to establish a strategic foothold in northwestern India.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1535 Humayun was made aware that the Sultan of Gujarat was planning an assault on the Mughal territories in Bayana with Portuguese aid. Humayun gathered an army and marched on Bahadur. Within a month he had captured the forts of Mandu and Champaner. However, instead of pressing his attack, Humayun ceased the campaign and consolidated his newly conquered territory. Sultan Bahadur, meanwhile escaped and took up refuge with the Portuguese. Like his father, Humayun was a frequent user of opium. In a popular revolt Bahadur Shah recaptured all of Gujarat in 1536 and began an attack on Malwa.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Shortly after Humayun had marched on Gujarat, Sher Shah Suri saw an opportunity to wrest control of Agra from the Mughals. He began to gather his army together hoping for a rapid and decisive siege of the Mughal capital. Upon hearing this alarming news, Humayun quickly marched his troops back to Agra allowing Bahadur to easily regain control of the territories Humayun had recently taken. In February 1537, however, Bahadur was killed when a botched plan to kidnap the Portuguese viceroy ended in a fire-fight that the Sultan lost. Bahadur's passing caused a power vacuum in Gujarat, which ultimately paved the way for the Mughals to become the region's dominant force.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "While Humayun succeeded in protecting Agra from Sher Shah, the second city of the Empire, Gaur the capital of the vilayat of Bengal, was sacked. Humayun's troops had been delayed while trying to take Chunar, a fort occupied by Sher Shah's son, in order to protect his troops from an attack from the rear. The stores of grain at Gauri, the largest in the empire, were emptied, and Humayun arrived to see corpses littering the roads. The vast wealth of Bengal was depleted and brought East, giving Sher Shah a substantial war chest.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Sher Shah withdrew to the east, but Humayun did not follow: instead he \"shut himself up for a considerable time in his Harem, and indulged himself in every kind of luxury\". Hindal, Humayun's 19-year-old brother, had agreed to aid him in this battle and protect the rear from attack, but he abandoned his position and withdrew to Agra, where he decreed himself acting emperor. When Humayun sent the grand Mufti, Sheikh Buhlul, to reason with him; the Sheikh was killed. Further provoking the rebellion, Hindal ordered that the Khutba, or sermon, in the main mosque be surrounded.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Humayun's other brother, Kamran Mirza, marched from his territories in the Punjab, ostensibly to aid Humayun. However, his return home had treacherous motives as he intended to stake a claim for Humayun's apparently collapsing empire. He brokered a deal with Hindal providing that his brother would cease all acts of disloyalty in return for a share in the new empire, which Kamran would create once Humayun was deposed.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In June 1539 Sher Shah met Humayun in the Battle of Chausa on the banks of the Ganges, near Buxar. This was to become an entrenched battle in which both sides spent a lot of time digging themselves into positions. The major part of the Mughal army, the artillery, was now immobile, and Humayun decided to engage in some diplomacy using Muhammad Aziz as ambassador. Humayun agreed to allow Sher Shah to rule over Bengal and Bihar, but only as provinces granted to him by his Emperor, Humayun, falling short of outright sovereignty. The two rulers also struck a bargain in order to save face: Humayun's troops would charge those of Sher Shah whose forces then retreat in feigned fear. Thus honour would, supposedly, be satisfied.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Once the Army of Humayun had made its charge and Sher Shah's troops made their agreed-upon retreat, the Mughal troops relaxed their defensive preparations and returned to their entrenchments without posting a proper guard. Observing the Mughals' vulnerability, Sher Shah reneged on his earlier agreement. That very night, his army approached the Mughal camp and finding the Mughal troops unprepared with a majority asleep, they advanced and killed most of them. The Emperor survived by swimming across the Ganges using an air-filled \"water skin\", and quietly returned to Agra. Humayun was assisted across the Ganges by Shams al-Din Muhammad.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "When Humayun returned to Agra, he found that all three of his brothers were present. Humayun once again not only pardoned his brothers for plotting against him, but even forgave Hindal for his outright betrayal. With his armies travelling at a leisurely pace, Sher Shah was gradually drawing closer and closer to Agra. This was a serious threat to the entire family, but Humayun and Kamran squabbled over how to proceed. Kamran withdrew after Humayun refused to make a quick attack on the approaching enemy, instead opting to build a larger army under his own name.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "When Kamran returned to Lahore, Humayun, with his other brothers Askari and Hindal, marched to meet Sher Shah 200 kilometres (120 mi) east of Agra at the battle of Kannauj on 17 May 1540. Humayun was soundly defeated. He retreated to Agra, pursued by Sher Shah, and thence through Delhi to Lahore. Sher Shah's founding of the short-lived Sur Empire, with its capital at Delhi, resulted in Humayun's exile for 15 years in the court of Shah Tahmasp I.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The four brothers were united in Lahore, but every day they were informed that Sher Shah was getting closer and closer. When he reached Sirhind, Humayun sent an ambassador carrying the message \"I have left you the whole of Hindustan [i.e. the lands to the East of Punjab, comprising most of the Ganges Valley]. Leave Lahore alone, and let Sirhind be a boundary between you and me.\" Sher Shah, however, replied \"I have left you Kabul. You should go there.\" Kabul was the capital of the empire of Humayun's brother Kamran, who was far from willing to hand over any of his territories to his brother. Instead, Kamran approached Sher Shah and proposed that he actually revolt against his brother and side with Sher Shah in return for most of the Punjab. Sher Shah dismissed his help, believing it not to be required, though word soon spread to Lahore about the treacherous proposal, and Humayun was urged to make an example of Kamran and kill him. Humayun refused, citing the last words of his father, Babur, \"Do nothing against your brothers, even though they may deserve it.\"",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Humayun visited Guru Angad at around 1540 after Humayun lost the Battle of Kannauj, and thereby the Mughal throne to Sher Shah Suri. According to Sikh hagiographies, when Humayun arrived in Gurdwara Mal Akhara Sahib at Khadur Sahib, Guru Angad was sitting and teaching children. The failure to greet the Emperor immediately angered Humayun. Humayun lashed out but the Guru reminded him that the time when you needed to fight when you lost your throne you ran away and did not fight and now you want to attack a person engaged in prayer. In the Sikh texts written more than a century after the event, Guru Angad is said to have blessed the emperor, and reassured him that someday he will regain the throne.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Humayun decided it would be wise to withdraw still further. He and his army rode out through and across the Thar Desert, when the Hindu ruler Rao Maldeo Rathore allied with Sher Shah Suri against the Mughal Empire. In many accounts Humayun mentions how he and his pregnant wife had to trace their steps through the desert at the hottest time of year. Their rations were low, and they had little to eat; even drinking water was a major problem in the desert. When Hamida Bano's horse died, no one would lend the Queen (who was now eight months pregnant) a horse, so Humayun did so himself, resulting in him riding a camel for six kilometres (four miles), although Khaled Beg then offered him his mount. Humayun was later to describe this incident as the lowest point in his life. Humayun asked that his brothers join him as he fell back into Sindh. While the previously rebellious Hindal Mirza remained loyal and was ordered to join his brothers in Kandahar. Kamran Mirza and Askari Mirza instead decided to head to the relative peace of Kabul. This was to be a definitive schism in the family. Humayun headed for Sindh because he expected aid from the Emir of Sindh, Hussein Umrani, whom he had appointed and who owed him his allegiance. Also, his wife Hamida hailed from Sindh; she was the daughter of a prestigious pir family (a pir is an Islamic religious guide) of Persian heritage long settled in Sindh. En route to the Emir's court, Humayun had to break journey because his pregnant wife Hamida was unable to travel further. Humayun sought refuge with the Hindu ruler of the oasis town of Amarkot (now part of Sindh province).",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Rana Prasad Rao of Amarkot duly welcomed Humayun into his home and sheltered the refugees for several months. Here, in the household of a Hindu Rajput nobleman, Humayun's wife Hamida Bano, daughter of a Sindhi family, gave birth to the future Emperor Akbar on 15 October 1542. The date of birth is well established because Humayun consulted his astronomer to utilise the astrolabe and check the location of the planets. The infant was the long-awaited heir-apparent to the 34-year-old Humayun and the answer of many prayers. Shortly after the birth, Humayun and his party left Amarkot for Sindh, leaving Akbar behind, who was not ready for the grueling journey ahead in his infancy. He was later adopted by Askari Mirza.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "For a change, Humayun was not deceived in the character of the man on whom he has pinned his hopes. Emir Hussein Umrani, ruler of Sindh, welcomed Humayun's presence and was loyal to him, just as he had been loyal to Babur against the renegade Arghuns. While in Sindh, Humayun alongside Hussein Umrani, gathered horses and weapons and formed new alliances that helped regain lost territories. Until finally Humayun had gathered hundreds of Sindhi and Baloch tribesmen alongside his Mughals and then marched towards Kandahar and later Kabul, thousands more gathered by his side as Humayun continually declared himself the rightful Timurid heir of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur.",
"title": "Sher Shah Suri"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After Humayun set out from his expedition in Sindh, along with 300 camels (mostly wild) and 2000 loads of grain, he set off to join his brothers in Kandahar after crossing the Indus River on 11 July 1543 along with the ambition to regain the Mughal Empire and overthrow the Suri dynasty. Among the tribes that had sworn allegiance to Humayun were the Leghari, Magsi, Rind and many others.",
"title": "Retreat to Kabul"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In Kamran Mirza's territory, Hindal Mirza had been placed under house arrest in Kabul after refusing to have the Khutba recited in Kamran Mirza's name. His other brother, Askari Mirza, was now ordered to gather an army and march on Humayun. When Humayun received word of the approaching hostile army he decided against facing them, and instead sought refuge elsewhere. Akbar was left behind in camp close to Kandahar, as it was December, too cold and dangerous to include the 14-month-old toddler in the march through the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Askari Mirza took Akbar in, leaving the wives of Kamran and Askari Mirza to raise him. The Akbarnama specifies Kamran Mirza's wife, Sultan Begam.",
"title": "Retreat to Kabul"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Once again Humayun turned toward Kandahar where his brother Kamran Mirza was in power, but he received no help and had to seek refuge with the Shah of Persia",
"title": "Retreat to Kabul"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Humayun fled to the refuge of the Safavid Empire in Persia, marching with 40 men, his wife Bega Begum, and her companion through mountains and valleys. Among other trials the Imperial party were forced to live on horse meat boiled in the soldiers' helmets. These indignities continued during the month it took them to reach Herat, however after their arrival they were reintroduced to the finer things in life. Upon entering the city his army was greeted with an armed escort, and they were treated to lavish food and clothing. They were given fine accommodations and the roads were cleared and cleaned before them. The Shah, Tahmasp I, unlike Humayun's own family, actually welcomed the Mughal, and treated him as a royal visitor. Here Humayun went sightseeing and was amazed at the Persian artwork and architecture he saw: much of this was the work of the Timurid Sultan Husayn Bayqarah and his ancestor, princess Gauhar Shad, thus he was able to admire the work of his relatives and ancestors at first hand.",
"title": "Refuge in Persia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Mughal monarch was introduced to the work of the Persian miniaturists, and Kamaleddin Behzad had two of his pupils join Humayun in his court. Humayun was amazed at their work and asked if they would work for him if he were to regain the sovereignty of Hindustan: they agreed. With so much going on Humayun did not even meet Tahmasp until July, some six months after the former's arrival in Persia. After a lengthy journey from Herat the two met in Qazvin where a large feast and parties were held for the event. The meeting of the two emperors is depicted in a famous wall-painting in the Chehel Sotoun (Forty Columns) palace in Esfahan.",
"title": "Refuge in Persia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Tahmasp urged that Humayun convert from Sunni to Shia Islam in order to keep himself and several hundred followers alive. Although the Mughals initially disagreed to their conversion they knew that with this outward acceptance of Shi'ism, Tahmasp was eventually prepared to offer Humayun more substantial support. When Humayun's brother, Kamran Mirza, offered to cede Kandahar to the Persians in exchange for Humayun, dead or alive, Tahmasp refused. Instead he staged a celebration, with 300 tents, an imperial Persian carpet, 12 musical bands and \"meat of all kinds\". Here the Shah announced that all this, and 12,000 elite cavalry were Humayun's to lead an attack on Kamran. All that Tahmasp asked for was that, if Humayun's forces were victorious, Kandahar would be his.",
"title": "Refuge in Persia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "With this Persian Safavid aid Humayun took Kandahar from Askari Mirza after a two-week siege. He noted how the nobles who had served Askari Mirza quickly flocked to serve him, \"in very truth the greater part of the inhabitants of the world are like a flock of sheep, wherever one goes the others immediately follow\". Kandahar was, as agreed, given to the Shah of Persia who sent his infant son, Murad, as the viceroy. However, the baby soon died and Humayun thought himself strong enough to assume power.",
"title": "Kandahar and onward"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Humayun now prepared to take Kabul, ruled by his brother Kamran Mirza. In the end, there was no actual siege. Kamran Mirza was detested as a leader and as Humayun's Persian army approached the city hundreds of the former's troops changed sides, flocking to join Humayun and swelling his ranks. Kamran Mirza absconded and began building an army outside the city. In November 1545, Hamida and Humayun were reunited with their son Akbar, and held a huge feast. They also held another feast in the child's honour when he was circumcised.",
"title": "Kandahar and onward"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "However, while Humayun had a larger army than Kamran Mirza and had the upper hand, on two occasions his poor military judgement allowed the latter to retake Kabul and Kandahar, forcing Humayun to mount further campaigns for their recapture. He might have been aided in this by his reputation for leniency towards the troops who had defended the cities against him, as opposed to Kamran Mirza, whose brief periods of possession were marked by atrocities against the inhabitants who, he supposed, had helped his brother.",
"title": "Kandahar and onward"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "His youngest brother, Hindal Mirza, formerly the most disloyal of his siblings, died fighting on his behalf. His brother Askari Mirza was shackled in chains at the behest of his nobles and aides. He was allowed go on Hajj, and died en route in the desert outside Damascus.",
"title": "Kandahar and onward"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Humayun's other brother, Kamran Mirza, had repeatedly sought to have him killed. In 1552 Kamran Mirza attempted to make a pact with Islam Shah, Sher Shah's successor, but was apprehended by a Gakhar. The Gakhars were one of the minority of tribal groups who had consistently remained loyal to their oath to the Mughals. Sultan Adam of the Gakhars handed Kamran Mirza over to Humayun. Humayun, though inclined to forgive Kamran Mirza, was warned that allowing his brother's repeated acts of treachery to go unpunished could foment rebellion amongst his own supporters. So, instead of killing Kamran Mirza, Humayun had him blinded, thereby ending any claim by the latter to the throne. He then sent Kamran Mirza on Hajj, as he hoped to see his brother thereby absolved of his offences. However Kamran Mirza died close to Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula in 1557.",
"title": "Kandahar and onward"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1535, When Humayun was Governor of Gujarat, he encamped near Cambay (Khambhat). Humayun and his army was robbed and plundered by Kolis of Gujarat.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Sher Shah Suri had died in 1545; his son and successor Islam Shah died in 1554. These two deaths left the dynasty reeling and disintegrating. Three rivals for the throne all marched on Delhi, while in many cities leaders tried to stake a claim for independence. This was a perfect opportunity for the Mughals to march back to India.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Mughal Emperor Humayun gathered a vast army and attempted the challenging task of retaking the throne in Delhi. Due to the Safavid role in Humayun's army, the vast majority of the army of the Shi'a faith, as one Shaikh Ahmad described to Humayun, \"My king, I see the whole of your army are Rafizi...Everywhere the names of your soldiers are of this kind. I find they are all Yar Ali or Kashfi Ali or Haider Ali and I have, not found a single man bearing the names of the other Companions.\" Humayun placed the army under the leadership of Bairam Khan, a wise move given Humayun's own record of military ineptitude, and it turned out to be prescient as Bairam proved himself a great tactician.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Bairam Khan led the army through the Punjab virtually unopposed. The only major battle faced by Humayun's armies was against Sikander Suri in Sirhind, where Bairam Khan employed a tactic whereby he engaged his enemy in open battle, but then retreated quickly in apparent fear. When the enemy followed after them they were surprised by entrenched defensive positions and were easily annihilated. At the Battle of Sirhind on 22 June 1555, the armies of Sikandar Shah Suri were decisively defeated and the Mughal Empire was re-established in India.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After Sirhind, most towns and villages chose to welcome the invading army as it made its way to the capital. On 23 July 1555, Humayun once again sat on Babur's throne in Delhi.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Gazetteer of Ulwur states:",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Soon after Babur's death, his successor, Humayun, was in AD 1540 supplanted by the Pathan Sher Shah, who, in AD 1545, was followed by Islam Shah. During the reign of the latter a battle was fought and lost by the Emperor's troops at Firozpur Jhirka, in Mewat, on which, however, Islam Shah did not loose his hold. Adil Shah, the third of the Pathan interlopers, who succeeded in AD 1552, had to contend for the Empire with the returned Humayun. In these struggles for the restoration of Babar's dynasty Khanzadas apparently do not figure at all. Humayun seems to have conciliated them by marrying the elder daughter of Jamal Khan, nephew of Babar's opponent, Hasan Khan and, by causing his great minister, Bairam Khan, to marry a younger daughter of the same Mewatti.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "With all of Humayun's brothers now dead, there was no fear of another usurping his throne during his military campaigns. He was also now an established leader and could trust his generals. With this new-found strength Humayun embarked on a series of military campaigns aimed at extending his reign over areas in the east and west of the subcontinent. His sojourn in exile seems to have reduced his reliance, and his military leadership came to imitate the more effective methods that he had observed in Persia.",
"title": "Restoration of the Mughal Empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Edward S. Holden writes; \"He was uniformly kind and considerate to his dependents, devotedly attached to his son Akbar, to his friends, and to his turbulent brothers. The misfortunes of his reign arose in great part, from his failure to treat them with rigor.\" He further writes: \"The very defects of his character, which render him less admirable as a successful ruler of nations, make us more fond of him as a man. His renown has suffered in that his reign came between the brilliant conquests of Babur and the beneficent statesmanship of Akbar; but he was not unworthy to be the son of the one and the father of the other.\" Stanley Lane-Poole writes in his book Medieval India: \"His name meant the winner (Lucky/Conqueror), there is no king in the history to be named as wrong as Humayun\", he was of a forgiving nature. He further writes, \"He was in fact unfortunate ... Scarcely had he enjoyed his throne for six months in Delhi when he slipped down from the polished steps of his palace and died in his forty-ninth year (Jan. 24, 1556). If there was a possibility of falling, Humayun was not the man to miss it. He tumbled through his life and tumbled out of it.\"",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Humayun ordered the crushing by elephant of an imam he mistakenly believed to be critical of his reign.",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On 24 January 1556, Humayun, with his arms full of books, was descending the staircase from his library Sher Mandal when the muezzin announced the Azaan (the call to prayer). It was his habit, wherever and whenever he heard the summons, to bow his knee in holy reverence. Trying to kneel, he caught his foot in his robe, slipped down several steps and hit his temple on a rugged stone edge. He died three days later. His body was laid to rest in Purana Quila initially, but, because of an attack by Hemu on Delhi and the capture of Purana Qila, Humayun's body was exhumed by the fleeing army and transferred to Kalanaur in Punjab where Akbar was crowned. After young Mughal emperor Akbar defeated and killed Hemu in the Second Battle of Panipat. Humayun's body was buried in Humayun's Tomb in Delhi the first very grand garden tomb in Mughal architecture, setting the precedent later followed by the Taj Mahal and many other Indian monuments. It was commissioned by his favourite and devoted chief wife, Bega Begum.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Akbar later asked his paternal aunt, Gulbadan Begum, to write a biography of his father Humayun, the Humayun nameh (or Humayun-nama), and what she remembered of Babur.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The full title is Ahwal Humayun Padshah Jamah Kardom Gulbadan Begum bint Babur Padshah amma Akbar Padshah. She was only eight when Babur died, and was married at 17, and her work is in simple Persian style.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Unlike other Mughal royal biographies (the Zafarnama of Timur, Baburnama, and his own Akbarnama) no richly illustrated copy has survived, and the work is only known from a single battered and slightly incomplete manuscript, now in the British Library, that emerged in the 1860s. Annette Beveridge published an English translation in 1901, and editions in English and Bengali have been published since 2000.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
}
]
| Mirza Nasir al-Din Muhammad, commonly known by his regnal name Humayun, was the second Mughal emperor, who ruled over territory in what is now Eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Northern India, and Pakistan from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to his death 1556. At the time of his passing, the Mughal Empire spanned almost one million square kilometres. In December 1530, Humayun succeeded his father Babur to the throne of Delhi as ruler of the Mughal territories in the Indian subcontinent. Humayun was an inexperienced ruler when he came to power at the age of 22. His half-brother Kamran Mirza inherited Kabul and Kandahar, the northernmost parts of their father's empire; the two half-brothers would become bitter rivals. Early in his reign, Humayun lost his entire state to Sher Shah Suri but regained it 15 years later with Safavid aid. His return from Persia was accompanied by a large retinue of Persian noblemen, signalling an important change in Mughal court culture. The Central Asian origins of the dynasty were largely overshadowed by the influences of Persian art, architecture, language, and literature. To this day, stone carvings and thousands of Persian manuscripts in India dating from the time of Humayun remain in the subcontinent. Following his return to power, Humayun quickly expanded the Empire, leaving a substantial legacy for his son, Akbar. | 2001-11-01T22:44:19Z | 2023-12-29T23:21:38Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humayun |
14,056 | Prince-elector | The prince-electors (German: Kurfürst (listen), pl. Kurfürsten, Czech: Kurfiřt, Latin: Princeps Elector) were the members of the electoral college that elected the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.
From the 13th century onwards, a small group of prince-electors gained the privilege of electing the king. The king would then later be crowned Emperor by the pope. Charles V (elected in 1519) was the last emperor to be crowned (1530); his successors assumed the title "Elected Emperor of the Romans" (German: erwählter Römischer Kaiser; Latin: electus Romanorum imperator) upon their coronation as kings.
The dignity of elector carried great prestige and was considered to be second only to that of king or emperor. The electors held exclusive privileges that were not shared with other princes of the Empire, and they continued to hold their original titles alongside that of elector.
The heir apparent to a secular prince-elector was known as an electoral prince (German: Kurprinz).
Electors were rulers of reichsstände (Imperial Estates), enjoying precedence over the other Imperial Princes. They were, until the 18th century, exclusively entitled to be addressed with the title Durchlaucht (Serene Highness). In 1742, the electors became entitled to the superlative Durchlauchtigste (Most Serene Highness), while other princes were promoted to Durchlaucht.
As rulers of Imperial Estates, the electors enjoyed all the privileges of princes, including the right to enter into alliances, to autonomy in relation to dynastic affairs, and to precedence over other subjects. The Golden Bull granted them the Privilegium de non appellando, which prevented their subjects from lodging an appeal to a higher Imperial court. However, while this privilege, and some others, were automatically granted to Electors, they were not exclusive to them and many of the larger Imperial Estates were also to be individually granted some or all those rights and privileges.
The electors, like the other princes ruling States of the Empire, were members of the Imperial Diet, which was divided into three collegia: the Council of Electors, the Council of Princes, and the Council of Cities. In addition to being members of the Council of Electors, most electors were also members of the Council of Princes by virtue of possessing territory or holding ecclesiastical position. The assent of both bodies was required for important decisions affecting the structure of the Empire, such as the creation of new electorates or States of the Empire.
Many electors ruled a number of States of the Empire or held several ecclesiastical titles, and therefore had multiple votes in the Council of Princes. In 1792, the Elector of Brandenburg had eight votes, the Elector of Bavaria six votes, the Elector of Hanover six votes, the King of Bohemia three votes, the Elector-Archbishop of Trier three votes, the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne two votes, and the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz one vote. Thus, of the hundred votes in the Council of Princes in 1792, twenty-nine belonged to electors, giving them considerable influence in the Council of Princes in addition to their positions as electors.
In addition to voting by colleges or councils, the Imperial Diet also voted in religious coalitions, as provided for in the Peace of Westphalia. The Archbishop of Mainz presided over the Catholic body, the corpus catholicorum, while the Elector of Saxony presided over the Protestant body, the corpus evangelicorum. The division into religious bodies was on the basis of the official religion of the state.
The electors were originally summoned by the Archbishop of Mainz within one month of an Emperor's death, and met within three months of being summoned. During the interregnum, imperial power was exercised by two imperial vicars. Each vicar, in the words of the Golden Bull, was "the administrator of the empire itself, with the power of passing judgments, of presenting to ecclesiastical benefices, of collecting returns and revenues and investing with fiefs, of receiving oaths of fealty for and in the name of the holy empire". The Elector of Saxony was vicar in areas operating under Saxon law (Saxony, Westphalia, Hannover, and northern Germany), while the Elector Palatine was vicar in the remainder of the Empire (Franconia, Swabia, the Rhine, and southern Germany). The Elector of Bavaria replaced the Elector Palatine in 1623, but when the latter was granted a new electorate in 1648, there was a dispute between the two as to which was vicar. In 1659, both purported to act as vicar, but ultimately, the other vicar recognized the Elector of Bavaria. Later, the two electors made a pact to act as joint vicars, but the Imperial Diet rejected the agreement. In 1711, while the Elector of Bavaria was under the ban of the Empire, the Elector Palatine again acted as vicar, but his cousin was restored to his position upon his restoration three years later.
Finally, in 1745, the two agreed to alternate as vicars, with Bavaria starting first. This arrangement was upheld by the Imperial Diet in 1752. In 1777, the question was settled when the Elector Palatine inherited Bavaria. On many occasions, however, there was no interregnum, as a new king had been elected during the lifetime of the previous Emperor.
Frankfurt regularly served as the site of the election from the fourteenth century on, but elections were also held at Cologne (1531), Regensburg (1575 and 1636), and Augsburg (1653 and 1690). An elector could appear in person or could appoint another elector as his proxy. More often, an electoral suite or embassy was sent to cast the vote; the credentials of such representatives were verified by the Archbishop of Mainz, who presided over the ceremony. The deliberations were held at the city hall, but voting occurred in the cathedral. In Frankfurt, a special electoral chapel, or Wahlkapelle, was used for elections. Under the Golden Bull, a majority of electors sufficed to elect a king, and each elector could cast only one vote. Electors were free to vote for whomsoever they pleased (including themselves), but dynastic considerations played a great part in the choice.
From the sixteenth century on, electors drafted a Wahlkapitulation, or electoral capitulation, which was presented to the king-elect. The capitulation may be described as a contract between the princes and the king, the latter conceding rights and powers to the electors and other princes. Once an individual swore to abide by the electoral capitulation, he assumed the office of King of the Romans.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, princes often acted merely to confirm hereditary succession in the Ottonian and Salian dynasty. But with the actual formation of the prince-elector class, elections became more open, starting with the election of Lothair III in 1125. The Staufen dynasty managed to get its sons formally elected in their fathers' lifetimes almost as a formality. After these lines ended in extinction, the electors began to elect kings from different families so that the throne would not once again settle within a single dynasty. All kings elected from 1438 onwards were from among the Habsburg dynasty until 1740, when Austria was inherited by a woman, Maria Theresa, sparking the War of the Austrian Succession an the short-lived rule of a Bavarian Wittelsbach emperor. In 1745, Maria Theresa's husband, Francis I of Lorraine, was elected emperor. All of his successors were also from the Habsburg-Lorraine family.
Each elector held a "High Office of the Empire" (Reichserzämter) analogous to a modern cabinet office position and was a member of the ceremonial Imperial Household. The three spiritual electors became Archchancellors (German: Erzkanzler, Latin: Archicancellarius): the Archbishop of Mainz became Archchancellor of Germany, the Archbishop of Cologne became Archchancellor of Italy, and the Archbishop of Trier became Archchancellor of Burgundy. The secular electors were granted heraldic augmentations to their coats of arms reflecting their positions in the Household. These augmentations were displayed in three alternative ways: firstly, as an inescutcheon on their coat of arms (as in the case of the Arch-Steward, Treasurer, and Chamberlain); secondly: as dexter impalements (as in the case of the Arch-Marshal and Arch-Bannerbearer) and thirdly: integrated into the charge within the escutcheon (as in the case of the Arch-Cupbearer, where the Lion of Bohemia acquired a "simple crown" held in his dexter paw).
When the Duke of Bavaria replaced the Elector Palatine in 1623, he assumed the latter's office of Arch-Steward. When the Count Palatine was granted a new electorate, he assumed the position of Arch-Treasurer of the Empire. When the Duke of Bavaria was banned in 1706, the Elector Palatine returned to the office of Arch-Steward, and in 1710, the Elector of Hanover was promoted to the post of Arch-Treasurer. Matters were complicated by the Duke of Bavaria's restoration in 1714; the Elector of Bavaria resumed the office of Arch-Steward, while the Elector Palatine returned to the post of Arch-Treasurer, and the Elector of Hanover was given the new office of Archbannerbearer. The Electors of Hanover, however, continued to be styled Arch-Treasurers, though the Elector Palatine was the one who actually exercised the office until 1777, when he inherited Bavaria and the Arch-Stewardship. After 1777, no further changes were made to the Imperial Household; new offices were planned for the Electors admitted in 1803, but the Empire was abolished before they could be created. The Duke of Württemberg, however, started to adopt the trappings of the Arch-Bannerbearer.
The electors discharged the ceremonial duties associated with their offices only during coronations, where they bore the crown and regalia of the Empire. Otherwise, they were represented by holders of corresponding "Hereditary Offices of the Household". The Arch-Butler was represented by the Hereditary Butler (Cupbearer) (the Count of Althann), the Arch-Seneschal by the Hereditary Steward (the Count of Waldburg, who adopted the title into their name as "Truchsess von Waldburg"), the Arch-Chamberlain by the Hereditary Chamberlain (the Count of Hohenzollern), the Arch-Marshal by the Hereditary Marshal (the Count of Pappenheim), and the Arch-Treasurer by the Hereditary Treasurer (the Count of Sinzendorf). After 1803, the Duke of Württemberg as Arch-Bannerbearer assigned the count of Zeppelin-Aschhausen as Hereditary Bannerbearer.
The German practice of electing monarchs began when ancient Germanic tribes formed ad hoc coalitions and elected the leaders thereof. Elections were irregularly held by the Franks, whose successor states include France and the Holy Roman Empire. The French monarchy eventually became hereditary, but the Holy Roman Emperors remained elective. While all free men originally exercised the right to vote in such elections, suffrage eventually came to be limited to the leading men of the realm. In the election of Lothar III in 1125, a small number of eminent nobles chose the monarch and then submitted him to the remaining magnates for their approbation.
Soon, the right to choose the monarch was settled on an exclusive group of princes, and the procedure of seeking the approval of the remaining nobles was abandoned. The college of electors was mentioned in 1152 and again in 1198. The composition of electors at that time is unclear, but appears to have included bishops and the dukes of the stem duchies.
The electoral college is known to have existed by 1152, but its composition is unknown. A letter written by Pope Urban IV in 1265 suggests that by "immemorial custom", seven princes had the right to elect the King and future Emperor. The pope wrote that the seven electors were those who had just voted in the election of 1257, which resulted in the election of two kings.
The three Archbishops oversaw the most venerable and powerful sees in Germany. Since 1214, the Palatinate and Bavaria were held by the same individual, but in 1253, they were divided between two members of the House of Wittelsbach. The other electors refused to allow two princes from the same dynasty to have electoral rights, so a heated rivalry arose between the Count Palatine and the Duke of Bavaria over who should hold the Wittelsbach seat.
Meanwhile, the King of Bohemia, who held the ancient imperial office of Arch-Cupbearer, asserted his right to participate in elections. Sometimes he was challenged on the grounds that his kingdom was not German, though usually he was recognized, instead of Bavaria which after all was just a younger line of Wittelsbachs.
The Declaration of Rhense issued in 1338 had the effect that election by the majority of the electors automatically conferred the royal title and rule over the empire, without papal confirmation. The Golden Bull of 1356 finally resolved the disputes among the electors. Under it, the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, as well as the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg held the right to elect the King.
The college's composition remained unchanged until the 17th century, although the Electorate of Saxony was transferred from the senior to the junior branch of the Wettin family in 1547, in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War.
In 1621, the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, came under the imperial ban after participating in the Bohemian Revolt (a part of the Thirty Years' War). The Elector Palatine's seat was conferred on the Duke of Bavaria, the head of a junior branch of his family. Originally, the Duke held the electorate personally, but it was later made hereditary along with the duchy. When the Thirty Years' War concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a new electorate was created for the Count Palatine of the Rhine. Since the Elector of Bavaria retained his seat, the number of electors increased to eight; the two Wittelsbach lines were now sufficiently estranged so as not to pose a combined potential threat.
In 1685, the religious composition of the College of Electors was disrupted when a Catholic branch of the Wittelsbach family inherited the Palatinate. A new Protestant electorate was created in 1692 for the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who became known as the Elector of Hanover (the Imperial Diet officially confirmed the creation in 1708). The Elector of Saxony converted to Catholicism in 1697 so that he could become King of Poland, but no additional Protestant electors were created. Although the Elector of Saxony was personally Catholic, the Electorate itself remained officially Protestant, and the Elector even remained the leader of the Protestant body in the Reichstag.
In 1706, the Elector of Bavaria and Archbishop of Cologne were outlawed during the War of the Spanish Succession, but both were restored in 1714 after the Peace of Baden. In 1777, the number of electors was reduced to eight when the Elector Palatine inherited Bavaria.
Many changes to the composition of the college were necessitated by Napoleon's aggression during the early 19th century. The Treaty of Lunéville (1801), which ceded territory on the Rhine's left bank to France, led to the abolition of the archbishoprics of Trier and Cologne, and the transfer of the remaining spiritual Elector from Mainz to Regensburg. In 1803, electorates were created for the Duke of Württemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and the Duke of Salzburg, bringing the total number of electors to ten. When Austria annexed Salzburg under the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), the Duke of Salzburg moved to the Grand Duchy of Würzburg and retained his electorate. None of the new electors, however, had an opportunity to cast votes, as the Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806, and the new electorates were never confirmed by the Emperor.
In 1788, the ruling family of Savoy pushed to receive an electoral title. Their ambition was backed by Brandenburg-Prussia. However, the French Revolution and subsequent Coalition Wars soon rendered this a moot point.
After the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806, the Electors continued to reign over their territories, many of them taking higher or alternative titles. The Electors of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony styled themselves Kings, while the Electors of Baden, Regensburg, and Würzburg became Grand Dukes. The Elector of Hesse-Kassel, however, retained the meaningless title "Elector of Hesse", thus distinguishing himself from other Hessian princes (the Grand Duke of Hesse(-Darmstadt) and the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg). Napoleon soon exiled him and Kassel was annexed to the Kingdom of Westphalia, a new creation. The King of Great Britain remained at war with Napoleon and continued to style himself Elector of Hanover, while the Hanoverian government continued to operate in London.
The Congress of Vienna accepted the Electors of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony as Kings, along with the newly created Grand Duke of Baden. The Elector of Hanover finally joined his fellow Electors by declaring himself the King of Hanover. The restored Elector of Hesse tried to be recognized as the King of the Chatti. However, the European powers refused to acknowledge this title at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) and instead listed him with the Grand Dukes as a "Royal Highness". Believing the title of Prince-Elector to be superior in dignity to that of Grand Duke, the Elector of Hesse-Kassel chose to remain an Elector, even though there was no longer a Holy Roman Emperor to elect. Hesse-Kassel remained the only Electorate in Germany until 1866, when the country backed the losing side in the Austro-Prussian War and was absorbed into Prussia.
Below are the State arms of each Imperial Elector. Emblems of Imperial High Offices are shown on the appropriate arms.
Three Electors Spiritual (Archbishops): all three were annexed by various powers through German Mediatisation of 1803.
Four Electors Secular:
Electors added in the 17th century:
As Napoleon waged war on Europe, between 1803 and 1806, the following changes to the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire were attempted until the Empire's collapse. Except for the prince Württemberg, who had already inherited his office, the electors were not given augments or high office in the imperial household. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The prince-electors (German: Kurfürst (listen), pl. Kurfürsten, Czech: Kurfiřt, Latin: Princeps Elector) were the members of the electoral college that elected the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "From the 13th century onwards, a small group of prince-electors gained the privilege of electing the king. The king would then later be crowned Emperor by the pope. Charles V (elected in 1519) was the last emperor to be crowned (1530); his successors assumed the title \"Elected Emperor of the Romans\" (German: erwählter Römischer Kaiser; Latin: electus Romanorum imperator) upon their coronation as kings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The dignity of elector carried great prestige and was considered to be second only to that of king or emperor. The electors held exclusive privileges that were not shared with other princes of the Empire, and they continued to hold their original titles alongside that of elector.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The heir apparent to a secular prince-elector was known as an electoral prince (German: Kurprinz).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Electors were rulers of reichsstände (Imperial Estates), enjoying precedence over the other Imperial Princes. They were, until the 18th century, exclusively entitled to be addressed with the title Durchlaucht (Serene Highness). In 1742, the electors became entitled to the superlative Durchlauchtigste (Most Serene Highness), while other princes were promoted to Durchlaucht.",
"title": "Rights and privileges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As rulers of Imperial Estates, the electors enjoyed all the privileges of princes, including the right to enter into alliances, to autonomy in relation to dynastic affairs, and to precedence over other subjects. The Golden Bull granted them the Privilegium de non appellando, which prevented their subjects from lodging an appeal to a higher Imperial court. However, while this privilege, and some others, were automatically granted to Electors, they were not exclusive to them and many of the larger Imperial Estates were also to be individually granted some or all those rights and privileges.",
"title": "Rights and privileges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The electors, like the other princes ruling States of the Empire, were members of the Imperial Diet, which was divided into three collegia: the Council of Electors, the Council of Princes, and the Council of Cities. In addition to being members of the Council of Electors, most electors were also members of the Council of Princes by virtue of possessing territory or holding ecclesiastical position. The assent of both bodies was required for important decisions affecting the structure of the Empire, such as the creation of new electorates or States of the Empire.",
"title": "Imperial Diet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Many electors ruled a number of States of the Empire or held several ecclesiastical titles, and therefore had multiple votes in the Council of Princes. In 1792, the Elector of Brandenburg had eight votes, the Elector of Bavaria six votes, the Elector of Hanover six votes, the King of Bohemia three votes, the Elector-Archbishop of Trier three votes, the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne two votes, and the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz one vote. Thus, of the hundred votes in the Council of Princes in 1792, twenty-nine belonged to electors, giving them considerable influence in the Council of Princes in addition to their positions as electors.",
"title": "Imperial Diet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In addition to voting by colleges or councils, the Imperial Diet also voted in religious coalitions, as provided for in the Peace of Westphalia. The Archbishop of Mainz presided over the Catholic body, the corpus catholicorum, while the Elector of Saxony presided over the Protestant body, the corpus evangelicorum. The division into religious bodies was on the basis of the official religion of the state.",
"title": "Imperial Diet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The electors were originally summoned by the Archbishop of Mainz within one month of an Emperor's death, and met within three months of being summoned. During the interregnum, imperial power was exercised by two imperial vicars. Each vicar, in the words of the Golden Bull, was \"the administrator of the empire itself, with the power of passing judgments, of presenting to ecclesiastical benefices, of collecting returns and revenues and investing with fiefs, of receiving oaths of fealty for and in the name of the holy empire\". The Elector of Saxony was vicar in areas operating under Saxon law (Saxony, Westphalia, Hannover, and northern Germany), while the Elector Palatine was vicar in the remainder of the Empire (Franconia, Swabia, the Rhine, and southern Germany). The Elector of Bavaria replaced the Elector Palatine in 1623, but when the latter was granted a new electorate in 1648, there was a dispute between the two as to which was vicar. In 1659, both purported to act as vicar, but ultimately, the other vicar recognized the Elector of Bavaria. Later, the two electors made a pact to act as joint vicars, but the Imperial Diet rejected the agreement. In 1711, while the Elector of Bavaria was under the ban of the Empire, the Elector Palatine again acted as vicar, but his cousin was restored to his position upon his restoration three years later.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Finally, in 1745, the two agreed to alternate as vicars, with Bavaria starting first. This arrangement was upheld by the Imperial Diet in 1752. In 1777, the question was settled when the Elector Palatine inherited Bavaria. On many occasions, however, there was no interregnum, as a new king had been elected during the lifetime of the previous Emperor.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Frankfurt regularly served as the site of the election from the fourteenth century on, but elections were also held at Cologne (1531), Regensburg (1575 and 1636), and Augsburg (1653 and 1690). An elector could appear in person or could appoint another elector as his proxy. More often, an electoral suite or embassy was sent to cast the vote; the credentials of such representatives were verified by the Archbishop of Mainz, who presided over the ceremony. The deliberations were held at the city hall, but voting occurred in the cathedral. In Frankfurt, a special electoral chapel, or Wahlkapelle, was used for elections. Under the Golden Bull, a majority of electors sufficed to elect a king, and each elector could cast only one vote. Electors were free to vote for whomsoever they pleased (including themselves), but dynastic considerations played a great part in the choice.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From the sixteenth century on, electors drafted a Wahlkapitulation, or electoral capitulation, which was presented to the king-elect. The capitulation may be described as a contract between the princes and the king, the latter conceding rights and powers to the electors and other princes. Once an individual swore to abide by the electoral capitulation, he assumed the office of King of the Romans.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the 10th and 11th centuries, princes often acted merely to confirm hereditary succession in the Ottonian and Salian dynasty. But with the actual formation of the prince-elector class, elections became more open, starting with the election of Lothair III in 1125. The Staufen dynasty managed to get its sons formally elected in their fathers' lifetimes almost as a formality. After these lines ended in extinction, the electors began to elect kings from different families so that the throne would not once again settle within a single dynasty. All kings elected from 1438 onwards were from among the Habsburg dynasty until 1740, when Austria was inherited by a woman, Maria Theresa, sparking the War of the Austrian Succession an the short-lived rule of a Bavarian Wittelsbach emperor. In 1745, Maria Theresa's husband, Francis I of Lorraine, was elected emperor. All of his successors were also from the Habsburg-Lorraine family.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Each elector held a \"High Office of the Empire\" (Reichserzämter) analogous to a modern cabinet office position and was a member of the ceremonial Imperial Household. The three spiritual electors became Archchancellors (German: Erzkanzler, Latin: Archicancellarius): the Archbishop of Mainz became Archchancellor of Germany, the Archbishop of Cologne became Archchancellor of Italy, and the Archbishop of Trier became Archchancellor of Burgundy. The secular electors were granted heraldic augmentations to their coats of arms reflecting their positions in the Household. These augmentations were displayed in three alternative ways: firstly, as an inescutcheon on their coat of arms (as in the case of the Arch-Steward, Treasurer, and Chamberlain); secondly: as dexter impalements (as in the case of the Arch-Marshal and Arch-Bannerbearer) and thirdly: integrated into the charge within the escutcheon (as in the case of the Arch-Cupbearer, where the Lion of Bohemia acquired a \"simple crown\" held in his dexter paw).",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "When the Duke of Bavaria replaced the Elector Palatine in 1623, he assumed the latter's office of Arch-Steward. When the Count Palatine was granted a new electorate, he assumed the position of Arch-Treasurer of the Empire. When the Duke of Bavaria was banned in 1706, the Elector Palatine returned to the office of Arch-Steward, and in 1710, the Elector of Hanover was promoted to the post of Arch-Treasurer. Matters were complicated by the Duke of Bavaria's restoration in 1714; the Elector of Bavaria resumed the office of Arch-Steward, while the Elector Palatine returned to the post of Arch-Treasurer, and the Elector of Hanover was given the new office of Archbannerbearer. The Electors of Hanover, however, continued to be styled Arch-Treasurers, though the Elector Palatine was the one who actually exercised the office until 1777, when he inherited Bavaria and the Arch-Stewardship. After 1777, no further changes were made to the Imperial Household; new offices were planned for the Electors admitted in 1803, but the Empire was abolished before they could be created. The Duke of Württemberg, however, started to adopt the trappings of the Arch-Bannerbearer.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The electors discharged the ceremonial duties associated with their offices only during coronations, where they bore the crown and regalia of the Empire. Otherwise, they were represented by holders of corresponding \"Hereditary Offices of the Household\". The Arch-Butler was represented by the Hereditary Butler (Cupbearer) (the Count of Althann), the Arch-Seneschal by the Hereditary Steward (the Count of Waldburg, who adopted the title into their name as \"Truchsess von Waldburg\"), the Arch-Chamberlain by the Hereditary Chamberlain (the Count of Hohenzollern), the Arch-Marshal by the Hereditary Marshal (the Count of Pappenheim), and the Arch-Treasurer by the Hereditary Treasurer (the Count of Sinzendorf). After 1803, the Duke of Württemberg as Arch-Bannerbearer assigned the count of Zeppelin-Aschhausen as Hereditary Bannerbearer.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The German practice of electing monarchs began when ancient Germanic tribes formed ad hoc coalitions and elected the leaders thereof. Elections were irregularly held by the Franks, whose successor states include France and the Holy Roman Empire. The French monarchy eventually became hereditary, but the Holy Roman Emperors remained elective. While all free men originally exercised the right to vote in such elections, suffrage eventually came to be limited to the leading men of the realm. In the election of Lothar III in 1125, a small number of eminent nobles chose the monarch and then submitted him to the remaining magnates for their approbation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Soon, the right to choose the monarch was settled on an exclusive group of princes, and the procedure of seeking the approval of the remaining nobles was abandoned. The college of electors was mentioned in 1152 and again in 1198. The composition of electors at that time is unclear, but appears to have included bishops and the dukes of the stem duchies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The electoral college is known to have existed by 1152, but its composition is unknown. A letter written by Pope Urban IV in 1265 suggests that by \"immemorial custom\", seven princes had the right to elect the King and future Emperor. The pope wrote that the seven electors were those who had just voted in the election of 1257, which resulted in the election of two kings.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The three Archbishops oversaw the most venerable and powerful sees in Germany. Since 1214, the Palatinate and Bavaria were held by the same individual, but in 1253, they were divided between two members of the House of Wittelsbach. The other electors refused to allow two princes from the same dynasty to have electoral rights, so a heated rivalry arose between the Count Palatine and the Duke of Bavaria over who should hold the Wittelsbach seat.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Meanwhile, the King of Bohemia, who held the ancient imperial office of Arch-Cupbearer, asserted his right to participate in elections. Sometimes he was challenged on the grounds that his kingdom was not German, though usually he was recognized, instead of Bavaria which after all was just a younger line of Wittelsbachs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Declaration of Rhense issued in 1338 had the effect that election by the majority of the electors automatically conferred the royal title and rule over the empire, without papal confirmation. The Golden Bull of 1356 finally resolved the disputes among the electors. Under it, the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, as well as the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg held the right to elect the King.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The college's composition remained unchanged until the 17th century, although the Electorate of Saxony was transferred from the senior to the junior branch of the Wettin family in 1547, in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1621, the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, came under the imperial ban after participating in the Bohemian Revolt (a part of the Thirty Years' War). The Elector Palatine's seat was conferred on the Duke of Bavaria, the head of a junior branch of his family. Originally, the Duke held the electorate personally, but it was later made hereditary along with the duchy. When the Thirty Years' War concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a new electorate was created for the Count Palatine of the Rhine. Since the Elector of Bavaria retained his seat, the number of electors increased to eight; the two Wittelsbach lines were now sufficiently estranged so as not to pose a combined potential threat.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1685, the religious composition of the College of Electors was disrupted when a Catholic branch of the Wittelsbach family inherited the Palatinate. A new Protestant electorate was created in 1692 for the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who became known as the Elector of Hanover (the Imperial Diet officially confirmed the creation in 1708). The Elector of Saxony converted to Catholicism in 1697 so that he could become King of Poland, but no additional Protestant electors were created. Although the Elector of Saxony was personally Catholic, the Electorate itself remained officially Protestant, and the Elector even remained the leader of the Protestant body in the Reichstag.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1706, the Elector of Bavaria and Archbishop of Cologne were outlawed during the War of the Spanish Succession, but both were restored in 1714 after the Peace of Baden. In 1777, the number of electors was reduced to eight when the Elector Palatine inherited Bavaria.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Many changes to the composition of the college were necessitated by Napoleon's aggression during the early 19th century. The Treaty of Lunéville (1801), which ceded territory on the Rhine's left bank to France, led to the abolition of the archbishoprics of Trier and Cologne, and the transfer of the remaining spiritual Elector from Mainz to Regensburg. In 1803, electorates were created for the Duke of Württemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and the Duke of Salzburg, bringing the total number of electors to ten. When Austria annexed Salzburg under the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), the Duke of Salzburg moved to the Grand Duchy of Würzburg and retained his electorate. None of the new electors, however, had an opportunity to cast votes, as the Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806, and the new electorates were never confirmed by the Emperor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1788, the ruling family of Savoy pushed to receive an electoral title. Their ambition was backed by Brandenburg-Prussia. However, the French Revolution and subsequent Coalition Wars soon rendered this a moot point.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "After the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806, the Electors continued to reign over their territories, many of them taking higher or alternative titles. The Electors of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony styled themselves Kings, while the Electors of Baden, Regensburg, and Würzburg became Grand Dukes. The Elector of Hesse-Kassel, however, retained the meaningless title \"Elector of Hesse\", thus distinguishing himself from other Hessian princes (the Grand Duke of Hesse(-Darmstadt) and the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg). Napoleon soon exiled him and Kassel was annexed to the Kingdom of Westphalia, a new creation. The King of Great Britain remained at war with Napoleon and continued to style himself Elector of Hanover, while the Hanoverian government continued to operate in London.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Congress of Vienna accepted the Electors of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony as Kings, along with the newly created Grand Duke of Baden. The Elector of Hanover finally joined his fellow Electors by declaring himself the King of Hanover. The restored Elector of Hesse tried to be recognized as the King of the Chatti. However, the European powers refused to acknowledge this title at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) and instead listed him with the Grand Dukes as a \"Royal Highness\". Believing the title of Prince-Elector to be superior in dignity to that of Grand Duke, the Elector of Hesse-Kassel chose to remain an Elector, even though there was no longer a Holy Roman Emperor to elect. Hesse-Kassel remained the only Electorate in Germany until 1866, when the country backed the losing side in the Austro-Prussian War and was absorbed into Prussia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Below are the State arms of each Imperial Elector. Emblems of Imperial High Offices are shown on the appropriate arms.",
"title": "Marks of office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Three Electors Spiritual (Archbishops): all three were annexed by various powers through German Mediatisation of 1803.",
"title": "Marks of office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Four Electors Secular:",
"title": "Marks of office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Electors added in the 17th century:",
"title": "Marks of office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As Napoleon waged war on Europe, between 1803 and 1806, the following changes to the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire were attempted until the Empire's collapse. Except for the prince Württemberg, who had already inherited his office, the electors were not given augments or high office in the imperial household.",
"title": "Marks of office"
}
]
| The prince-electors, pl. Kurfürsten, Czech: Kurfiřt, Latin: Princeps Elector) were the members of the electoral college that elected the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. From the 13th century onwards, a small group of prince-electors gained the privilege of electing the king. The king would then later be crowned Emperor by the pope. Charles V was the last emperor to be crowned (1530); his successors assumed the title "Elected Emperor of the Romans" upon their coronation as kings. The dignity of elector carried great prestige and was considered to be second only to that of king or emperor. The electors held exclusive privileges that were not shared with other princes of the Empire, and they continued to hold their original titles alongside that of elector. The heir apparent to a secular prince-elector was known as an electoral prince. | 2001-11-01T23:52:16Z | 2023-12-27T10:50:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince-elector |
14,059 | Howard Hughes | Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness.
As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often controversial films such as The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), and Scarface (1932). He later acquired the RKO Pictures film studio in 1948, recognized then as one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age, although the production company struggled under his control and ultimately ceased operations in 1957.
Through his interest in aviation and aerospace travel, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, hiring numerous engineers, designers, and defense contractors. He spent the rest of the 1930s and much of the 1940s setting multiple world air speed records and building the Hughes H-1 Racer (1935) and the gigantic H-4 Hercules (the Spruce Goose, 1947), the largest flying boat in history with the longest wingspan of any aircraft from the time it was built until 2019. He acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines and later acquired Air West, renaming it Hughes Airwest. Hughes won the Harmon Trophy on two occasions (1936 and 1938), the Collier Trophy (1938), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1939) all for his achievements in aviation throughout the 1930s. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973 and was included in Flying magazine's 2013 list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation, ranked at No. 25.
During his final years, Hughes extended his financial empire to include several major businesses in Las Vegas, such as real estate, hotels, casinos, and media outlets. Known at the time as one of the most powerful men in the state of Nevada, he is largely credited with transforming Vegas into a more refined cosmopolitan city. After years of mental and physical decline, Hughes died of kidney failure in 1976. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Howard Hughes Corporation.
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was the only child of Allene Stone Gano (1883–1922) and of Howard R. Hughes Sr. (1869–1924), a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri. He had English, Welsh and some French Huguenot ancestry, and was a descendant of John Gano (1727–1804), the minister who allegedly baptized George Washington.
Hughes Sr. patented the two-cone roller bit in 1909, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. The senior Hughes made the shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention by leasing the bits instead of selling them, obtaining several early patents, and founding the Hughes Tool Company in 1909.
Hughes's uncle was the famed novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes.
A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes, signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and by Estelle Boughton Sharp, states that he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his certificate of baptism, recorded on October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa, listed his date of birth as September 24, 1905, without any reference to the place of birth.
At a young age, Hughes Jr. showed interest in science and technology. In particular, he had a great engineering aptitude, and built Houston's first "wireless" radio transmitter at age 11. He went on to be one of the first licensed ham-radio operators in Houston, having the assigned callsign W5CY (originally 5CY). At 12, Hughes was photographed for the local newspaper, which identified him as the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he had built from parts of his father's steam engine. He was an indifferent student, with a liking for mathematics, flying, and mechanics. He took his first flying lesson at 14, and attended Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1921.
After a brief stint at The Thacher School, Hughes attended math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech. The red-brick house where Hughes lived as a teenager at 3921 Yoakum Blvd., Houston, still stands, now known as Hughes House on the grounds of the University of St. Thomas.
His mother Allene died in March 1922 from complications of an ectopic pregnancy. Howard Hughes Sr. died of a heart attack in 1924. Their deaths apparently inspired Hughes to include the establishment of a medical research laboratory in the will that he signed in 1925 at age 19. Howard Sr.'s will had not been updated since Allene's death, and Hughes Jr. inherited 75% of the family fortune. On his 19th birthday, Hughes was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his life.
From a young age, Hughes became a proficient and enthusiastic golfer. He often scored near-par figures, playing the game to a two-three handicap during his 20s, and for a time aimed for a professional golf career. He golfed frequently with top players, including Gene Sarazen. Hughes rarely played competitively and gradually gave up his passion for the sport to pursue other interests.
Hughes played golf every afternoon at LA courses including the Lakeside Golf Club, Wilshire Country Club, or the Bel-Air Country Club. Partners included George Von Elm or Ozzie Carlton. After Hughes hurt himself in the late 1920s, his golfing tapered off, and after his XF-11 crash, Hughes was unable to play at all.
Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father's death. On June 1, 1925, he married Ella Botts Rice, daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston, and great-niece of William Marsh Rice, for whom Rice University was named. They moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself as a filmmaker.
They moved into the Ambassador Hotel, and Hughes proceeded to learn to fly a Waco, while simultaneously producing his first motion picture, Swell Hogan.
Hughes enjoyed a highly successful business career beyond engineering, aviation, and filmmaking; many of his career endeavors involved varying entrepreneurial roles.
Ralph Graves persuaded Hughes to finance a short film, Swell Hogan, which Graves had written and would star in. Hughes himself produced it. However, it was a disaster. After hiring a film editor to try to salvage it, he finally ordered that it be destroyed. His next two films, Everybody's Acting (1926) and Two Arabian Knights (1927), achieved financial success; the latter won the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture. The Racket (1928) and The Front Page (1931) were also nominated for Academy Awards.
Hughes spent $3.5 million to make the flying film Hell's Angels (1930). Hell's Angels received one Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
He produced another hit, Scarface (1932), a production delayed by censors' concern over its violence.
The Outlaw premiered in 1943, but was not released nationally until 1946. The film featured Jane Russell, who received considerable attention from industry censors, this time owing to her revealing costumes.
From the 1940s to the late 1950s, the Hughes Tool Company ventured into the film industry when it obtained partial ownership of the RKO companies, which included RKO Pictures, RKO Studios, a chain of movie theaters known as RKO Theatres and a network of radio stations known as the RKO Radio Network.
In 1948, Hughes gained control of RKO, a struggling major Hollywood studio, by acquiring the 929,000 shares owned by Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation, for $8,825,000 ($107,165,160 in 2023). Within weeks of acquiring the studio, Hughes dismissed 700 employees. Production dwindled to 9 pictures during the first year of Hughes's control; previously RKO had averaged 30 per year.
That same year, 1948, he was able to arrange for his previous films with United Artists (UA), The Outlaw, Mad Wednesday, and Vendetta to be transferred to RKO. In exchange for the three completed being removed from UA distribution, Hughes and James and Theodore Nasser of General Service Studios would provide the financing of three independent films for distribution by UA. In terms of negotiations directly with RKO, the company agree to remove the production of the film Jet Pilot from David O. Selznick to Hughes. Hughes produced the film during the years 1949-1950 and owned RKO and in turn the distribution for the film. However, the film was not released until 1957 by Universal Pictures due in part to the subsequent events that would take place at RKO Distribution, and largely due the extra aerial film footage that had been filmed over the years after the film's 1950 completion. Hughes was undertaking a final edit before the 1957 release.
After his acquisition of RKO, Hughes shut down production at the studio for six months, during which time he ordered investigations into the political leanings of every remaining RKO employee. Only after ensuring that the stars under contract to RKO had no suspect affiliations would Hughes approve completed pictures to be sent back for re-shooting. This was especially true of the women under contract to RKO at that time. If Hughes felt that his stars did not properly represent the political views of his liking or if a film's anti-communist politics were not sufficiently clear, he pulled the plug. In 1952, an abortive sale to a Chicago-based five-man syndicate, two of whom had a history of complaints about their business practices and none with any experience in the movie industry, disrupted studio operations at RKO even further.
In 1953, Hughes became involved with a high-profile lawsuit as part of the settlement of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. Antitrust Case. As a result of the hearings, the shaky status of RKO became increasingly apparent. A steady stream of lawsuits from RKO's minority shareholders had grown to become extremely annoying to Hughes. They had accused him of financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement. Since Hughes wanted to focus primarily on his aircraft manufacturing and TWA holdings during the years of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, Hughes offered to buy out all other RKO stockholders in order to dispense with their distractions.
By the end of 1954, Hughes had gained near-total control of RKO at a cost of nearly $24 million, becoming the first sole owner of a major Hollywood studio since the silent-film era. Six months later Hughes sold the studio to the General Tire and Rubber Company for $25 million. Hughes retained the rights to pictures that he had personally produced, including those made at RKO. He also retained Jane Russell's contract. For Howard Hughes, this was the virtual end of his 25-year involvement in the motion-picture industry. However, his reputation as a financial wizard emerged unscathed. During that time period, RKO became known as the home of classic film noir productions, thanks in part to the limited budgets required to make such films during Hughes's tenure. Hughes reportedly walked away from RKO having made $6.5 million in personal profit. According to Noah Dietrich, Hughes made a $10,000,000 profit from the sale of the theaters and made a profit of $1,000,000 from his 7-year ownership of RKO.
According to Noah Dietrich, "Land became a principal asset for the Hughes empire". Hughes acquired 1200 acres in Culver City for Hughes Aircraft, bought 7 sections [4,480 acres] in Tucson for his Falcon missile-plant, and purchased 25,000 acres near Las Vegas. In 1968, the Hughes Tool Company purchased the North Las Vegas Air Terminal.
Originally known as Summa Corporation, the Howard Hughes Corporation formed in 1972 when the oil-tools business of Hughes Tool Company, then owned by Howard Hughes Jr., floated on the New York Stock Exchange under the "Hughes Tool" name. This forced the remaining businesses of the "original" Hughes Tool to adopt a new corporate name: "Summa". The name "Summa"—Latin for "highest"—was adopted without the approval of Hughes himself, who preferred to keep his own name on the business, and suggested "HRH Properties" (for Hughes Resorts and Hotels, and also his own initials). In 1988 Summa announced plans for Summerlin, a master-planned community named for the paternal grandmother of Howard Hughes, Jean Amelia Summerlin.
Initially staying in the Desert Inn, Hughes refused to vacate his room, and instead decided to purchase the entire hotel. Hughes extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels, and media outlets, spending an estimated $300 million, and using his considerable powers to acquire many of the well-known hotels, especially the venues connected with organized crime. He quickly became one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He was instrumental in changing the image of Las Vegas from its Wild West roots into a more refined cosmopolitan city. In addition to the Desert Inn, Hughes would eventually own the Sands, Frontier, Silver Slipper, Castaways, and Landmark and Harold's Club in Reno. Hughes would eventually become the largest employer in Nevada.
Another portion of Hughes's commercial interests involved aviation, airlines, and the aerospace and defense industries. A lifelong aircraft enthusiast and pilot, Hughes survived four airplane accidents: one in a Thomas-Morse Scout while filming Hell's Angels, one while setting the airspeed record in the Hughes Racer, one at Lake Mead in 1943, and the near-fatal crash of the Hughes XF-11 in 1946. At Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, he learned to fly from pioneer aviators, including Moye Stephens and J.B. Alexander. He set many world records and commissioned the construction of custom aircraft for himself while heading Hughes Aircraft at the airport in Glendale, CA. Operating from there, the most technologically important aircraft he commissioned was the Hughes H-1 Racer. On September 13, 1935, Hughes, flying the H-1, set the landplane airspeed record of 352 mph (566 km/h) over his test course near Santa Ana, California (Giuseppe Motta reaching 362 mph in 1929 and George Stainforth reached 407.5 mph in 1931, both in seaplanes). This marked the last time in history that an aircraft built by a private individual set the world airspeed record. A year and a half later, on January 19, 1937, flying the same H-1 Racer fitted with longer wings, Hughes set a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in seven hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of nine hours, 27 minutes). His average ground-speed over the flight was 322 mph (518 km/h).
The H-1 Racer featured a number of design innovations: it had retractable landing gear (as Boeing Monomail had five years before), and all rivets and joints set flush into the body of the aircraft to reduce drag. The H-1 Racer is thought to have influenced the design of a number of World War II fighters such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Focke-Wulf Fw 190, and F8F Bearcat, although that has never been reliably confirmed. In 1975 the H-1 Racer was donated to the Smithsonian.
In 1932 Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, to build the H-1 racer.
Shortly after founding the company, Hughes used the alias "Charles Howard" to accept a job as a baggage handler for American Airlines. He was soon promoted to co-pilot. Hughes continued to work for American Airlines until his real identity was discovered.
During and after World War II Hughes turned his company into a major defense contractor. The Hughes Helicopters division started in 1947 when helicopter manufacturer Kellett sold their latest design to Hughes for production. Hughes Aircraft became a major U.S. aerospace- and defense contractor, manufacturing numerous technology-related products that included spacecraft vehicles, military aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, the first working laser, aircraft computer systems, missile systems, ion-propulsion engines (for space travel), commercial satellites, and other electronics systems.
In 1948 Hughes created a new division of Hughes Aircraft: the Hughes Aerospace Group. The Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division were later spun off in 1948 to form their own divisions and ultimately became the Hughes Space and Communications Company in 1961. In 1953 Howard Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charitable organization. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion. In 1997 General Motors sold Hughes Aircraft to Raytheon and in 2000, sold Hughes Space & Communications to Boeing. A combination of Boeing, GM, and Raytheon acquired the Hughes Research Laboratories, which focused on advanced developments in microelectronics, information & systems sciences, materials, sensors, and photonics; their work-space spans from basic research to product delivery. It has particularly emphasized capabilities in high-performance integrated circuits, high-power lasers, antennas, networking, and smart materials.
On July 14, 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours (three days, 19 hours, 17 minutes), beating the previous record of 186 hours (seven days, 18 hours, 49 minutes) set in 1933 by Wiley Post in a single-engine Lockheed Vega by almost four days. Hughes returned home ahead of photographs of his flight. Taking off from New York City, Hughes continued to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis, then returning to New York City. For this flight he flew a Lockheed 14 Super Electra (NX18973, a twin-engine transport with a crew of four) fitted with the latest radio and navigational equipment. Harry Connor was the co-pilot, Thomas Thurlow the navigator, Richard Stoddart the engineer, and Ed Lund the mechanic. Hughes wanted the flight to be a triumph of U.S. aviation technology, illustrating that safe, long-distance air travel was possible. Albert Lodwick of Mystic, Iowa, provided organizational skills as the flight operations manager. While Hughes had previously been relatively obscure despite his wealth, better known for dating Katharine Hepburn, New York City now gave him a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes. Hughes and his crew were awarded the 1938 Collier Trophy for flying around the world in record time. He was awarded the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938 for the record-breaking global circumnavigation.
In 1938 the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas—known at the time as Houston Municipal Airport—was renamed after Hughes, but the name was changed back due to public outrage over naming the airport after a living person. Hughes also had a role in the financing of the Boeing 307 Stratoliner for TWA, and the design and financing of the Lockheed L-049 Constellation.
Other aviator awards include: the Bibesco Cup of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in 1938, the Octave Chanute Award in 1940, and a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 "in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world".
President Harry S. Truman sent the Congressional medal to Hughes after the F-11 crash. After his around-the-world flight, Hughes had declined to go to the White House to collect it.
Development of the D-2 began around 1937, but little is known about its early gestation because Hughes' archives on the aircraft have not been made public. Aircraft historian René Francillon speculates that Hughes designed the aircraft for another circumnavigation record attempt, but the outbreak of World War II closed much of the world's airspace and made it difficult to buy aircraft parts without government approval, so he decided to sell the aircraft to the U.S. Army instead. In December 1939, Hughes proposed that the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) procure it as a "pursuit type airplane" (i.e. a fighter aircraft). It emerged as a two or three-seat twin-boom aircraft powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-2800-49 engines and constructed mostly of Duramold, a type of molded plywood. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF, successor to the USAAC) struggled to define a mission for the D-2, which lacked both the maneuverability of a fighter and the payload of a bomber, and was highly skeptical of the extensive use of plywood; however, the project was kept alive by high-level intervention from General Henry H. Arnold. The prototype was brought to Harper's Dry Lake in California in great secrecy in 1943 and first flew on June 20 of that year. The initial test flights revealed serious flight control problems, so the D-2 returned to the hangar for extensive changes to its wings, and Hughes proposed to redesignate it as the D-5. However, in November 1944, the still-incomplete D-2 was destroyed in a hangar fire reportedly caused by a lightning strike.
In the spring of 1943 Hughes spent nearly a month in Las Vegas, test-flying his Sikorsky S-43 amphibious aircraft, practicing touch-and-go landings on Lake Mead in preparation for flying the H-4 Hercules. The weather conditions at the lake during the day were ideal and he enjoyed Las Vegas at night. On May 17, 1943, Hughes flew the Sikorsky from California, carrying two Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) aviation inspectors, two of his employees, and actress Ava Gardner. Hughes dropped Gardner off in Las Vegas and proceeded to Lake Mead to conduct qualifying tests in the S-43. The test flight did not go well. The Sikorsky crashed into Lake Mead, killing CAA inspector Ceco Cline and Hughes's employee Richard Felt. Hughes suffered a severe gash on the top of his head when he hit the upper control panel and had to be rescued by one of the others on board. Hughes paid divers $100,000 to raise the aircraft and later spent more than $500,000 restoring it. Hughes sent the plane to Houston, where it remained for many years.
Acting on a recommendation of the president's son, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who had become friends with Hughes, in September 1943 General Arnold issued a directive to order 100 of a reconnaissance development of the D-2, known as the F-11 (XF-11 in prototype form). The project was controversial from the beginning, as the USAAF Air Materiel Command deeply doubted that Hughes Aircraft could fulfill a contract this large, but Arnold pushed the project forward. Materiel Command demanded a host of major design changes notably including the elimination of Duramold; Hughes, who sought $3.9 million in reimbursement for sunk costs from the D-2, strenuously objected because this undercut his argument that the XF-11 was a modified D-2 rather than a new design. Protracted negotiations caused months of delays but ultimately yielded few design concessions. The war ended before the first XF-11 prototype was completed and the F-11 production contract was canceled. The XF-11 emerged in 1946 as an all-metal, twin-boom, three-seat reconnaissance aircraft, substantially larger than the D-2 and powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-4360-31 engines, each driving a set of contra-rotating propellers. Only two prototypes were completed; the second one had a conventional single propeller per side.
Hughes was almost killed on July 7, 1946, while performing the first flight of the XF-11 near Hughes Airfield at Culver City, California. Hughes extended the test flight well beyond the 45-minute limit decreed by the USAAF, possibly distracted by landing gear retraction problems. An oil leak caused one of the contra-rotating propellers to reverse pitch, causing the aircraft to yaw sharply and lose altitude rapidly. Hughes attempted to save the aircraft by landing it at the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but just seconds before reaching the course, the XF-11 started to drop dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club.
When the XF-11 finally came to a halt after destroying three houses, the fuel tanks exploded, setting fire to the aircraft and a nearby home at 808 North Whittier Drive owned by Lt Col. Charles E. Meyer. Hughes managed to pull himself out of the flaming wreckage but lay beside the aircraft until he was rescued by U.S. Marine Corps Master Sergeant William L. Durkin, who happened to be in the area visiting friends. Hughes sustained significant injuries in the crash, including a crushed collar bone, multiple cracked ribs, crushed chest with collapsed left lung, shifting his heart to the right side of the chest cavity, and numerous third-degree burns. An oft-told story said that Hughes sent a check to the Marine weekly for the remainder of his life as a sign of gratitude. Noah Dietrich asserted that Hughes did send Durkin $200 a month, but Durkin's daughter denied knowing that he received any money from Hughes.
Despite his physical injuries, Hughes took pride that his mind was still working. As he lay in his hospital bed, he decided that he did not like the bed's design. He called in plant engineers to design a customized bed, equipped with hot and cold running water, built in six sections, and operated by 30 electric motors, with push-button adjustments. Hughes designed the hospital bed specifically to alleviate the pain caused by moving with severe burn injuries. He never used the bed that he designed. Hughes's doctors considered his recovery almost miraculous.
Many attribute his long-term dependence on opiates to his use of codeine as a painkiller during his convalescence. Yet Dietrich asserts that Hughes recovered the "hard way—no sleeping pills, no opiates of any kind". The trademark mustache he wore afterward hid a scar on his upper lip resulting from the accident.
The War Production Board (not the military) originally contracted with Henry Kaiser and Hughes to produce the gigantic HK-1 Hercules flying boat for use during World War II to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic as an alternative to seagoing troop transport ships that were vulnerable to German U-boats. The military services opposed the project, thinking it would siphon resources from higher-priority programs, but Hughes's powerful allies in Washington, D.C. advocated it. After disputes, Kaiser withdrew from the project and Hughes elected to continue it as the H-4 Hercules. However, the aircraft was not completed until after World War II.
The Hercules was the world's largest flying boat, the largest aircraft made from wood, and, at 319 feet 11 inches (97.51 m), had the longest wingspan of any aircraft (the next-largest wingspan was about 310 ft (94 m)). (The Hercules is no longer the longest nor heaviest aircraft ever built - surpassed by the Antonov An-225 Mriya produced in 1985.)
The Hercules flew only once for one mile (1.6 km), and 70 feet (21 m) above the water, with Hughes at the controls, on November 2, 1947.
Critics nicknamed the Hercules the Spruce Goose, but it was actually made largely from birch (not spruce) rather than from aluminum, because the contract required that Hughes build the aircraft of "non-strategic materials". It was built in Hughes's Westchester, California, facility. In 1947, Howard Hughes was summoned to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain why the H-4 development had been so troubled, and why $22 million had produced only two prototypes of the XF-11. General Elliott Roosevelt and numerous other USAAF officers were also called to testify in hearings that transfixed the nation during August and November 1947. In hotly-disputed testimony over TWA's route awards and malfeasance in the defense-acquisition process, Hughes turned the tables on his main interlocutor, Maine senator Owen Brewster, and the hearings were widely interpreted as a Hughes victory. After being displayed at the harbor of Long Beach, California, the Hercules was moved to McMinnville, Oregon, where as of 2020 it features at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.
On November 4, 2017, the 70th anniversary of the only flight of the H-4 Hercules was celebrated at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum with Hughes's paternal cousin Michael Wesley Summerlin and Brian Palmer Evans, son of Hughes radio technology pioneer Dave Evans, taking their positions in the recreation of a photo that was previously taken of Hughes, Dave Evans, and Joe Petrali on board the H-4 Hercules.
In 1939, at the urging of Jack Frye, president of Transcontinental & Western Airlines, the predecessor of Trans World Airlines (TWA), Hughes began to quietly purchase a majority share of TWA stock (78% of stock, to be exact); he took a controlling interest in the airline by 1944. Although he never had an official position with TWA, Hughes handpicked the board of directors, which included Noah Dietrich, and often issued orders directly to airline staff. Hughes Tool Co. purchased the first six Stratoliners Boeing manufactured. Hughes used one personally, and he let TWA operate the other five.
Hughes is commonly credited as the driving force behind the Lockheed Constellation airliner, which Hughes and Frye ordered in 1939 as a long-range replacement for TWA's fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners. Hughes personally financed TWA's acquisition of 40 Constellations for $18 million, the largest aircraft order in history up to that time. The Constellations were among the highest-performing commercial aircraft of the late 1940s and 1950s and allowed TWA to pioneer nonstop transcontinental service. During World War II Hughes leveraged political connections in Washington to obtain rights for TWA to serve Europe, making it the only U.S. carrier with a combination of domestic and transatlantic routes.
After the announcement of the Boeing 707, Hughes opted to pursue a more advanced jet aircraft for TWA and approached Convair in late 1954. Convair proposed two concepts to Hughes, but Hughes was unable to decide which concept to adopt, and Convair eventually abandoned its initial jet project after the mockups of the 707 and Douglas DC-8 were unveiled. Even after competitors such as United Airlines, American Airlines and Pan American World Airways had placed large orders for the 707, Hughes only placed eight orders for 707s through the Hughes Tool Company and forbade TWA from using the aircraft. After finally beginning to reserve 707 orders in 1956, Hughes embarked on a plan to build his own "superior" jet aircraft for TWA, applied for CAB permission to sell Hughes aircraft to TWA, and began negotiations with the state of Florida to build a manufacturing plant there. However, he abandoned this plan around 1958, and in the interim, negotiated new contracts for 707 and Convair 880 aircraft and engines totaling $400 million.
The financing of TWA's jet orders precipitated the end of Hughes's relationship with Noah Dietrich, and ultimately Hughes's ouster from control of TWA. Hughes did not have enough cash on hand or future cash flow to pay for the orders and did not immediately seek bank financing. Hughes's refusal to heed Dietrich's financing advice led to a major rift between the two by the end of 1956. Hughes believed that Dietrich wished to have Hughes committed as mentally incompetent, although the evidence of this is inconclusive. Dietrich resigned by telephone in May 1957 after repeated requests for stock options, which Hughes refused to grant, and with no further progress on the jet financing. As Hughes's mental state worsened, he ordered various tactics to delay payments to Boeing and Convair; his behavior led TWA's banks to insist that he be removed from management as a condition for further financing.
In 1960, Hughes was ultimately forced out of the management of TWA, although he continued to own 78% of the company. In 1961, TWA filed suit against Hughes Tool Company, claiming that the latter had violated antitrust law by using TWA as a captive market for aircraft trading. The claim was largely dependent upon obtaining testimony from Hughes himself. Hughes went into hiding and refused to testify. A default judgment was issued against Hughes Tool Company for $135 million in 1963 but was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973, on the basis that Hughes was immune from prosecution. In 1966, Hughes was forced to sell his TWA shares. The sale of his TWA shares brought Hughes $546,549,771.
Hughes acquired control of Boston-based Northeast Airlines in 1962. However, the airline's lucrative route authority between major northeastern cities and Miami was terminated by a CAB decision around the time of the acquisition, and Hughes sold control of the company to a trustee in 1964. Northeast went on to merge with Delta Air Lines in 1972.
In 1970, Hughes acquired San Francisco-based Air West and renamed it Hughes Airwest. Air West had been formed in 1968 by the merger of Bonanza Air Lines, Pacific Air Lines, and West Coast Airlines, all of which operated in the western U.S. By the late 1970s, Hughes Airwest operated an all-jet fleet of Boeing 727-200, Douglas DC-9-10, and McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 jetliners serving an extensive route network in the western U.S. with flights to Mexico and western Canada as well. By 1980, the airline's route system reached as far east as Houston (Hobby Airport) and Milwaukee with a total of 42 destinations being served. Hughes Airwest was then acquired by and merged into Republic Airlines (1979–1986) in late 1980. Republic was subsequently acquired by and merged into Northwest Airlines which in turn was ultimately merged into Delta Air Lines in 2008.
Hughes had made numerous business partnerships through industrialist and producer David Charnay. Their friendship and many partnerships began with the film The Conqueror, which was released to the public in 1956. The film caused many controversies due to its critical flop and radioactive location used in St. George, Utah, that eventually led to Hughes buying up nearly every copy of the film he could, only to watch the film at home repeatedly for many nights in a row.
Charnay later bought Four Star, the film and television production company that produced The Conqueror.
Hughes and Charnay's most published dealings were with a contested AirWest leveraged buyout. Charnay led the buyout group that involved Howard Hughes and their partners acquiring Air West. Hughes, Charnay, as well as three others, were indicted. The indictment, made by U.S. Attorney DeVoe Heaton, accused the group of conspiring to drive down the stock price of Air West in order to pressure company directors to sell to Hughes. The charges were dismissed after a judge had determined that the indictment had failed to allege an illegal action on the part of Hughes, Charnay, and all the other accused in the indictment. Thompson, the federal judge that made the decision to dismiss the charges, called the indictment one of the worst claims that he had ever seen. The charges were filed a second time by U.S. Attorney DeVoe Heaton's assistant, Dean Vernon. The Federal Judge ruled on November 13, 1974, and elaborated to say that the case suggested a "reprehensible misuse of the power of great wealth", but in his judicial opinion, "no crime had been committed." The aftermath of the Air West deal was later settled with the SEC by paying former stockholders for alleged losses from the sale of their investment in Air West stock. As noted above, Air West was subsequently renamed Hughes Airwest. During a long pause between the years of the dismissed charges against Hughes, Charnay, and their partners, Howard Hughes mysteriously died mid-flight while on the way to Houston from Acapulco. No further attempts were made to file any indictments after Hughes died.
In 1953, Hughes launched the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Miami (currently located in Chevy Chase, Maryland near Washington, D.C.), with the expressed goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand, in Hughes's words, the "genesis of life itself", due to his lifelong interest in science and technology. Hughes's first will, which he signed in 1925 at the age of 19, stipulated that a portion of his estate should be used to create a medical institute bearing his name. When a major battle with the IRS loomed ahead, Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a for-profit entity of a fully tax-exempt charity. Hughes's internist, Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 aircraft crash, was chairman of the institute's medical advisory committee. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute's new board of trustees sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion, allowing the institute to grow dramatically.
In 1954, Hughes transferred Hughes Aircraft to the foundation, which paid Hughes Tool Co. $18,000,000 for the assets. The foundation leased the land from Hughes Tool Co., which then subleased it to Hughes Aircraft Corp. The difference in rent, $2,000,000 per year, became the foundation's working capital.
The deal was the topic of a protracted legal battle between Hughes and the Internal Revenue Service, which Hughes ultimately won. After his death in 1976, many thought that the balance of Hughes's estate would go to the institute, although it was ultimately divided among his cousins and other heirs, given the lack of a will to the contrary. The HHMI was the fourth largest private organization as of 2007 and one of the largest devoted to biological and medical research, with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of June 2018.
In 1972, during the cold war era, Hughes was approached by the CIA through his longtime partner, David Charnay, to help secretly recover the Soviet submarine K-129, which had sunk near Hawaii four years earlier. Hughes's involvement provided the CIA with a plausible cover story, conducting expensive civilian marine research at extreme depths and the mining of undersea manganese nodules. The recovery plan used the special-purpose salvage vessel Glomar Explorer. In the summer of 1974, Glomar Explorer attempted to raise the Soviet vessel. However, during the recovery a mechanical failure in the ship's grapple caused half of the submarine to break off and fall to the ocean floor. This section is believed to have held many of the most sought-after items, including its code book and nuclear missiles. Two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines were recovered, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners who were subsequently given formal burial at sea in a filmed ceremony. The operation, known as Project Azorian (but incorrectly referred to by the press as Project Jennifer), became public in February 1975 after secret documents were released, obtained by burglars of Hughes's headquarters in June 1974. Although he lent his name and his company's resources to the operation, Hughes and his companies had no operational involvement in the project. The Glomar Explorer was eventually acquired by Transocean and was sent to the scrap yard in 2015 during a large decline in oil prices.
In 1929, Hughes's wife of four years, Ella, returned to Houston and filed for divorce.
Hughes dated many famous women, including Joan Crawford, Debra Paget, Billie Dove, Faith Domergue, Bette Davis, Yvonne De Carlo, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Ginger Rogers, Pat Sheehan, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mamie Van Doren and Gene Tierney. He also proposed to Joan Fontaine several times, according to her autobiography No Bed of Roses. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of Hell's Angels, but Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship was strictly professional, as Hughes disliked Harlow personally. In his 1971 book, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich said that Hughes genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell, but never sought romantic involvement with her. According to Russell's autobiography, however, Hughes once tried to bed her after a party. Russell (who was married at the time) refused him, and Hughes promised it would never happen again. The two maintained a professional and private friendship for many years. Hughes remained good friends with Tierney who, after his failed attempts to seduce her, was quoted as saying "I don't think Howard could love anything that did not have a motor in it". Later, when Tierney's daughter Daria was born deaf and blind and with a severe learning disability because of Tierney's exposure to rubella during her pregnancy, Hughes saw to it that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.
In 1933, Hughes made a purchase of a luxury steam yacht named the Rover, which was previously owned by Scottish shipping magnate James Mackay, 1st Earl of Inchcape. Hughes stated that "I have never seen the Rover but bought it on the blueprints, photographs and the reports of Lloyd's surveyors. My experience is that the English are the most honest race in the world." Hughes renamed the yacht Southern Cross and later sold her to Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren.
On July 11, 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian named Gabriel S. Meyer with his car at the corner of 3rd Street and Lorraine in Los Angeles. After the crash, Hughes was taken to the hospital and certified as sober, but an attending doctor made a note that Hughes had been drinking. A witness to the crash told police that Hughes was driving erratically and too fast and that Meyer had been standing in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Hughes was booked on suspicion of negligent homicide and held overnight in jail until his attorney, Neil S. McCarthy, obtained a writ of habeas corpus for his release pending a coroner's inquest. By the time of the coroner's inquiry, however, the witness had changed his story and claimed that Meyer had moved directly in front of Hughes's car. Nancy Bayly (Watts), who was in the car with Hughes at the time of the crash, corroborated this version of the story. On July 16, 1936, Hughes was held blameless by a coroner's jury at the inquest into Meyer's death. Hughes told reporters outside the inquiry, "I was driving slowly and a man stepped out of the darkness in front of me".
On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters at a small hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. The couple met in the 1940s, before Peters became a film actress. They had a highly publicized romance in 1947 and there was talk of marriage, but she said she could not combine it with her career. Some later claimed that Peters was "the only woman [Hughes] ever loved", and he reportedly had his security officers follow her everywhere even when they were not in a relationship. Such reports were confirmed by actor Max Showalter, who became a close friend of Peters while shooting Niagara (1953). Showalter told an interviewer that because he frequently met with Peters, Hughes's men threatened to ruin his career if he did not leave her alone.
Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon was alarmed when it was revealed that his brother, Donald, had received a $205,000 loan from Hughes. It has long been speculated that Nixon's drive to learn what the Democrats were planning in 1972 was based in part on his belief that the Democrats knew about a later bribe that his friend Bebe Rebozo had received from Hughes after Nixon took office.
In late 1971, Donald Nixon was collecting intelligence for his brother in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. One of his sources was John H. Meier, a former business adviser of Hughes who had also worked with Democratic National Committee Chairman Larry O'Brien.
Meier, in collaboration with former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to the Nixon campaign. Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because Larry O'Brien had a great deal of information on Richard Nixon's illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been released; O'Brien did not actually have any such information, but Meier wanted Nixon to think that he did. Donald told his brother that O'Brien was in possession of damaging Hughes information that could destroy his campaign. Terry Lenzner, who was the chief investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, speculates that it was Nixon's desire to know what O'Brien knew about Nixon's dealings with Hughes that may have partially motivated the Watergate break-in.
Hughes was widely considered eccentric and suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Dietrich wrote that Hughes always ate the same thing for dinner; a New York strip steak cooked medium rare, dinner salad, and peas, but only the smaller ones, pushing the larger ones aside. For breakfast, he wanted his eggs cooked the way his family cook, Lily, made them. Hughes had a "phobia about germs", and "his passion for secrecy became a mania."
While directing The Outlaw, Hughes became fixated on a small flaw in one of Jane Russell's blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He wrote a detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem. Richard Fleischer, who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the tycoon. In his book Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer explained that Hughes was fixated on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate. He also revealed that Hughes's unpredictable mood swings made him wonder if the film would ever be completed.
In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk, and was surrounded by dozens of boxes of Kleenex that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions neither to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies. When he finally emerged in the summer of 1958, his hygiene was terrible. He had neither bathed nor cut his hair and nails for weeks; this may have been due to allodynia, which results in a pain response to stimuli that would normally not cause pain.
After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he also rented rooms for his aides, his wife, and numerous girlfriends. He would sit naked in his bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. This may have been because Hughes found the touch of clothing painful due to allodynia. He may have watched movies to distract himself from his pain—a common practice among patients with intractable pain, especially those who do not receive adequate treatment. In one year, he spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.
Hughes began purchasing restaurant chains and four-star hotels that had been founded within the state of Texas. This included, if for only a short period, many unknown franchises currently out of business. He placed ownership of the restaurants with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and all licenses were resold shortly after.
He became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times. Feeling guilty about the failure of his film The Conqueror, a commercial and critical flop, he bought every copy of the film for $12 million, watching the film on repeat. Paramount Pictures acquired the rights of the film in 1979, three years after his death.
Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects to insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains, or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of them. Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view, although tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even dead.
Injuries from numerous aircraft crashes caused Hughes to spend much of his later life in pain, and he eventually became addicted to codeine, which he injected intramuscularly. He had his hair cut and nails trimmed only once a year, likely due to the pain caused by the RSD/CRPS, which was caused by the plane crashes. He also stored his urine in bottles.
The wealthy and aging Hughes, accompanied by his entourage of personal aides, began moving from one hotel to another, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse. In the last ten years of his life, 1966 to 1976, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities—including Beverly Hills, Boston, Las Vegas, Nassau, Freeport and Vancouver.
On November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day), Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel's eighth floor became the center of Hughes' empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became his personal residence. Between 1966 and 1968, he bought several other hotel-casinos, including the Castaways, New Frontier, the Landmark Hotel and Casino, and the Sands. He bought the small Silver Slipper casino for the sole purpose of moving its trademark neon silver slipper which was visible from his bedroom, and had apparently kept him awake at night. After Hughes left the Desert Inn, hotel employees discovered that his drapes had not been opened during the time he lived there and had rotted through.
Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something more glamorous. He wrote in a memo to an aide, "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car." Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV).
Eventually, the brain trauma from Hughes's previous accidents, the effects of neurosyphilis diagnosed in 1932 and undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder considerably affected his decision-making. A small panel, unofficially dubbed the "Mormon Mafia" for the many Latter-day Saints on the committee, was led by Frank William Gay and originally served as Hughes's "secret police" headquartered at 7000 Romaine. Over the next two decades, however, this group oversaw and controlled considerable business holdings, with the CIA anointing Gay while awarding a contract to the Hughes corporation to acquire sensitive information on a sunken Russian submarine. In addition to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes's health, they also went to great pains to satisfy Hughes's every whim. For example, Hughes once became fond of Baskin-Robbins's banana nut ice cream, so his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him, only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. They put in a request for the smallest amount the company could provide for a special order, 350 gallons (1,300 L), and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream. The Desert Inn ended up distributing free banana nut ice cream to casino customers for a year. In a 1996 interview, former Howard Hughes Chief of Nevada Operations Robert Maheu said, "There is a rumor that there is still some banana nut ice cream left in the freezer. It is most likely true."
As an owner of several major Las Vegas businesses, Hughes wielded much political and economic influence in Nevada and elsewhere. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he disapproved of underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. Hughes was concerned about the risk from residual nuclear radiation and attempted to halt the tests. When the tests finally went through despite Hughes's efforts, the detonations were powerful enough that the entire hotel in which he was living trembled from the shock waves. In two separate, last-ditch maneuvers, Hughes instructed his representatives to offer bribes of $1 million to both Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
In 1970, Jean Peters filed for divorce. The two had not lived together for many years. Peters requested a lifetime alimony payment of $70,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, and waived all claims to Hughes's estate. Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she declined it. Hughes did not insist on a confidentiality agreement from Peters as a condition of the divorce. Aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of her. She refused to discuss her life with Hughes and declined several lucrative offers from publishers and biographers. Peters would state only that she had not seen Hughes for several years before their divorce and had dealt with him only by phone.
Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, seeking privacy and security, when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake damaged Managua in December 1972. As a precaution, Hughes moved to a large tent facing the hotel; after a few days, he moved to the Nicaraguan National Palace and stayed there as a guest of Anastasio Somoza Debayle before leaving for Florida on a private jet the following day. He subsequently moved into the penthouse at the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, which he had recently purchased. He lived almost exclusively in the penthouse of the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina for the last four years of his life. Hughes spent a total of $300 million on his many properties in Las Vegas.
In 1972, author Clifford Irving caused a media sensation when he claimed he had co-written an authorized Hughes autobiography. Irving claimed he and Hughes had corresponded through the United States mail, and offered as proof handwritten notes allegedly sent by Hughes. Publisher McGraw-Hill, Inc. was duped into believing the manuscript was authentic. Hughes was so reclusive that he did not immediately publicly refute Irving's statement, leading many to believe that Irving's book was genuine. However, before the book's publication, Hughes finally denounced Irving in a teleconference attended by reporters Hughes knew personally: James Bacon of the Hearst papers, Marvin Miles of the Los Angeles Times, Vernon Scott of UPI, Roy Neal of NBC News, Gene Handsaker of AP, Wayne Thomas of the Chicago Tribune, and Gladwin Hill of the New York Times.
The entire hoax finally unraveled. The United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) got a subpoena to force Irving to turn over samples of his handwriting. The USPIS investigation led to Irving's indictment and subsequent conviction for using the postal service to commit fraud. He was incarcerated for 17 months. In 1974, the Orson Welles film F for Fake included a section on the Hughes autobiography hoax, leaving a question open as to whether it was actually Hughes who took part in the teleconference (since so few people had actually heard or seen him in recent years). In 1977, The Hoax by Clifford Irving was published in the United Kingdom, telling his story of these events. The 2006 film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, is also based on these events.
Hughes is reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft, Learjet 24B N855W, owned by Robert Graf and piloted by Roger Sutton and Jeff Abrams. He was en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Princess Hotel (now the Fairmont Acapulco Princess) in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston.
His reclusiveness and possibly his drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body. Howard Hughes's alias, John T. Conover, was used when his body arrived at a morgue in Houston on the day of his death.
An autopsy recorded kidney failure as the cause of death. In an eighteen-month study investigating Hughes's drug abuse for the estate, it was found "someone administered a deadly injection of the painkiller to this comatose man ... obviously needlessly and almost certainly fatal". He suffered from malnutrition and was covered in bedsores. While his kidneys were damaged, his other internal organs, including his brain, which had no visible damage or illnesses, were deemed perfectly healthy. X-rays revealed five broken-off hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms. To inject codeine into his muscles, Hughes had used glass syringes with metal needles that easily became detached.
Hughes is buried next to his parents at Glenwood Cemetery in Houston.
Following his death, Hughes was subject to several widely rebuked conspiracy theories that he had faked his own death. A notable allegation came from retired Major General Mark Musick, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, who claimed Hughes went on to live under an assumed identity, dying on November 15, 2001, in Troy, Alabama.
Approximately three weeks after Hughes's death, a handwritten will was found on the desk of an official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The so-called "Mormon Will" gave $1.56 billion to various charitable organizations (including $625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute), nearly $470 million to the upper management in Hughes's companies and to his aides, $156 million to first cousin William Lummis, and $156 million split equally between his two ex-wives Ella Rice and Jean Peters.
A further $156 million was endowed to a gas station owner, Melvin Dummar, who told reporters that in 1967, he found a disheveled and dirty man lying along U.S. Route 95, just 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas. The man asked for a ride to Vegas. Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said the man told him that he was Hughes. Dummar later claimed that days after Hughes's death a "mysterious man" appeared at his gas station, leaving an envelope containing the will on his desk. Unsure if the will was genuine and unsure of what to do, Dummar left the will at the LDS Church office. In 1978, a Nevada court ruled the Mormon Will a forgery and officially declared that Hughes had died intestate (without a valid will). Dummar's story was later adapted into Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard in 1980.
Hughes's $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 among 22 cousins, including William Lummis, who serves as a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5.2 billion. The court rejected suits by the states of California and Texas that claimed they were owed inheritance tax.
In 1984, Hughes's estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed she and Hughes had secretly married on a yacht in international waters off Mexico in 1949 and never divorced. Moore never produced proof of a marriage, but her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a bestseller.
The moving image collection of Howard Hughes is held at the Academy Film Archive. The collection consists of over 200 items including 35mm and 16mm elements of feature films, documentaries, and television programs made or accumulated by Hughes. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often controversial films such as The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), and Scarface (1932). He later acquired the RKO Pictures film studio in 1948, recognized then as one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age, although the production company struggled under his control and ultimately ceased operations in 1957.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Through his interest in aviation and aerospace travel, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, hiring numerous engineers, designers, and defense contractors. He spent the rest of the 1930s and much of the 1940s setting multiple world air speed records and building the Hughes H-1 Racer (1935) and the gigantic H-4 Hercules (the Spruce Goose, 1947), the largest flying boat in history with the longest wingspan of any aircraft from the time it was built until 2019. He acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines and later acquired Air West, renaming it Hughes Airwest. Hughes won the Harmon Trophy on two occasions (1936 and 1938), the Collier Trophy (1938), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1939) all for his achievements in aviation throughout the 1930s. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973 and was included in Flying magazine's 2013 list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation, ranked at No. 25.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During his final years, Hughes extended his financial empire to include several major businesses in Las Vegas, such as real estate, hotels, casinos, and media outlets. Known at the time as one of the most powerful men in the state of Nevada, he is largely credited with transforming Vegas into a more refined cosmopolitan city. After years of mental and physical decline, Hughes died of kidney failure in 1976. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Howard Hughes Corporation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was the only child of Allene Stone Gano (1883–1922) and of Howard R. Hughes Sr. (1869–1924), a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri. He had English, Welsh and some French Huguenot ancestry, and was a descendant of John Gano (1727–1804), the minister who allegedly baptized George Washington.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hughes Sr. patented the two-cone roller bit in 1909, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. The senior Hughes made the shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention by leasing the bits instead of selling them, obtaining several early patents, and founding the Hughes Tool Company in 1909.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hughes's uncle was the famed novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes, signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and by Estelle Boughton Sharp, states that he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his certificate of baptism, recorded on October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa, listed his date of birth as September 24, 1905, without any reference to the place of birth.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At a young age, Hughes Jr. showed interest in science and technology. In particular, he had a great engineering aptitude, and built Houston's first \"wireless\" radio transmitter at age 11. He went on to be one of the first licensed ham-radio operators in Houston, having the assigned callsign W5CY (originally 5CY). At 12, Hughes was photographed for the local newspaper, which identified him as the first boy in Houston to have a \"motorized\" bicycle, which he had built from parts of his father's steam engine. He was an indifferent student, with a liking for mathematics, flying, and mechanics. He took his first flying lesson at 14, and attended Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1921.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After a brief stint at The Thacher School, Hughes attended math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech. The red-brick house where Hughes lived as a teenager at 3921 Yoakum Blvd., Houston, still stands, now known as Hughes House on the grounds of the University of St. Thomas.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "His mother Allene died in March 1922 from complications of an ectopic pregnancy. Howard Hughes Sr. died of a heart attack in 1924. Their deaths apparently inspired Hughes to include the establishment of a medical research laboratory in the will that he signed in 1925 at age 19. Howard Sr.'s will had not been updated since Allene's death, and Hughes Jr. inherited 75% of the family fortune. On his 19th birthday, Hughes was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his life.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "From a young age, Hughes became a proficient and enthusiastic golfer. He often scored near-par figures, playing the game to a two-three handicap during his 20s, and for a time aimed for a professional golf career. He golfed frequently with top players, including Gene Sarazen. Hughes rarely played competitively and gradually gave up his passion for the sport to pursue other interests.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Hughes played golf every afternoon at LA courses including the Lakeside Golf Club, Wilshire Country Club, or the Bel-Air Country Club. Partners included George Von Elm or Ozzie Carlton. After Hughes hurt himself in the late 1920s, his golfing tapered off, and after his XF-11 crash, Hughes was unable to play at all.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father's death. On June 1, 1925, he married Ella Botts Rice, daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston, and great-niece of William Marsh Rice, for whom Rice University was named. They moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself as a filmmaker.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "They moved into the Ambassador Hotel, and Hughes proceeded to learn to fly a Waco, while simultaneously producing his first motion picture, Swell Hogan.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Hughes enjoyed a highly successful business career beyond engineering, aviation, and filmmaking; many of his career endeavors involved varying entrepreneurial roles.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Ralph Graves persuaded Hughes to finance a short film, Swell Hogan, which Graves had written and would star in. Hughes himself produced it. However, it was a disaster. After hiring a film editor to try to salvage it, he finally ordered that it be destroyed. His next two films, Everybody's Acting (1926) and Two Arabian Knights (1927), achieved financial success; the latter won the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture. The Racket (1928) and The Front Page (1931) were also nominated for Academy Awards.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Hughes spent $3.5 million to make the flying film Hell's Angels (1930). Hell's Angels received one Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "He produced another hit, Scarface (1932), a production delayed by censors' concern over its violence.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Outlaw premiered in 1943, but was not released nationally until 1946. The film featured Jane Russell, who received considerable attention from industry censors, this time owing to her revealing costumes.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "From the 1940s to the late 1950s, the Hughes Tool Company ventured into the film industry when it obtained partial ownership of the RKO companies, which included RKO Pictures, RKO Studios, a chain of movie theaters known as RKO Theatres and a network of radio stations known as the RKO Radio Network.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1948, Hughes gained control of RKO, a struggling major Hollywood studio, by acquiring the 929,000 shares owned by Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation, for $8,825,000 ($107,165,160 in 2023). Within weeks of acquiring the studio, Hughes dismissed 700 employees. Production dwindled to 9 pictures during the first year of Hughes's control; previously RKO had averaged 30 per year.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "That same year, 1948, he was able to arrange for his previous films with United Artists (UA), The Outlaw, Mad Wednesday, and Vendetta to be transferred to RKO. In exchange for the three completed being removed from UA distribution, Hughes and James and Theodore Nasser of General Service Studios would provide the financing of three independent films for distribution by UA. In terms of negotiations directly with RKO, the company agree to remove the production of the film Jet Pilot from David O. Selznick to Hughes. Hughes produced the film during the years 1949-1950 and owned RKO and in turn the distribution for the film. However, the film was not released until 1957 by Universal Pictures due in part to the subsequent events that would take place at RKO Distribution, and largely due the extra aerial film footage that had been filmed over the years after the film's 1950 completion. Hughes was undertaking a final edit before the 1957 release.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After his acquisition of RKO, Hughes shut down production at the studio for six months, during which time he ordered investigations into the political leanings of every remaining RKO employee. Only after ensuring that the stars under contract to RKO had no suspect affiliations would Hughes approve completed pictures to be sent back for re-shooting. This was especially true of the women under contract to RKO at that time. If Hughes felt that his stars did not properly represent the political views of his liking or if a film's anti-communist politics were not sufficiently clear, he pulled the plug. In 1952, an abortive sale to a Chicago-based five-man syndicate, two of whom had a history of complaints about their business practices and none with any experience in the movie industry, disrupted studio operations at RKO even further.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1953, Hughes became involved with a high-profile lawsuit as part of the settlement of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. Antitrust Case. As a result of the hearings, the shaky status of RKO became increasingly apparent. A steady stream of lawsuits from RKO's minority shareholders had grown to become extremely annoying to Hughes. They had accused him of financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement. Since Hughes wanted to focus primarily on his aircraft manufacturing and TWA holdings during the years of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, Hughes offered to buy out all other RKO stockholders in order to dispense with their distractions.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "By the end of 1954, Hughes had gained near-total control of RKO at a cost of nearly $24 million, becoming the first sole owner of a major Hollywood studio since the silent-film era. Six months later Hughes sold the studio to the General Tire and Rubber Company for $25 million. Hughes retained the rights to pictures that he had personally produced, including those made at RKO. He also retained Jane Russell's contract. For Howard Hughes, this was the virtual end of his 25-year involvement in the motion-picture industry. However, his reputation as a financial wizard emerged unscathed. During that time period, RKO became known as the home of classic film noir productions, thanks in part to the limited budgets required to make such films during Hughes's tenure. Hughes reportedly walked away from RKO having made $6.5 million in personal profit. According to Noah Dietrich, Hughes made a $10,000,000 profit from the sale of the theaters and made a profit of $1,000,000 from his 7-year ownership of RKO.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "According to Noah Dietrich, \"Land became a principal asset for the Hughes empire\". Hughes acquired 1200 acres in Culver City for Hughes Aircraft, bought 7 sections [4,480 acres] in Tucson for his Falcon missile-plant, and purchased 25,000 acres near Las Vegas. In 1968, the Hughes Tool Company purchased the North Las Vegas Air Terminal.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Originally known as Summa Corporation, the Howard Hughes Corporation formed in 1972 when the oil-tools business of Hughes Tool Company, then owned by Howard Hughes Jr., floated on the New York Stock Exchange under the \"Hughes Tool\" name. This forced the remaining businesses of the \"original\" Hughes Tool to adopt a new corporate name: \"Summa\". The name \"Summa\"—Latin for \"highest\"—was adopted without the approval of Hughes himself, who preferred to keep his own name on the business, and suggested \"HRH Properties\" (for Hughes Resorts and Hotels, and also his own initials). In 1988 Summa announced plans for Summerlin, a master-planned community named for the paternal grandmother of Howard Hughes, Jean Amelia Summerlin.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Initially staying in the Desert Inn, Hughes refused to vacate his room, and instead decided to purchase the entire hotel. Hughes extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels, and media outlets, spending an estimated $300 million, and using his considerable powers to acquire many of the well-known hotels, especially the venues connected with organized crime. He quickly became one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He was instrumental in changing the image of Las Vegas from its Wild West roots into a more refined cosmopolitan city. In addition to the Desert Inn, Hughes would eventually own the Sands, Frontier, Silver Slipper, Castaways, and Landmark and Harold's Club in Reno. Hughes would eventually become the largest employer in Nevada.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Another portion of Hughes's commercial interests involved aviation, airlines, and the aerospace and defense industries. A lifelong aircraft enthusiast and pilot, Hughes survived four airplane accidents: one in a Thomas-Morse Scout while filming Hell's Angels, one while setting the airspeed record in the Hughes Racer, one at Lake Mead in 1943, and the near-fatal crash of the Hughes XF-11 in 1946. At Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, he learned to fly from pioneer aviators, including Moye Stephens and J.B. Alexander. He set many world records and commissioned the construction of custom aircraft for himself while heading Hughes Aircraft at the airport in Glendale, CA. Operating from there, the most technologically important aircraft he commissioned was the Hughes H-1 Racer. On September 13, 1935, Hughes, flying the H-1, set the landplane airspeed record of 352 mph (566 km/h) over his test course near Santa Ana, California (Giuseppe Motta reaching 362 mph in 1929 and George Stainforth reached 407.5 mph in 1931, both in seaplanes). This marked the last time in history that an aircraft built by a private individual set the world airspeed record. A year and a half later, on January 19, 1937, flying the same H-1 Racer fitted with longer wings, Hughes set a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in seven hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of nine hours, 27 minutes). His average ground-speed over the flight was 322 mph (518 km/h).",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The H-1 Racer featured a number of design innovations: it had retractable landing gear (as Boeing Monomail had five years before), and all rivets and joints set flush into the body of the aircraft to reduce drag. The H-1 Racer is thought to have influenced the design of a number of World War II fighters such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Focke-Wulf Fw 190, and F8F Bearcat, although that has never been reliably confirmed. In 1975 the H-1 Racer was donated to the Smithsonian.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1932 Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, to build the H-1 racer.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Shortly after founding the company, Hughes used the alias \"Charles Howard\" to accept a job as a baggage handler for American Airlines. He was soon promoted to co-pilot. Hughes continued to work for American Airlines until his real identity was discovered.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During and after World War II Hughes turned his company into a major defense contractor. The Hughes Helicopters division started in 1947 when helicopter manufacturer Kellett sold their latest design to Hughes for production. Hughes Aircraft became a major U.S. aerospace- and defense contractor, manufacturing numerous technology-related products that included spacecraft vehicles, military aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, the first working laser, aircraft computer systems, missile systems, ion-propulsion engines (for space travel), commercial satellites, and other electronics systems.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1948 Hughes created a new division of Hughes Aircraft: the Hughes Aerospace Group. The Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division were later spun off in 1948 to form their own divisions and ultimately became the Hughes Space and Communications Company in 1961. In 1953 Howard Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charitable organization. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion. In 1997 General Motors sold Hughes Aircraft to Raytheon and in 2000, sold Hughes Space & Communications to Boeing. A combination of Boeing, GM, and Raytheon acquired the Hughes Research Laboratories, which focused on advanced developments in microelectronics, information & systems sciences, materials, sensors, and photonics; their work-space spans from basic research to product delivery. It has particularly emphasized capabilities in high-performance integrated circuits, high-power lasers, antennas, networking, and smart materials.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "On July 14, 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours (three days, 19 hours, 17 minutes), beating the previous record of 186 hours (seven days, 18 hours, 49 minutes) set in 1933 by Wiley Post in a single-engine Lockheed Vega by almost four days. Hughes returned home ahead of photographs of his flight. Taking off from New York City, Hughes continued to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis, then returning to New York City. For this flight he flew a Lockheed 14 Super Electra (NX18973, a twin-engine transport with a crew of four) fitted with the latest radio and navigational equipment. Harry Connor was the co-pilot, Thomas Thurlow the navigator, Richard Stoddart the engineer, and Ed Lund the mechanic. Hughes wanted the flight to be a triumph of U.S. aviation technology, illustrating that safe, long-distance air travel was possible. Albert Lodwick of Mystic, Iowa, provided organizational skills as the flight operations manager. While Hughes had previously been relatively obscure despite his wealth, better known for dating Katharine Hepburn, New York City now gave him a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes. Hughes and his crew were awarded the 1938 Collier Trophy for flying around the world in record time. He was awarded the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938 for the record-breaking global circumnavigation.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1938 the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas—known at the time as Houston Municipal Airport—was renamed after Hughes, but the name was changed back due to public outrage over naming the airport after a living person. Hughes also had a role in the financing of the Boeing 307 Stratoliner for TWA, and the design and financing of the Lockheed L-049 Constellation.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Other aviator awards include: the Bibesco Cup of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in 1938, the Octave Chanute Award in 1940, and a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 \"in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world\".",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "President Harry S. Truman sent the Congressional medal to Hughes after the F-11 crash. After his around-the-world flight, Hughes had declined to go to the White House to collect it.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Development of the D-2 began around 1937, but little is known about its early gestation because Hughes' archives on the aircraft have not been made public. Aircraft historian René Francillon speculates that Hughes designed the aircraft for another circumnavigation record attempt, but the outbreak of World War II closed much of the world's airspace and made it difficult to buy aircraft parts without government approval, so he decided to sell the aircraft to the U.S. Army instead. In December 1939, Hughes proposed that the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) procure it as a \"pursuit type airplane\" (i.e. a fighter aircraft). It emerged as a two or three-seat twin-boom aircraft powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-2800-49 engines and constructed mostly of Duramold, a type of molded plywood. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF, successor to the USAAC) struggled to define a mission for the D-2, which lacked both the maneuverability of a fighter and the payload of a bomber, and was highly skeptical of the extensive use of plywood; however, the project was kept alive by high-level intervention from General Henry H. Arnold. The prototype was brought to Harper's Dry Lake in California in great secrecy in 1943 and first flew on June 20 of that year. The initial test flights revealed serious flight control problems, so the D-2 returned to the hangar for extensive changes to its wings, and Hughes proposed to redesignate it as the D-5. However, in November 1944, the still-incomplete D-2 was destroyed in a hangar fire reportedly caused by a lightning strike.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the spring of 1943 Hughes spent nearly a month in Las Vegas, test-flying his Sikorsky S-43 amphibious aircraft, practicing touch-and-go landings on Lake Mead in preparation for flying the H-4 Hercules. The weather conditions at the lake during the day were ideal and he enjoyed Las Vegas at night. On May 17, 1943, Hughes flew the Sikorsky from California, carrying two Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) aviation inspectors, two of his employees, and actress Ava Gardner. Hughes dropped Gardner off in Las Vegas and proceeded to Lake Mead to conduct qualifying tests in the S-43. The test flight did not go well. The Sikorsky crashed into Lake Mead, killing CAA inspector Ceco Cline and Hughes's employee Richard Felt. Hughes suffered a severe gash on the top of his head when he hit the upper control panel and had to be rescued by one of the others on board. Hughes paid divers $100,000 to raise the aircraft and later spent more than $500,000 restoring it. Hughes sent the plane to Houston, where it remained for many years.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Acting on a recommendation of the president's son, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who had become friends with Hughes, in September 1943 General Arnold issued a directive to order 100 of a reconnaissance development of the D-2, known as the F-11 (XF-11 in prototype form). The project was controversial from the beginning, as the USAAF Air Materiel Command deeply doubted that Hughes Aircraft could fulfill a contract this large, but Arnold pushed the project forward. Materiel Command demanded a host of major design changes notably including the elimination of Duramold; Hughes, who sought $3.9 million in reimbursement for sunk costs from the D-2, strenuously objected because this undercut his argument that the XF-11 was a modified D-2 rather than a new design. Protracted negotiations caused months of delays but ultimately yielded few design concessions. The war ended before the first XF-11 prototype was completed and the F-11 production contract was canceled. The XF-11 emerged in 1946 as an all-metal, twin-boom, three-seat reconnaissance aircraft, substantially larger than the D-2 and powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-4360-31 engines, each driving a set of contra-rotating propellers. Only two prototypes were completed; the second one had a conventional single propeller per side.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Hughes was almost killed on July 7, 1946, while performing the first flight of the XF-11 near Hughes Airfield at Culver City, California. Hughes extended the test flight well beyond the 45-minute limit decreed by the USAAF, possibly distracted by landing gear retraction problems. An oil leak caused one of the contra-rotating propellers to reverse pitch, causing the aircraft to yaw sharply and lose altitude rapidly. Hughes attempted to save the aircraft by landing it at the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but just seconds before reaching the course, the XF-11 started to drop dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "When the XF-11 finally came to a halt after destroying three houses, the fuel tanks exploded, setting fire to the aircraft and a nearby home at 808 North Whittier Drive owned by Lt Col. Charles E. Meyer. Hughes managed to pull himself out of the flaming wreckage but lay beside the aircraft until he was rescued by U.S. Marine Corps Master Sergeant William L. Durkin, who happened to be in the area visiting friends. Hughes sustained significant injuries in the crash, including a crushed collar bone, multiple cracked ribs, crushed chest with collapsed left lung, shifting his heart to the right side of the chest cavity, and numerous third-degree burns. An oft-told story said that Hughes sent a check to the Marine weekly for the remainder of his life as a sign of gratitude. Noah Dietrich asserted that Hughes did send Durkin $200 a month, but Durkin's daughter denied knowing that he received any money from Hughes.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Despite his physical injuries, Hughes took pride that his mind was still working. As he lay in his hospital bed, he decided that he did not like the bed's design. He called in plant engineers to design a customized bed, equipped with hot and cold running water, built in six sections, and operated by 30 electric motors, with push-button adjustments. Hughes designed the hospital bed specifically to alleviate the pain caused by moving with severe burn injuries. He never used the bed that he designed. Hughes's doctors considered his recovery almost miraculous.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Many attribute his long-term dependence on opiates to his use of codeine as a painkiller during his convalescence. Yet Dietrich asserts that Hughes recovered the \"hard way—no sleeping pills, no opiates of any kind\". The trademark mustache he wore afterward hid a scar on his upper lip resulting from the accident.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The War Production Board (not the military) originally contracted with Henry Kaiser and Hughes to produce the gigantic HK-1 Hercules flying boat for use during World War II to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic as an alternative to seagoing troop transport ships that were vulnerable to German U-boats. The military services opposed the project, thinking it would siphon resources from higher-priority programs, but Hughes's powerful allies in Washington, D.C. advocated it. After disputes, Kaiser withdrew from the project and Hughes elected to continue it as the H-4 Hercules. However, the aircraft was not completed until after World War II.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Hercules was the world's largest flying boat, the largest aircraft made from wood, and, at 319 feet 11 inches (97.51 m), had the longest wingspan of any aircraft (the next-largest wingspan was about 310 ft (94 m)). (The Hercules is no longer the longest nor heaviest aircraft ever built - surpassed by the Antonov An-225 Mriya produced in 1985.)",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Hercules flew only once for one mile (1.6 km), and 70 feet (21 m) above the water, with Hughes at the controls, on November 2, 1947.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Critics nicknamed the Hercules the Spruce Goose, but it was actually made largely from birch (not spruce) rather than from aluminum, because the contract required that Hughes build the aircraft of \"non-strategic materials\". It was built in Hughes's Westchester, California, facility. In 1947, Howard Hughes was summoned to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain why the H-4 development had been so troubled, and why $22 million had produced only two prototypes of the XF-11. General Elliott Roosevelt and numerous other USAAF officers were also called to testify in hearings that transfixed the nation during August and November 1947. In hotly-disputed testimony over TWA's route awards and malfeasance in the defense-acquisition process, Hughes turned the tables on his main interlocutor, Maine senator Owen Brewster, and the hearings were widely interpreted as a Hughes victory. After being displayed at the harbor of Long Beach, California, the Hercules was moved to McMinnville, Oregon, where as of 2020 it features at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On November 4, 2017, the 70th anniversary of the only flight of the H-4 Hercules was celebrated at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum with Hughes's paternal cousin Michael Wesley Summerlin and Brian Palmer Evans, son of Hughes radio technology pioneer Dave Evans, taking their positions in the recreation of a photo that was previously taken of Hughes, Dave Evans, and Joe Petrali on board the H-4 Hercules.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 1939, at the urging of Jack Frye, president of Transcontinental & Western Airlines, the predecessor of Trans World Airlines (TWA), Hughes began to quietly purchase a majority share of TWA stock (78% of stock, to be exact); he took a controlling interest in the airline by 1944. Although he never had an official position with TWA, Hughes handpicked the board of directors, which included Noah Dietrich, and often issued orders directly to airline staff. Hughes Tool Co. purchased the first six Stratoliners Boeing manufactured. Hughes used one personally, and he let TWA operate the other five.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Hughes is commonly credited as the driving force behind the Lockheed Constellation airliner, which Hughes and Frye ordered in 1939 as a long-range replacement for TWA's fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners. Hughes personally financed TWA's acquisition of 40 Constellations for $18 million, the largest aircraft order in history up to that time. The Constellations were among the highest-performing commercial aircraft of the late 1940s and 1950s and allowed TWA to pioneer nonstop transcontinental service. During World War II Hughes leveraged political connections in Washington to obtain rights for TWA to serve Europe, making it the only U.S. carrier with a combination of domestic and transatlantic routes.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "After the announcement of the Boeing 707, Hughes opted to pursue a more advanced jet aircraft for TWA and approached Convair in late 1954. Convair proposed two concepts to Hughes, but Hughes was unable to decide which concept to adopt, and Convair eventually abandoned its initial jet project after the mockups of the 707 and Douglas DC-8 were unveiled. Even after competitors such as United Airlines, American Airlines and Pan American World Airways had placed large orders for the 707, Hughes only placed eight orders for 707s through the Hughes Tool Company and forbade TWA from using the aircraft. After finally beginning to reserve 707 orders in 1956, Hughes embarked on a plan to build his own \"superior\" jet aircraft for TWA, applied for CAB permission to sell Hughes aircraft to TWA, and began negotiations with the state of Florida to build a manufacturing plant there. However, he abandoned this plan around 1958, and in the interim, negotiated new contracts for 707 and Convair 880 aircraft and engines totaling $400 million.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The financing of TWA's jet orders precipitated the end of Hughes's relationship with Noah Dietrich, and ultimately Hughes's ouster from control of TWA. Hughes did not have enough cash on hand or future cash flow to pay for the orders and did not immediately seek bank financing. Hughes's refusal to heed Dietrich's financing advice led to a major rift between the two by the end of 1956. Hughes believed that Dietrich wished to have Hughes committed as mentally incompetent, although the evidence of this is inconclusive. Dietrich resigned by telephone in May 1957 after repeated requests for stock options, which Hughes refused to grant, and with no further progress on the jet financing. As Hughes's mental state worsened, he ordered various tactics to delay payments to Boeing and Convair; his behavior led TWA's banks to insist that he be removed from management as a condition for further financing.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1960, Hughes was ultimately forced out of the management of TWA, although he continued to own 78% of the company. In 1961, TWA filed suit against Hughes Tool Company, claiming that the latter had violated antitrust law by using TWA as a captive market for aircraft trading. The claim was largely dependent upon obtaining testimony from Hughes himself. Hughes went into hiding and refused to testify. A default judgment was issued against Hughes Tool Company for $135 million in 1963 but was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973, on the basis that Hughes was immune from prosecution. In 1966, Hughes was forced to sell his TWA shares. The sale of his TWA shares brought Hughes $546,549,771.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Hughes acquired control of Boston-based Northeast Airlines in 1962. However, the airline's lucrative route authority between major northeastern cities and Miami was terminated by a CAB decision around the time of the acquisition, and Hughes sold control of the company to a trustee in 1964. Northeast went on to merge with Delta Air Lines in 1972.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 1970, Hughes acquired San Francisco-based Air West and renamed it Hughes Airwest. Air West had been formed in 1968 by the merger of Bonanza Air Lines, Pacific Air Lines, and West Coast Airlines, all of which operated in the western U.S. By the late 1970s, Hughes Airwest operated an all-jet fleet of Boeing 727-200, Douglas DC-9-10, and McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 jetliners serving an extensive route network in the western U.S. with flights to Mexico and western Canada as well. By 1980, the airline's route system reached as far east as Houston (Hobby Airport) and Milwaukee with a total of 42 destinations being served. Hughes Airwest was then acquired by and merged into Republic Airlines (1979–1986) in late 1980. Republic was subsequently acquired by and merged into Northwest Airlines which in turn was ultimately merged into Delta Air Lines in 2008.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Hughes had made numerous business partnerships through industrialist and producer David Charnay. Their friendship and many partnerships began with the film The Conqueror, which was released to the public in 1956. The film caused many controversies due to its critical flop and radioactive location used in St. George, Utah, that eventually led to Hughes buying up nearly every copy of the film he could, only to watch the film at home repeatedly for many nights in a row.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Charnay later bought Four Star, the film and television production company that produced The Conqueror.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Hughes and Charnay's most published dealings were with a contested AirWest leveraged buyout. Charnay led the buyout group that involved Howard Hughes and their partners acquiring Air West. Hughes, Charnay, as well as three others, were indicted. The indictment, made by U.S. Attorney DeVoe Heaton, accused the group of conspiring to drive down the stock price of Air West in order to pressure company directors to sell to Hughes. The charges were dismissed after a judge had determined that the indictment had failed to allege an illegal action on the part of Hughes, Charnay, and all the other accused in the indictment. Thompson, the federal judge that made the decision to dismiss the charges, called the indictment one of the worst claims that he had ever seen. The charges were filed a second time by U.S. Attorney DeVoe Heaton's assistant, Dean Vernon. The Federal Judge ruled on November 13, 1974, and elaborated to say that the case suggested a \"reprehensible misuse of the power of great wealth\", but in his judicial opinion, \"no crime had been committed.\" The aftermath of the Air West deal was later settled with the SEC by paying former stockholders for alleged losses from the sale of their investment in Air West stock. As noted above, Air West was subsequently renamed Hughes Airwest. During a long pause between the years of the dismissed charges against Hughes, Charnay, and their partners, Howard Hughes mysteriously died mid-flight while on the way to Houston from Acapulco. No further attempts were made to file any indictments after Hughes died.",
"title": "Business career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In 1953, Hughes launched the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Miami (currently located in Chevy Chase, Maryland near Washington, D.C.), with the expressed goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand, in Hughes's words, the \"genesis of life itself\", due to his lifelong interest in science and technology. Hughes's first will, which he signed in 1925 at the age of 19, stipulated that a portion of his estate should be used to create a medical institute bearing his name. When a major battle with the IRS loomed ahead, Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a for-profit entity of a fully tax-exempt charity. Hughes's internist, Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 aircraft crash, was chairman of the institute's medical advisory committee. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute's new board of trustees sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for $5.2 billion, allowing the institute to grow dramatically.",
"title": "Howard Hughes Medical Institute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 1954, Hughes transferred Hughes Aircraft to the foundation, which paid Hughes Tool Co. $18,000,000 for the assets. The foundation leased the land from Hughes Tool Co., which then subleased it to Hughes Aircraft Corp. The difference in rent, $2,000,000 per year, became the foundation's working capital.",
"title": "Howard Hughes Medical Institute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The deal was the topic of a protracted legal battle between Hughes and the Internal Revenue Service, which Hughes ultimately won. After his death in 1976, many thought that the balance of Hughes's estate would go to the institute, although it was ultimately divided among his cousins and other heirs, given the lack of a will to the contrary. The HHMI was the fourth largest private organization as of 2007 and one of the largest devoted to biological and medical research, with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of June 2018.",
"title": "Howard Hughes Medical Institute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 1972, during the cold war era, Hughes was approached by the CIA through his longtime partner, David Charnay, to help secretly recover the Soviet submarine K-129, which had sunk near Hawaii four years earlier. Hughes's involvement provided the CIA with a plausible cover story, conducting expensive civilian marine research at extreme depths and the mining of undersea manganese nodules. The recovery plan used the special-purpose salvage vessel Glomar Explorer. In the summer of 1974, Glomar Explorer attempted to raise the Soviet vessel. However, during the recovery a mechanical failure in the ship's grapple caused half of the submarine to break off and fall to the ocean floor. This section is believed to have held many of the most sought-after items, including its code book and nuclear missiles. Two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines were recovered, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners who were subsequently given formal burial at sea in a filmed ceremony. The operation, known as Project Azorian (but incorrectly referred to by the press as Project Jennifer), became public in February 1975 after secret documents were released, obtained by burglars of Hughes's headquarters in June 1974. Although he lent his name and his company's resources to the operation, Hughes and his companies had no operational involvement in the project. The Glomar Explorer was eventually acquired by Transocean and was sent to the scrap yard in 2015 during a large decline in oil prices.",
"title": "Glomar Explorer and the taking of K-129"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 1929, Hughes's wife of four years, Ella, returned to Houston and filed for divorce.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Hughes dated many famous women, including Joan Crawford, Debra Paget, Billie Dove, Faith Domergue, Bette Davis, Yvonne De Carlo, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Ginger Rogers, Pat Sheehan, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mamie Van Doren and Gene Tierney. He also proposed to Joan Fontaine several times, according to her autobiography No Bed of Roses. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of Hell's Angels, but Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship was strictly professional, as Hughes disliked Harlow personally. In his 1971 book, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich said that Hughes genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell, but never sought romantic involvement with her. According to Russell's autobiography, however, Hughes once tried to bed her after a party. Russell (who was married at the time) refused him, and Hughes promised it would never happen again. The two maintained a professional and private friendship for many years. Hughes remained good friends with Tierney who, after his failed attempts to seduce her, was quoted as saying \"I don't think Howard could love anything that did not have a motor in it\". Later, when Tierney's daughter Daria was born deaf and blind and with a severe learning disability because of Tierney's exposure to rubella during her pregnancy, Hughes saw to it that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 1933, Hughes made a purchase of a luxury steam yacht named the Rover, which was previously owned by Scottish shipping magnate James Mackay, 1st Earl of Inchcape. Hughes stated that \"I have never seen the Rover but bought it on the blueprints, photographs and the reports of Lloyd's surveyors. My experience is that the English are the most honest race in the world.\" Hughes renamed the yacht Southern Cross and later sold her to Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "On July 11, 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian named Gabriel S. Meyer with his car at the corner of 3rd Street and Lorraine in Los Angeles. After the crash, Hughes was taken to the hospital and certified as sober, but an attending doctor made a note that Hughes had been drinking. A witness to the crash told police that Hughes was driving erratically and too fast and that Meyer had been standing in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Hughes was booked on suspicion of negligent homicide and held overnight in jail until his attorney, Neil S. McCarthy, obtained a writ of habeas corpus for his release pending a coroner's inquest. By the time of the coroner's inquiry, however, the witness had changed his story and claimed that Meyer had moved directly in front of Hughes's car. Nancy Bayly (Watts), who was in the car with Hughes at the time of the crash, corroborated this version of the story. On July 16, 1936, Hughes was held blameless by a coroner's jury at the inquest into Meyer's death. Hughes told reporters outside the inquiry, \"I was driving slowly and a man stepped out of the darkness in front of me\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters at a small hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. The couple met in the 1940s, before Peters became a film actress. They had a highly publicized romance in 1947 and there was talk of marriage, but she said she could not combine it with her career. Some later claimed that Peters was \"the only woman [Hughes] ever loved\", and he reportedly had his security officers follow her everywhere even when they were not in a relationship. Such reports were confirmed by actor Max Showalter, who became a close friend of Peters while shooting Niagara (1953). Showalter told an interviewer that because he frequently met with Peters, Hughes's men threatened to ruin his career if he did not leave her alone.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon was alarmed when it was revealed that his brother, Donald, had received a $205,000 loan from Hughes. It has long been speculated that Nixon's drive to learn what the Democrats were planning in 1972 was based in part on his belief that the Democrats knew about a later bribe that his friend Bebe Rebozo had received from Hughes after Nixon took office.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In late 1971, Donald Nixon was collecting intelligence for his brother in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. One of his sources was John H. Meier, a former business adviser of Hughes who had also worked with Democratic National Committee Chairman Larry O'Brien.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Meier, in collaboration with former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to the Nixon campaign. Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because Larry O'Brien had a great deal of information on Richard Nixon's illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been released; O'Brien did not actually have any such information, but Meier wanted Nixon to think that he did. Donald told his brother that O'Brien was in possession of damaging Hughes information that could destroy his campaign. Terry Lenzner, who was the chief investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee, speculates that it was Nixon's desire to know what O'Brien knew about Nixon's dealings with Hughes that may have partially motivated the Watergate break-in.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Hughes was widely considered eccentric and suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Dietrich wrote that Hughes always ate the same thing for dinner; a New York strip steak cooked medium rare, dinner salad, and peas, but only the smaller ones, pushing the larger ones aside. For breakfast, he wanted his eggs cooked the way his family cook, Lily, made them. Hughes had a \"phobia about germs\", and \"his passion for secrecy became a mania.\"",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "While directing The Outlaw, Hughes became fixated on a small flaw in one of Jane Russell's blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He wrote a detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem. Richard Fleischer, who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the tycoon. In his book Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer explained that Hughes was fixated on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate. He also revealed that Hughes's unpredictable mood swings made him wonder if the film would ever be completed.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk, and was surrounded by dozens of boxes of Kleenex that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions neither to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies. When he finally emerged in the summer of 1958, his hygiene was terrible. He had neither bathed nor cut his hair and nails for weeks; this may have been due to allodynia, which results in a pain response to stimuli that would normally not cause pain.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he also rented rooms for his aides, his wife, and numerous girlfriends. He would sit naked in his bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. This may have been because Hughes found the touch of clothing painful due to allodynia. He may have watched movies to distract himself from his pain—a common practice among patients with intractable pain, especially those who do not receive adequate treatment. In one year, he spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Hughes began purchasing restaurant chains and four-star hotels that had been founded within the state of Texas. This included, if for only a short period, many unknown franchises currently out of business. He placed ownership of the restaurants with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and all licenses were resold shortly after.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "He became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times. Feeling guilty about the failure of his film The Conqueror, a commercial and critical flop, he bought every copy of the film for $12 million, watching the film on repeat. Paramount Pictures acquired the rights of the film in 1979, three years after his death.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects to insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains, or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of them. Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view, although tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even dead.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Injuries from numerous aircraft crashes caused Hughes to spend much of his later life in pain, and he eventually became addicted to codeine, which he injected intramuscularly. He had his hair cut and nails trimmed only once a year, likely due to the pain caused by the RSD/CRPS, which was caused by the plane crashes. He also stored his urine in bottles.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The wealthy and aging Hughes, accompanied by his entourage of personal aides, began moving from one hotel to another, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse. In the last ten years of his life, 1966 to 1976, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities—including Beverly Hills, Boston, Las Vegas, Nassau, Freeport and Vancouver.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "On November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day), Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel's eighth floor became the center of Hughes' empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became his personal residence. Between 1966 and 1968, he bought several other hotel-casinos, including the Castaways, New Frontier, the Landmark Hotel and Casino, and the Sands. He bought the small Silver Slipper casino for the sole purpose of moving its trademark neon silver slipper which was visible from his bedroom, and had apparently kept him awake at night. After Hughes left the Desert Inn, hotel employees discovered that his drapes had not been opened during the time he lived there and had rotted through.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something more glamorous. He wrote in a memo to an aide, \"I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car.\" Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV).",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Eventually, the brain trauma from Hughes's previous accidents, the effects of neurosyphilis diagnosed in 1932 and undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder considerably affected his decision-making. A small panel, unofficially dubbed the \"Mormon Mafia\" for the many Latter-day Saints on the committee, was led by Frank William Gay and originally served as Hughes's \"secret police\" headquartered at 7000 Romaine. Over the next two decades, however, this group oversaw and controlled considerable business holdings, with the CIA anointing Gay while awarding a contract to the Hughes corporation to acquire sensitive information on a sunken Russian submarine. In addition to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes's health, they also went to great pains to satisfy Hughes's every whim. For example, Hughes once became fond of Baskin-Robbins's banana nut ice cream, so his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him, only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. They put in a request for the smallest amount the company could provide for a special order, 350 gallons (1,300 L), and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream. The Desert Inn ended up distributing free banana nut ice cream to casino customers for a year. In a 1996 interview, former Howard Hughes Chief of Nevada Operations Robert Maheu said, \"There is a rumor that there is still some banana nut ice cream left in the freezer. It is most likely true.\"",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "As an owner of several major Las Vegas businesses, Hughes wielded much political and economic influence in Nevada and elsewhere. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he disapproved of underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. Hughes was concerned about the risk from residual nuclear radiation and attempted to halt the tests. When the tests finally went through despite Hughes's efforts, the detonations were powerful enough that the entire hotel in which he was living trembled from the shock waves. In two separate, last-ditch maneuvers, Hughes instructed his representatives to offer bribes of $1 million to both Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In 1970, Jean Peters filed for divorce. The two had not lived together for many years. Peters requested a lifetime alimony payment of $70,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, and waived all claims to Hughes's estate. Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she declined it. Hughes did not insist on a confidentiality agreement from Peters as a condition of the divorce. Aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of her. She refused to discuss her life with Hughes and declined several lucrative offers from publishers and biographers. Peters would state only that she had not seen Hughes for several years before their divorce and had dealt with him only by phone.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, seeking privacy and security, when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake damaged Managua in December 1972. As a precaution, Hughes moved to a large tent facing the hotel; after a few days, he moved to the Nicaraguan National Palace and stayed there as a guest of Anastasio Somoza Debayle before leaving for Florida on a private jet the following day. He subsequently moved into the penthouse at the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, which he had recently purchased. He lived almost exclusively in the penthouse of the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina for the last four years of his life. Hughes spent a total of $300 million on his many properties in Las Vegas.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In 1972, author Clifford Irving caused a media sensation when he claimed he had co-written an authorized Hughes autobiography. Irving claimed he and Hughes had corresponded through the United States mail, and offered as proof handwritten notes allegedly sent by Hughes. Publisher McGraw-Hill, Inc. was duped into believing the manuscript was authentic. Hughes was so reclusive that he did not immediately publicly refute Irving's statement, leading many to believe that Irving's book was genuine. However, before the book's publication, Hughes finally denounced Irving in a teleconference attended by reporters Hughes knew personally: James Bacon of the Hearst papers, Marvin Miles of the Los Angeles Times, Vernon Scott of UPI, Roy Neal of NBC News, Gene Handsaker of AP, Wayne Thomas of the Chicago Tribune, and Gladwin Hill of the New York Times.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The entire hoax finally unraveled. The United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) got a subpoena to force Irving to turn over samples of his handwriting. The USPIS investigation led to Irving's indictment and subsequent conviction for using the postal service to commit fraud. He was incarcerated for 17 months. In 1974, the Orson Welles film F for Fake included a section on the Hughes autobiography hoax, leaving a question open as to whether it was actually Hughes who took part in the teleconference (since so few people had actually heard or seen him in recent years). In 1977, The Hoax by Clifford Irving was published in the United Kingdom, telling his story of these events. The 2006 film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, is also based on these events.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Hughes is reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft, Learjet 24B N855W, owned by Robert Graf and piloted by Roger Sutton and Jeff Abrams. He was en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Princess Hotel (now the Fairmont Acapulco Princess) in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "His reclusiveness and possibly his drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body. Howard Hughes's alias, John T. Conover, was used when his body arrived at a morgue in Houston on the day of his death.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "An autopsy recorded kidney failure as the cause of death. In an eighteen-month study investigating Hughes's drug abuse for the estate, it was found \"someone administered a deadly injection of the painkiller to this comatose man ... obviously needlessly and almost certainly fatal\". He suffered from malnutrition and was covered in bedsores. While his kidneys were damaged, his other internal organs, including his brain, which had no visible damage or illnesses, were deemed perfectly healthy. X-rays revealed five broken-off hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms. To inject codeine into his muscles, Hughes had used glass syringes with metal needles that easily became detached.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Hughes is buried next to his parents at Glenwood Cemetery in Houston.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Following his death, Hughes was subject to several widely rebuked conspiracy theories that he had faked his own death. A notable allegation came from retired Major General Mark Musick, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, who claimed Hughes went on to live under an assumed identity, dying on November 15, 2001, in Troy, Alabama.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Approximately three weeks after Hughes's death, a handwritten will was found on the desk of an official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The so-called \"Mormon Will\" gave $1.56 billion to various charitable organizations (including $625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute), nearly $470 million to the upper management in Hughes's companies and to his aides, $156 million to first cousin William Lummis, and $156 million split equally between his two ex-wives Ella Rice and Jean Peters.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "A further $156 million was endowed to a gas station owner, Melvin Dummar, who told reporters that in 1967, he found a disheveled and dirty man lying along U.S. Route 95, just 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas. The man asked for a ride to Vegas. Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said the man told him that he was Hughes. Dummar later claimed that days after Hughes's death a \"mysterious man\" appeared at his gas station, leaving an envelope containing the will on his desk. Unsure if the will was genuine and unsure of what to do, Dummar left the will at the LDS Church office. In 1978, a Nevada court ruled the Mormon Will a forgery and officially declared that Hughes had died intestate (without a valid will). Dummar's story was later adapted into Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard in 1980.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Hughes's $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 among 22 cousins, including William Lummis, who serves as a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5.2 billion. The court rejected suits by the states of California and Texas that claimed they were owed inheritance tax.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "In 1984, Hughes's estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed she and Hughes had secretly married on a yacht in international waters off Mexico in 1949 and never divorced. Moore never produced proof of a marriage, but her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a bestseller.",
"title": "Last years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The moving image collection of Howard Hughes is held at the Academy Film Archive. The collection consists of over 200 items including 35mm and 16mm elements of feature films, documentaries, and television programs made or accumulated by Hughes.",
"title": "Archive"
}
]
| Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness. As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often controversial films such as The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), and Scarface (1932). He later acquired the RKO Pictures film studio in 1948, recognized then as one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age, although the production company struggled under his control and ultimately ceased operations in 1957. Through his interest in aviation and aerospace travel, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, hiring numerous engineers, designers, and defense contractors. He spent the rest of the 1930s and much of the 1940s setting multiple world air speed records and building the Hughes H-1 Racer (1935) and the gigantic H-4 Hercules, the largest flying boat in history with the longest wingspan of any aircraft from the time it was built until 2019. He acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines and later acquired Air West, renaming it Hughes Airwest. Hughes won the Harmon Trophy on two occasions, the Collier Trophy (1938), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1939) all for his achievements in aviation throughout the 1930s. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973 and was included in Flying magazine's 2013 list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation, ranked at No. 25. During his final years, Hughes extended his financial empire to include several major businesses in Las Vegas, such as real estate, hotels, casinos, and media outlets. Known at the time as one of the most powerful men in the state of Nevada, he is largely credited with transforming Vegas into a more refined cosmopolitan city. After years of mental and physical decline, Hughes died of kidney failure in 1976. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Howard Hughes Corporation. | 2001-11-02T00:17:20Z | 2023-12-31T05:31:33Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes |
14,062 | Hook of Holland | Hook of Holland (Dutch: Hoek van Holland, pronounced [ˈɦuk fɑn ˈɦɔlɑnt] ) is a town in the southwestern corner of Holland, hence the name; hoek means "corner" and was the word in use before the word kaap – "cape", from Portuguese cabo – became Dutch. The English translation using Hook is a false cognate of the Dutch Hoek, but has become commonplace (in official government records in English, the name tends not to get translated and Hoek van Holland is used). It is located at the mouth of the New Waterway shipping canal into the North Sea. The town is administered as a district of the municipality of Rotterdam. Its district covers an area of 16.7 km, of which 13.92 km is land. On 1 January 1999 it had an estimated population of 9,400.
Towns near "the Hook" (Dutch: "de Hoek") include Monster, 's-Gravenzande, Naaldwijk and Delft to the northeast, and Maassluis to the southeast. On the other side of the river is the Europort and the Maasvlakte. The wide sandy beach, one section of which is designated for use by naturists, runs for approximately 18 kilometres to Scheveningen and for most of this distance is backed by extensive sand dunes through which there are foot and cycle paths. On the north side of the New Waterway, to the west of the town, is a pier, part of which is accessible to pedestrians and cyclists.
The Berghaven is a small harbour on the New Waterway where the Rotterdam and Europort pilots are based. This small harbour is only for the use of the pilot service, government vessels and the Hook of Holland lifeboat.
The Hook of Holland area was created as a sandbar in the Maas estuary, when it became more and more silted after St. Elizabeth's flood of 1421. All kinds of plans were designed to improve the shipping channel to Rotterdam. In 1863 it was finally decided to construct the New Waterway which was dug between 1866 and 1868. The route ran through the Hook of Holland, where a primitive settlement, Old Hook (Oude Hoek - nowadays the Zuidelijk Strandcentrum), was created. Many workers and senior employees of the Rijkswaterstaat settled in Old Hook.
The Hook initially fell under the administrative authority of 's-Gravenzande. An attempt by the inhabitants to transform the place into an independent municipality failed and, on 1 January 1914, Hook of Holland was added to Rotterdam. After the First World War the village started to develop into a seaside resort. It has since been informally known as 'Rotterdam by the sea'.
During World War II, the Hook was one of the most important places for the Wehrmacht to hold because of its harbour, which comprised an important and strategic part of the Atlantic Wall. The German Army installed three 11" guns (removed from the damaged battleship Gneisenau) as shore batteries to protect the port area from invasion.
Hook of Holland already had a ward council in 1947 and has been a borough since 1973. In 2014, it was replaced by an "area committee".
The kindertransport, with which Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia could be brought to England from December 1938 until the outbreak of the World War II, usually went from the children's home stations to the Netherlands by train. The crossing to Harwich then largely took place from Hoek of Holland. The transports were supported by the Dutch government and by volunteers. The first transport, which started on December 1, 1938, at the Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, reached England on December 2, 1938. When the transport was allowed, the British government stipulated that the children could not be older than seventeen and that their parents could not come along. The Nazis stipulated, among other things, that the children at the railway station were not allowed to say goodbye to those left behind. By the time the war broke out in 1939, approximately 10,000 children had been brought to Britain in this way.
The Schiedam–Hoek van Holland railway was a 24-kilometre train service branch line from Schiedam Centrum station via Vlaardingen and Maassluis. The final two stations on the line were located within the town. Hoek van Holland Haven, the penultimate station, was close to the town centre, adjacent to the ferry terminal and the small harbour, the Berghaven. Hoek van Holland Strand, the terminus, is closest to the beach. The railway line opened for service in 1893 and was electrified in 1935. International trains ran from Berlin and Moscow to connected these with London via the ferry service. From 1928 to 1939 and from 1962 to 1979, Hook of Holland was the northern terminus of the Rheingold Express to Frankfurt and Geneva. Services on the line to Rotterdam Centraal station were operated by NS every half-hour during the day until April 2017, when the line was closed.
It was than converted to a metro/lightrail system. It was reopened in September 2019, as an extension of the Rotterdam Metro / lightrail. The metro/ligthrail service from Hook of Holland terminates at the beach, stops at the redeveloped Hoek van Holland Haven metro station where it connects to the Stena Line ferry to Harwich. It connects to Dutch trains services at Schiedam Centrum station, Rotterdam Blaak station and Rotterdam Alexander station and after changing to other metro lines at Beurs metro station to Rotterdam Centraal.
Hook of Holland is also the location of an international ferry terminal, from which service to eastern England has operated since 1893 except for the durations of the two World Wars. Currently, two routes are operated: one, a day-and-night freight and passenger service to Harwich, Essex, and the other, a night, freight-only service to North Killingholme Haven, Lincolnshire. The passenger ferry service is operated by Stena Line as part of the Dutchflyer rail-ferry service between Hook van Holland Haven station and Harwich International station in England, from which Greater Anglia provides service to Liverpool Street station in central London.
A local ferry operated by RET links the Hook with the Maasvlakte part of the Port of Rotterdam.
The A20 motorway begins approximately 10 kilometres east of Hook of Holland near Westerlee, heading east towards Rotterdam and Utrecht. It connects to the A4 heading north towards The Hague and Amsterdam 17 kilometres east of the town. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hook of Holland (Dutch: Hoek van Holland, pronounced [ˈɦuk fɑn ˈɦɔlɑnt] ) is a town in the southwestern corner of Holland, hence the name; hoek means \"corner\" and was the word in use before the word kaap – \"cape\", from Portuguese cabo – became Dutch. The English translation using Hook is a false cognate of the Dutch Hoek, but has become commonplace (in official government records in English, the name tends not to get translated and Hoek van Holland is used). It is located at the mouth of the New Waterway shipping canal into the North Sea. The town is administered as a district of the municipality of Rotterdam. Its district covers an area of 16.7 km, of which 13.92 km is land. On 1 January 1999 it had an estimated population of 9,400.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Towns near \"the Hook\" (Dutch: \"de Hoek\") include Monster, 's-Gravenzande, Naaldwijk and Delft to the northeast, and Maassluis to the southeast. On the other side of the river is the Europort and the Maasvlakte. The wide sandy beach, one section of which is designated for use by naturists, runs for approximately 18 kilometres to Scheveningen and for most of this distance is backed by extensive sand dunes through which there are foot and cycle paths. On the north side of the New Waterway, to the west of the town, is a pier, part of which is accessible to pedestrians and cyclists.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Berghaven is a small harbour on the New Waterway where the Rotterdam and Europort pilots are based. This small harbour is only for the use of the pilot service, government vessels and the Hook of Holland lifeboat.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Hook of Holland area was created as a sandbar in the Maas estuary, when it became more and more silted after St. Elizabeth's flood of 1421. All kinds of plans were designed to improve the shipping channel to Rotterdam. In 1863 it was finally decided to construct the New Waterway which was dug between 1866 and 1868. The route ran through the Hook of Holland, where a primitive settlement, Old Hook (Oude Hoek - nowadays the Zuidelijk Strandcentrum), was created. Many workers and senior employees of the Rijkswaterstaat settled in Old Hook.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hook initially fell under the administrative authority of 's-Gravenzande. An attempt by the inhabitants to transform the place into an independent municipality failed and, on 1 January 1914, Hook of Holland was added to Rotterdam. After the First World War the village started to develop into a seaside resort. It has since been informally known as 'Rotterdam by the sea'.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During World War II, the Hook was one of the most important places for the Wehrmacht to hold because of its harbour, which comprised an important and strategic part of the Atlantic Wall. The German Army installed three 11\" guns (removed from the damaged battleship Gneisenau) as shore batteries to protect the port area from invasion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hook of Holland already had a ward council in 1947 and has been a borough since 1973. In 2014, it was replaced by an \"area committee\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The kindertransport, with which Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia could be brought to England from December 1938 until the outbreak of the World War II, usually went from the children's home stations to the Netherlands by train. The crossing to Harwich then largely took place from Hoek of Holland. The transports were supported by the Dutch government and by volunteers. The first transport, which started on December 1, 1938, at the Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, reached England on December 2, 1938. When the transport was allowed, the British government stipulated that the children could not be older than seventeen and that their parents could not come along. The Nazis stipulated, among other things, that the children at the railway station were not allowed to say goodbye to those left behind. By the time the war broke out in 1939, approximately 10,000 children had been brought to Britain in this way.",
"title": "Kindertransport monument"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Schiedam–Hoek van Holland railway was a 24-kilometre train service branch line from Schiedam Centrum station via Vlaardingen and Maassluis. The final two stations on the line were located within the town. Hoek van Holland Haven, the penultimate station, was close to the town centre, adjacent to the ferry terminal and the small harbour, the Berghaven. Hoek van Holland Strand, the terminus, is closest to the beach. The railway line opened for service in 1893 and was electrified in 1935. International trains ran from Berlin and Moscow to connected these with London via the ferry service. From 1928 to 1939 and from 1962 to 1979, Hook of Holland was the northern terminus of the Rheingold Express to Frankfurt and Geneva. Services on the line to Rotterdam Centraal station were operated by NS every half-hour during the day until April 2017, when the line was closed.",
"title": "Transport links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "It was than converted to a metro/lightrail system. It was reopened in September 2019, as an extension of the Rotterdam Metro / lightrail. The metro/ligthrail service from Hook of Holland terminates at the beach, stops at the redeveloped Hoek van Holland Haven metro station where it connects to the Stena Line ferry to Harwich. It connects to Dutch trains services at Schiedam Centrum station, Rotterdam Blaak station and Rotterdam Alexander station and after changing to other metro lines at Beurs metro station to Rotterdam Centraal.",
"title": "Transport links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Hook of Holland is also the location of an international ferry terminal, from which service to eastern England has operated since 1893 except for the durations of the two World Wars. Currently, two routes are operated: one, a day-and-night freight and passenger service to Harwich, Essex, and the other, a night, freight-only service to North Killingholme Haven, Lincolnshire. The passenger ferry service is operated by Stena Line as part of the Dutchflyer rail-ferry service between Hook van Holland Haven station and Harwich International station in England, from which Greater Anglia provides service to Liverpool Street station in central London.",
"title": "Transport links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A local ferry operated by RET links the Hook with the Maasvlakte part of the Port of Rotterdam.",
"title": "Transport links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The A20 motorway begins approximately 10 kilometres east of Hook of Holland near Westerlee, heading east towards Rotterdam and Utrecht. It connects to the A4 heading north towards The Hague and Amsterdam 17 kilometres east of the town.",
"title": "Transport links"
}
]
| Hook of Holland is a town in the southwestern corner of Holland, hence the name; hoek means "corner" and was the word in use before the word kaap – "cape", from Portuguese cabo – became Dutch. The English translation using Hook is a false cognate of the Dutch Hoek, but has become commonplace. It is located at the mouth of the New Waterway shipping canal into the North Sea. The town is administered as a district of the municipality of Rotterdam. Its district covers an area of 16.7 km2, of which 13.92 km2 is land. On 1 January 1999 it had an estimated population of 9,400. Towns near "the Hook" include Monster, 's-Gravenzande, Naaldwijk and Delft to the northeast, and Maassluis to the southeast. On the other side of the river is the Europort and the Maasvlakte. The wide sandy beach, one section of which is designated for use by naturists, runs for approximately 18 kilometres to Scheveningen and for most of this distance is backed by extensive sand dunes through which there are foot and cycle paths. On the north side of the New Waterway, to the west of the town, is a pier, part of which is accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. The Berghaven is a small harbour on the New Waterway where the Rotterdam and Europort pilots are based. This small harbour is only for the use of the pilot service, government vessels and the Hook of Holland lifeboat. | 2001-11-03T00:10:58Z | 2023-12-28T14:16:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_of_Holland |
14,063 | Hugh Binning | Hugh Binning (1627–1653) was a Scottish philosopher and theologian. He was born in Scotland during the reign of Charles I and was ordained in the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. He died in 1653, during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth of England.
Hugh Binning was the son of John Binning of Dalvennan, Straiton, South Ayrshire. and Margaret M'Kell. Margaret was the daughter of Matthew McKell, who was a minister in the parish of Bothwell, Scotland, and sister of Hugh M'Kell, a minister in Edinburgh. Binning was born on his father's estate in Dalvennan. The family owned other lands in the parishes of Straiton and Colmonell as well as Maybole in Carrick.
A precocious child, Binning was admitted to the study of philosophy at the University of Glasgow at age thirteen. Binning has been described as "an extraordinary instance of precocious learning and genius."
In 1645, James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount of Stair, who was Hugh's master (primary professor) in the study of philosophy, announced he was retiring from the University of Glasgow. Dalrymple was afterward President of the Court of Session, and Viscount Stair. After a national search for a replacement on the faculty, three men were selected to compete for the position. Binning was one of those selected, but was at a disadvantage because of his extreme youth and because he was not of noble birth. However, he had strong support from the existing faculty, who suggested that the candidates speak extemporaneously on any topic of the candidate's choice. After hearing Hugh speak, the other candidates withdrew, making Hugh a regent and professor of philosophy, while he was still 18 years old.
On 7 February 1648, (at the age of 21) Hugh was appointed an Advocate before the Court of Sessions (an attorney). In the same year, he married Barbara Simpson (sometimes called Mary), daughter of James Simpson a minister in Ireland. Their son, John, was born in 1650.
Binning became a minister on 25 October 1649. As minister of Govan, he was the successor of William Wilkie. His ordination took place on the 8th of January 1649, when Mr David Dickson, one of the theological professors at the College of Glasgow, and author of Therapeutica Sacra, presided. He was ordained in January, at the age of 22, holding his regency until 14 May that year. At that time Govan was a separate town rather than part of Glasgow.
Hugh died around September 1653 and was buried in the churchyard of Govan, where Patrick Gillespie, then principal of the University of Glasgow, ordered a monument inscribed in Latin, roughly translated:
Here lies Mr. Hugh Binning, a man distinguished for his piety and eloquence, learned in philology, philosophy, and theology, a Prelate, faithful to the Gospel, and finally an excellent preacher. In the middle of a series of events, he was taken at the age of 26, in the year of our Lord 1653. Alive, he changed the society of his own land because he walked with God. And if you wish to make other inquires, the rest should keep silence, since neither you nor the marble can comprehend it.
Hugh's widow, Barbara (or Mary), then remarried James Gordon, an Anglican priest at Cumber in Ireland. Together they had a daughter,Jean who married Daniel MacKenzie, who was on the winning side of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge serving as an ensign under Lieutenant-Colonel William Ramsay (who became the third Earl of Dalhousie), in the Earl of Mar's Regiment of Foot.
Binning's son, John Binning, married Hanna Keir, who was born in Ireland. The Binnings were Covenanters, a resistance movement that objected to the return of Charles II (who was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed). They were on the losing side in the 1679 Battle of Bothwell Bridge. Most of the rebels who were not executed were exiled to the Americas; about 30 Covenanters were exiled to the Carolinas on the Carolina Merchant in 1684. After the battle, John and Hanna were separated.
In the aftermath of the battle at Bothwell Bridge, Hugh Binning's widow (now Barbara Gordon) tried to reclaim the family estate at Dalvennan by saying that John and his wife owed his stepfather a considerable some of money. The legal action was successful and Dalvennan became the possession of John's half-sister Jean, and her husband Daniel MacKenzie. In addition, Jean came into possession of Hanna Keir's property in Ireland.
By 1683, Jean was widowed. John Binning was branded a traitor, was sentenced to death and forfeited his property to the Crown. John's wife (Hanna Keir) was branded as a traitor and forfeited her property in Ireland. In 1685, Jean "donated" the Binning family's home at Dalvennan and other properties, along with the Keir properties, to Roderick MacKenzie, who was a Scottish advocate of James II (James VII of Scotland), and the baillie of Carrick. According to an act of the Scottish Parliament, Roderick MacKenzie was also very effective in "suppressing the rebellious, fanatical party in the western and other shires of this realm, and putting the laws to vigorous execution against them".
Since Bothwell Bridge, Hanna had been hiding from the authorities. In 1685, Hanna was in Edinburgh where she was found during a sweep for subversives and imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, a combination city hall and prison. Those arrested with Hanna were exiled to North America, however, she developed dysentery and remained behind. By 1687, near death, Hanna petitioned the Privy Council of Scotland for her release; she was exiled to her family in Ireland, where she died around 1692.
In 1690, the Scottish Parliament rescinded John's fines and forfeiture, but he was unable to recover his family's estates, the courts suggesting that he had relinquished his claim to Dalvennan in exchange for forgiveness of debt, rather than forfeiture.
There is little documentation about John after his wife's death. John received a small income from royalties on his father's works after parliament extended copyrights on Binning's writings to him. However, the income was not significant and John made several petitions to the Scottish parliament for money, the last occurring in 1717. It is thought that he died in Somerset county, in southwestern England.
He died of consumption at the age of 26 on September 1653. He was remarkably popular as a preacher, having been considered "the most accomplished philosopher and divine in his time, and styled the Scottish Cicero." He married (cont. 17 May 1650), Mary (who died at Paisley in 1694) and had a son, John of Dalvennan. She was the daughter of Richard Simson, minister of Sprouston. After John's early death Mary married her second husband, James Gordon, minister of Comber, in Ireland. A marble tablet, with an inscription in classical Latin, was erected to his memory by his friend Mr Patrick Gillespie, who was then Principal of the University of Glasgow. It has been placed in the vestibule of the present parish church. The whole of his works are posthumous publications.
He was a follower of James Dalrymple. In later life, he was well known as an evangelical Christian.
Hugh Binning was born two years after Charles I became monarch of England, Ireland, and Scotland. At the time, each was an independent country sharing the same monarch. The Acts of Union 1707 integrated Scotland and England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Acts of Union 1800 integrated Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
The period was dominated by both political and religious strife between the three independent countries. Religious disputes centered on questions such as whether religion was to be dictated by the monarch or was to be the choice of the people, and whether individuals had a direct relationship with God or needed to use an intermediary. Civil disputes centered on debates about the extent of the King's power (a question of the Divine right of kings), and specifically whether the King had the right to raise taxes and armed forces without the consent of the governed. These wars ultimately changed the relationship between king and subjects.
In 1638, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to remove bishops and the Book of Common Prayer that had been introduced by Charles I to impose the Anglican model on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Public riots followed, culminating in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, an interrelated series of conflicts that took place in the three countries. The first conflict, which was also the first of the Bishops' Wars, took place in 1639 and was a single border skirmish between England and Scotland, also known as the war the armys did not wanted to fight.
To maintain his English power base, Charles I made secret alliances with Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland to invade Anglican England, promising that each country could establish their own separate state religion. Once these secret entreaties became known to the English Long Parliament, the Congregationalist faction (of which Oliver Cromwell was a primary spokesman) took matters into its own hands and Parliament established an army separate from the King. Charles I was executed in January 1649, which led to the rule of Cromwell and the establishment of the Commonwealth. The conflicts concluded with The English Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II in 1660.
The Act of Classes was passed by the Parliament of Scotland on 23 January 1649; the act banned Royalists (people supporting the monarchy) from holding political or military office. In exile, Charles II signed the Treaty of Breda (1650) with the Scottish Parliament; among other things, the treaty established Presbyterianism as the national religion. Charles was crowned King of Scots at Scone in January 1651. By September 1651, Scotland was annexed by England, its legislative institutions abolished, Presbyterianism dis-established, and Charles was forced into exile in France.
The Scottish Parliament rescinded the Act of Classes in 1651, which produced a split within Scottish society. The sides of the conflict were called the Resolutioners (who supported the rescission of the act – supported the monarchy and the Scottish House of Stewart) and the Protesters (who supported Cromwell and the Commonwealth); Binning sided with the Protestors. Binning joined the Protesters in 1651. When Cromwell had sent troops to Scotland, he was also attempting to dis-establish Presbyterianism and the Church of Scotland, Binning spoke against Cromwell's act.
On Saturday 19 April 1651, Cromwell entered Glasgow and the next day he heard a sermon by three ministers who condemned him for invading Scotland. That evening, Cromwell summoned those ministers and others, to a debate on the issue. a discussion on some of the controverted points of the times was held in his presence, between his chaplains, the learned Dr John Owen, Joseph Caryl, and others on the one side, and some Scots ministers on the other. Mr. Binning, who was one of the disputants, apparently nonplussed the Independents, which led Cromwell to ask who the learned and bold young man was. Told it was Binning, he said: "He hath bound well, indeed," ... " but, laying his hand on his sword, this will lose all again." The late Mr. Orme was of the opinion that there is nothing improbable in the account of the meeting, but that such a meeting took place is certain. This appears from two letters which were written by Principal Robert Baillie, who was then Professor of Theology at the University of Glasgow.At the debate, Rev Hugh Binning is said to have out-debated Cromwell's ministers so completely that he silenced them.
Hugh Binning's political views were based on his theology. Binning was a Covenanter, a movement that began in Scotland at Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1638 with the National Covenant and continued with the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant—in effect a treaty between the English Long Parliament and Scotland for the preservation of the reformed religion in exchange for troops to confront the threat of Irish Catholic troops joining the Royalist army. Binning could also be described as a Protestor; both political positions were taken because of their religious implications. However, he saw the evils of the politics of his day was not a "fomenter of factions" writing "A Treatise of Christian Love" as a response.
Because of the tumultuous time in which Hugh Binning lived, politics and religion were inexorably intertwined. Binning was a Calvinist and follower of John Knox. As a profession, Binning was trained as a Philosopher, and he believed that philosophy was the servant of theology. He thought that both Philosophy and Theology should be taught in parallel. Binning's writing, which is primarily a collection of his sermons, "forms an important bridge between the 17th century, when philosophy in Scotland was heavily dominated by Calvinism, and the 18th century when figures such as Francis Hutcheson re-asserted a greater degree of independence between the two and allied philosophy with the developing human sciences."
Religiously, Hugh Binning was, what we would call today, an Evangelical Calvinist. He spoke on the primacy of God's love as the ground of salvation: "... our salvation is not the business of Christ alone, but the whole Godhead is interested in it deeply, so deeply that you cannot say who loves it most, or who likes it most. The Father is the very fountain of it, his love is the spring of all."
With regards to the extent of the 'atonement', Hugh Binning, did not hold that the offer of redemption applied only to the few that are elect but said that "the ultimate ground of faith is in the electing will of God." In Scotland, during the 1600s, the questions concerning atonement revolved around the terms in which the offer was expressed.
Binning believed that "forgiveness is based on Christ's death, understood as a satisfaction and as a sacrifice: 'If he had pardoned sin without any satisfaction what rich grace it had been! But truly, to provide the Lamb and sacrifice himself, to find out the ransom, and to exact it of his own Son, in our name, is a testimony of mercy and grace far beyond that. But then, his justice is very conspicuous in this work'."
All of the works of Hugh Binning were published posthumously and were primarily collections of his sermons. Of his speaking style, it was said: "There is originality without any affectation, a rich imagination, without anything fanciful or extravert, the utmost simplicity, without an thing mean or trifling."
(The Common Principles of the Christian Religion, fulltext) Quotations from the publication include:
Attribution: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hugh Binning (1627–1653) was a Scottish philosopher and theologian. He was born in Scotland during the reign of Charles I and was ordained in the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. He died in 1653, during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth of England.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hugh Binning was the son of John Binning of Dalvennan, Straiton, South Ayrshire. and Margaret M'Kell. Margaret was the daughter of Matthew McKell, who was a minister in the parish of Bothwell, Scotland, and sister of Hugh M'Kell, a minister in Edinburgh. Binning was born on his father's estate in Dalvennan. The family owned other lands in the parishes of Straiton and Colmonell as well as Maybole in Carrick.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A precocious child, Binning was admitted to the study of philosophy at the University of Glasgow at age thirteen. Binning has been described as \"an extraordinary instance of precocious learning and genius.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1645, James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount of Stair, who was Hugh's master (primary professor) in the study of philosophy, announced he was retiring from the University of Glasgow. Dalrymple was afterward President of the Court of Session, and Viscount Stair. After a national search for a replacement on the faculty, three men were selected to compete for the position. Binning was one of those selected, but was at a disadvantage because of his extreme youth and because he was not of noble birth. However, he had strong support from the existing faculty, who suggested that the candidates speak extemporaneously on any topic of the candidate's choice. After hearing Hugh speak, the other candidates withdrew, making Hugh a regent and professor of philosophy, while he was still 18 years old.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "On 7 February 1648, (at the age of 21) Hugh was appointed an Advocate before the Court of Sessions (an attorney). In the same year, he married Barbara Simpson (sometimes called Mary), daughter of James Simpson a minister in Ireland. Their son, John, was born in 1650.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Binning became a minister on 25 October 1649. As minister of Govan, he was the successor of William Wilkie. His ordination took place on the 8th of January 1649, when Mr David Dickson, one of the theological professors at the College of Glasgow, and author of Therapeutica Sacra, presided. He was ordained in January, at the age of 22, holding his regency until 14 May that year. At that time Govan was a separate town rather than part of Glasgow.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hugh died around September 1653 and was buried in the churchyard of Govan, where Patrick Gillespie, then principal of the University of Glasgow, ordered a monument inscribed in Latin, roughly translated:",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Here lies Mr. Hugh Binning, a man distinguished for his piety and eloquence, learned in philology, philosophy, and theology, a Prelate, faithful to the Gospel, and finally an excellent preacher. In the middle of a series of events, he was taken at the age of 26, in the year of our Lord 1653. Alive, he changed the society of his own land because he walked with God. And if you wish to make other inquires, the rest should keep silence, since neither you nor the marble can comprehend it.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hugh's widow, Barbara (or Mary), then remarried James Gordon, an Anglican priest at Cumber in Ireland. Together they had a daughter,Jean who married Daniel MacKenzie, who was on the winning side of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge serving as an ensign under Lieutenant-Colonel William Ramsay (who became the third Earl of Dalhousie), in the Earl of Mar's Regiment of Foot.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Binning's son, John Binning, married Hanna Keir, who was born in Ireland. The Binnings were Covenanters, a resistance movement that objected to the return of Charles II (who was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed). They were on the losing side in the 1679 Battle of Bothwell Bridge. Most of the rebels who were not executed were exiled to the Americas; about 30 Covenanters were exiled to the Carolinas on the Carolina Merchant in 1684. After the battle, John and Hanna were separated.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the aftermath of the battle at Bothwell Bridge, Hugh Binning's widow (now Barbara Gordon) tried to reclaim the family estate at Dalvennan by saying that John and his wife owed his stepfather a considerable some of money. The legal action was successful and Dalvennan became the possession of John's half-sister Jean, and her husband Daniel MacKenzie. In addition, Jean came into possession of Hanna Keir's property in Ireland.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "By 1683, Jean was widowed. John Binning was branded a traitor, was sentenced to death and forfeited his property to the Crown. John's wife (Hanna Keir) was branded as a traitor and forfeited her property in Ireland. In 1685, Jean \"donated\" the Binning family's home at Dalvennan and other properties, along with the Keir properties, to Roderick MacKenzie, who was a Scottish advocate of James II (James VII of Scotland), and the baillie of Carrick. According to an act of the Scottish Parliament, Roderick MacKenzie was also very effective in \"suppressing the rebellious, fanatical party in the western and other shires of this realm, and putting the laws to vigorous execution against them\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Since Bothwell Bridge, Hanna had been hiding from the authorities. In 1685, Hanna was in Edinburgh where she was found during a sweep for subversives and imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, a combination city hall and prison. Those arrested with Hanna were exiled to North America, however, she developed dysentery and remained behind. By 1687, near death, Hanna petitioned the Privy Council of Scotland for her release; she was exiled to her family in Ireland, where she died around 1692.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1690, the Scottish Parliament rescinded John's fines and forfeiture, but he was unable to recover his family's estates, the courts suggesting that he had relinquished his claim to Dalvennan in exchange for forgiveness of debt, rather than forfeiture.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "There is little documentation about John after his wife's death. John received a small income from royalties on his father's works after parliament extended copyrights on Binning's writings to him. However, the income was not significant and John made several petitions to the Scottish parliament for money, the last occurring in 1717. It is thought that he died in Somerset county, in southwestern England.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "He died of consumption at the age of 26 on September 1653. He was remarkably popular as a preacher, having been considered \"the most accomplished philosopher and divine in his time, and styled the Scottish Cicero.\" He married (cont. 17 May 1650), Mary (who died at Paisley in 1694) and had a son, John of Dalvennan. She was the daughter of Richard Simson, minister of Sprouston. After John's early death Mary married her second husband, James Gordon, minister of Comber, in Ireland. A marble tablet, with an inscription in classical Latin, was erected to his memory by his friend Mr Patrick Gillespie, who was then Principal of the University of Glasgow. It has been placed in the vestibule of the present parish church. The whole of his works are posthumous publications.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "He was a follower of James Dalrymple. In later life, he was well known as an evangelical Christian.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Hugh Binning was born two years after Charles I became monarch of England, Ireland, and Scotland. At the time, each was an independent country sharing the same monarch. The Acts of Union 1707 integrated Scotland and England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Acts of Union 1800 integrated Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The period was dominated by both political and religious strife between the three independent countries. Religious disputes centered on questions such as whether religion was to be dictated by the monarch or was to be the choice of the people, and whether individuals had a direct relationship with God or needed to use an intermediary. Civil disputes centered on debates about the extent of the King's power (a question of the Divine right of kings), and specifically whether the King had the right to raise taxes and armed forces without the consent of the governed. These wars ultimately changed the relationship between king and subjects.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1638, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to remove bishops and the Book of Common Prayer that had been introduced by Charles I to impose the Anglican model on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Public riots followed, culminating in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, an interrelated series of conflicts that took place in the three countries. The first conflict, which was also the first of the Bishops' Wars, took place in 1639 and was a single border skirmish between England and Scotland, also known as the war the armys did not wanted to fight.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "To maintain his English power base, Charles I made secret alliances with Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland to invade Anglican England, promising that each country could establish their own separate state religion. Once these secret entreaties became known to the English Long Parliament, the Congregationalist faction (of which Oliver Cromwell was a primary spokesman) took matters into its own hands and Parliament established an army separate from the King. Charles I was executed in January 1649, which led to the rule of Cromwell and the establishment of the Commonwealth. The conflicts concluded with The English Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II in 1660.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Act of Classes was passed by the Parliament of Scotland on 23 January 1649; the act banned Royalists (people supporting the monarchy) from holding political or military office. In exile, Charles II signed the Treaty of Breda (1650) with the Scottish Parliament; among other things, the treaty established Presbyterianism as the national religion. Charles was crowned King of Scots at Scone in January 1651. By September 1651, Scotland was annexed by England, its legislative institutions abolished, Presbyterianism dis-established, and Charles was forced into exile in France.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Scottish Parliament rescinded the Act of Classes in 1651, which produced a split within Scottish society. The sides of the conflict were called the Resolutioners (who supported the rescission of the act – supported the monarchy and the Scottish House of Stewart) and the Protesters (who supported Cromwell and the Commonwealth); Binning sided with the Protestors. Binning joined the Protesters in 1651. When Cromwell had sent troops to Scotland, he was also attempting to dis-establish Presbyterianism and the Church of Scotland, Binning spoke against Cromwell's act.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "On Saturday 19 April 1651, Cromwell entered Glasgow and the next day he heard a sermon by three ministers who condemned him for invading Scotland. That evening, Cromwell summoned those ministers and others, to a debate on the issue. a discussion on some of the controverted points of the times was held in his presence, between his chaplains, the learned Dr John Owen, Joseph Caryl, and others on the one side, and some Scots ministers on the other. Mr. Binning, who was one of the disputants, apparently nonplussed the Independents, which led Cromwell to ask who the learned and bold young man was. Told it was Binning, he said: \"He hath bound well, indeed,\" ... \" but, laying his hand on his sword, this will lose all again.\" The late Mr. Orme was of the opinion that there is nothing improbable in the account of the meeting, but that such a meeting took place is certain. This appears from two letters which were written by Principal Robert Baillie, who was then Professor of Theology at the University of Glasgow.At the debate, Rev Hugh Binning is said to have out-debated Cromwell's ministers so completely that he silenced them.",
"title": "Impact of the Commonwealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Hugh Binning's political views were based on his theology. Binning was a Covenanter, a movement that began in Scotland at Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1638 with the National Covenant and continued with the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant—in effect a treaty between the English Long Parliament and Scotland for the preservation of the reformed religion in exchange for troops to confront the threat of Irish Catholic troops joining the Royalist army. Binning could also be described as a Protestor; both political positions were taken because of their religious implications. However, he saw the evils of the politics of his day was not a \"fomenter of factions\" writing \"A Treatise of Christian Love\" as a response.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Because of the tumultuous time in which Hugh Binning lived, politics and religion were inexorably intertwined. Binning was a Calvinist and follower of John Knox. As a profession, Binning was trained as a Philosopher, and he believed that philosophy was the servant of theology. He thought that both Philosophy and Theology should be taught in parallel. Binning's writing, which is primarily a collection of his sermons, \"forms an important bridge between the 17th century, when philosophy in Scotland was heavily dominated by Calvinism, and the 18th century when figures such as Francis Hutcheson re-asserted a greater degree of independence between the two and allied philosophy with the developing human sciences.\"",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Religiously, Hugh Binning was, what we would call today, an Evangelical Calvinist. He spoke on the primacy of God's love as the ground of salvation: \"... our salvation is not the business of Christ alone, but the whole Godhead is interested in it deeply, so deeply that you cannot say who loves it most, or who likes it most. The Father is the very fountain of it, his love is the spring of all.\"",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "With regards to the extent of the 'atonement', Hugh Binning, did not hold that the offer of redemption applied only to the few that are elect but said that \"the ultimate ground of faith is in the electing will of God.\" In Scotland, during the 1600s, the questions concerning atonement revolved around the terms in which the offer was expressed.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Binning believed that \"forgiveness is based on Christ's death, understood as a satisfaction and as a sacrifice: 'If he had pardoned sin without any satisfaction what rich grace it had been! But truly, to provide the Lamb and sacrifice himself, to find out the ransom, and to exact it of his own Son, in our name, is a testimony of mercy and grace far beyond that. But then, his justice is very conspicuous in this work'.\"",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "All of the works of Hugh Binning were published posthumously and were primarily collections of his sermons. Of his speaking style, it was said: \"There is originality without any affectation, a rich imagination, without anything fanciful or extravert, the utmost simplicity, without an thing mean or trifling.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "(The Common Principles of the Christian Religion, fulltext) Quotations from the publication include:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Attribution:",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Hugh Binning (1627–1653) was a Scottish philosopher and theologian. He was born in Scotland during the reign of Charles I and was ordained in the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. He died in 1653, during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth of England. | 2002-02-13T11:45:06Z | 2023-12-27T03:22:34Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Binning |
14,064 | Henry Home, Lord Kames | Henry Home, Lord Kames (1695–27 December 1782) was a Scottish writer, philosopher and judge who played a major role in Scotland's Agricultural Revolution. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was a founding member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and active in The Select Society. Home acted as patron to some of the most influential thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, writer James Boswell, philosopher William Cullen and naturalist John Walker.
Henry Home was born in 1695 at Kames House, between Eccles and Birgham in Berwickshire. Henry was the son of George Home of Kames, and was homeschooled by Mr Wingate, a private tutor, until the age of 16. In 1712, Home was apprenticed as a lawyer under a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, and was called to the Scottish bar as an advocate bar in 1724. He soon acquired reputation by a number of publications on the civil and Scottish law, and was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1752, he was "raised to the bench", thus acquiring the title of Lord Kames.
Kames held an interest in the development and production of linen in Scotland. Kames was one of the original proprietors of the British Linen Company, serving as a director of the company from 1754 to 1756. Kames was on the panel of judges in the Knight v. Wedderburn case which ruled that slavery was illegal in Scotland. In 1775, he lived in a townhouse in Canongate. The house was located the head of the street's east side, facing onto the Canongate.
He died of old age, aged 87, and is buried in the Home-Drummond plot at Kincardine-in-Menteith west of Blair Drummond.
Home wrote much about the importance of property to society. In his Essay Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities, written just after the Jacobite rising of 1745, he showed that the politics of Scotland were based not on loyalty to Kings, as the Jacobites had said, but on the royal land grants that lay at the base of feudalism, the system whereby the sovereign maintained "an immediate hold of the persons and property of his subjects".
In Historical Law Tracts Home described a four-stage model of social evolution that became "a way of organizing the history of Western civilization". The first stage was that of the hunter-gatherer, wherein families avoided each other as competitors for the same food. The second was that of the herder of domestic animals, which encouraged the formation of larger groups but did not result in what Home considered a true society. No laws were needed at these early stages except those given by the head of the family, clan, or tribe. Agriculture was the third stage, wherein new occupations such as "plowman, carpenter, blacksmith, stonemason" made "the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves", and a new complexity of relationships, rights, and obligations required laws and law enforcers. A fourth stage evolved with the development of market towns and seaports, "commercial society", bringing yet more laws and complexity but also providing more benefit. Lord Kames could see these stages within Scotland itself, with the pastoral Highlands, the agricultural Lowlands, the "polite" commercial towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the Western Isles a remaining culture of rude huts where fishermen and gatherers of seaweed eked out their subsistence living.
Home was a polygenist, he believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches of the History of Man, in 1774, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.
The above studies created the genre of the story of civilization and defined the fields of anthropology and sociology and therefore the modern study of history for two hundred years.
In the popular book Elements of Criticism (1762) Home interrogated the notion of fixed or arbitrary rules of literary composition, and endeavoured to establish a new theory based on the principles of human nature. The late eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental writing was associated with his notion that 'the genuine rules of criticism are all of them derived from the human heart. Prof Neil Rhodes has argued that Lord Kames played a significant role in the development of English as an academic discipline in the Scottish Universities.
He was married to Agatha Drummond of Blair Drummond. Their children included George Drummond-Home. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry Home, Lord Kames (1695–27 December 1782) was a Scottish writer, philosopher and judge who played a major role in Scotland's Agricultural Revolution. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was a founding member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and active in The Select Society. Home acted as patron to some of the most influential thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, writer James Boswell, philosopher William Cullen and naturalist John Walker.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Henry Home was born in 1695 at Kames House, between Eccles and Birgham in Berwickshire. Henry was the son of George Home of Kames, and was homeschooled by Mr Wingate, a private tutor, until the age of 16. In 1712, Home was apprenticed as a lawyer under a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, and was called to the Scottish bar as an advocate bar in 1724. He soon acquired reputation by a number of publications on the civil and Scottish law, and was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1752, he was \"raised to the bench\", thus acquiring the title of Lord Kames.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kames held an interest in the development and production of linen in Scotland. Kames was one of the original proprietors of the British Linen Company, serving as a director of the company from 1754 to 1756. Kames was on the panel of judges in the Knight v. Wedderburn case which ruled that slavery was illegal in Scotland. In 1775, he lived in a townhouse in Canongate. The house was located the head of the street's east side, facing onto the Canongate.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He died of old age, aged 87, and is buried in the Home-Drummond plot at Kincardine-in-Menteith west of Blair Drummond.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Home wrote much about the importance of property to society. In his Essay Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities, written just after the Jacobite rising of 1745, he showed that the politics of Scotland were based not on loyalty to Kings, as the Jacobites had said, but on the royal land grants that lay at the base of feudalism, the system whereby the sovereign maintained \"an immediate hold of the persons and property of his subjects\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In Historical Law Tracts Home described a four-stage model of social evolution that became \"a way of organizing the history of Western civilization\". The first stage was that of the hunter-gatherer, wherein families avoided each other as competitors for the same food. The second was that of the herder of domestic animals, which encouraged the formation of larger groups but did not result in what Home considered a true society. No laws were needed at these early stages except those given by the head of the family, clan, or tribe. Agriculture was the third stage, wherein new occupations such as \"plowman, carpenter, blacksmith, stonemason\" made \"the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves\", and a new complexity of relationships, rights, and obligations required laws and law enforcers. A fourth stage evolved with the development of market towns and seaports, \"commercial society\", bringing yet more laws and complexity but also providing more benefit. Lord Kames could see these stages within Scotland itself, with the pastoral Highlands, the agricultural Lowlands, the \"polite\" commercial towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the Western Isles a remaining culture of rude huts where fishermen and gatherers of seaweed eked out their subsistence living.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Home was a polygenist, he believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches of the History of Man, in 1774, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The above studies created the genre of the story of civilization and defined the fields of anthropology and sociology and therefore the modern study of history for two hundred years.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the popular book Elements of Criticism (1762) Home interrogated the notion of fixed or arbitrary rules of literary composition, and endeavoured to establish a new theory based on the principles of human nature. The late eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental writing was associated with his notion that 'the genuine rules of criticism are all of them derived from the human heart. Prof Neil Rhodes has argued that Lord Kames played a significant role in the development of English as an academic discipline in the Scottish Universities.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "He was married to Agatha Drummond of Blair Drummond. Their children included George Drummond-Home.",
"title": "Family"
}
]
| Henry Home, Lord Kames was a Scottish writer, philosopher and judge who played a major role in Scotland's Agricultural Revolution. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was a founding member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and active in The Select Society. Home acted as patron to some of the most influential thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, writer James Boswell, philosopher William Cullen and naturalist John Walker. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-09-27T19:07:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Home,_Lord_Kames |
14,065 | Harwich | Harwich /ˈhærɪtʃ/ is a town in Essex, England, and one of the Haven ports on the North Sea coast. It is in the Tendring district. Nearby places include Felixstowe to the north-east, Ipswich to the north-west, Colchester to the south-west and Clacton-on-Sea to the south. It is the northernmost coastal town in Essex.
Its position on the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell rivers, with its usefulness to mariners as the only safe anchorage between the Thames and the Humber, led to a long period of civil and military maritime significance. The town became a naval base in 1657 and was heavily fortified, with Harwich Redoubt, Beacon Hill Battery, and Bath Side Battery.
Harwich is the likely launch point of the Mayflower, which carried English Puritans to North America, and is the presumed birthplace of Mayflower captain Christopher Jones.
Harwich today is contiguous with Dovercourt and the two, along with Parkeston, are often referred to collectively as Harwich.
The town's name means "military settlement", from Old English here-wic.
The town received its charter in 1238, although there is evidence of earlier settlement – for example, a record of a chapel in 1177, and some indications of a possible Roman presence.
The town was the target of an abortive raid by French forces under Antonio Doria on 24 March 1339 during the Hundred Years' War.
Because of its strategic position, Harwich was the target for the invasion of Britain by William of Orange on 11 November 1688. However, unfavourable winds forced his fleet to sail into the English Channel instead and eventually land at Torbay. Due to the involvement of the Schomberg family in the invasion, Charles Louis Schomberg was made Marquess of Harwich.
Writer Daniel Defoe devotes a few pages to the town in A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. Visiting in 1722, he noted its formidable fort and harbour "of a vast extent". The town, he recounts, was also known for an unusual chalybeate spring rising on Beacon Hill (a promontory to the north-east of the town), which "petrified" clay, allowing it to be used to pave Harwich's streets and build its walls. The locals also claimed that "the same spring is said to turn wood into iron", but Defoe put this down to the presence of "copperas" in the water. Regarding the atmosphere of the town, he states: "Harwich is a town of hurry and business, not much of gaiety and pleasure; yet the inhabitants seem warm in their nests and some of them are very wealthy".
Harwich played an important part in the Napoleonic and more especially the two world wars. Of particular note:
1793-1815—Post Office Station for communication with Europe, one of embarkation and evacuation bases for expeditions to Holland in 1799, 1809 and 1813/14; base for capturing enemy privateers. The dockyard built many ships for the Navy, including HMS Conqueror which captured the French Admiral Villeneuve at the Battle of Trafalgar. The Redoubt and the now-demolished Ordnance Building date from that era.
1914-18—base for the Royal Navy's Harwich Force light cruisers and destroyers under Commodore Tyrwhitt, and for British submarines. In November 1918 the German U-boat fleet surrendered to the Royal Navy in the harbour.
1939-1945—one of main East Coast minesweeping and destroyer bases, at one period base for British and French submarines; assembled fleets for Dutch and Dunkirk evacuations and follow-up to D-Day; unusually, a target for Italian bombers during the Battle of Britain.
Harwich Dockyard was established as a Naval Dockyard in 1652. It ceased to operate as a Royal Dockyard in 1713 (though a Royal Navy presence was maintained until 1829). During the various wars with France and Holland, through to 1815, the dockyard was responsible for both building and repairing numerous warships. HMS Conqueror, a 74-gun ship completed in 1801, captured the French admiral Villeneuve at Trafalgar. The yard was then a semi-private concern, with the actual shipbuilding contracted to Joseph Graham, who was sometimes mayor of the town. During World War II parts of Harwich were again requisitioned for naval use and ships were based at HMS Badger; Badger was decommissioned in 1946, but the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service maintained a headquarters on the site until 1992.
In 1665, not long after the establishment of the Dockyard, a pair of lighthouses were set up on the Town Green to serve as leading lights for ships entering the harbour. Completely rebuilt in 1818, both towers are still standing (though they ceased functioning as lighthouses in 1863, when they were replaced by a new pair of lights at Dovercourt).
The Royal Navy no longer has a presence in Harwich but Harwich International Port at nearby Parkeston continues to offer regular ferry services to the Hook of Holland (Hoek van Holland) in the Netherlands. Mann Lines operates a roll-on roll-off ferry service from Harwich Navyard to Bremerhaven, Cuxhaven, Paldiski and Turku. Many operations of the Port of Felixstowe and of Trinity House, the lighthouse authority, are managed from Harwich.
The Mayflower railway line serves Harwich and there are three operational passenger stations: Harwich International, Dovercourt and Harwich Town. The line also allows freight trains to access the Port.
The port is famous for the phrase "Harwich for the Continent", seen on road signs and in London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) advertisements.
From 1924 to 1987 (with a break during the Second World War), a train ferry service operated between Harwich and Zeebrugge. The train ferry linkspan still exists today and the rails leading from the former goods yard of Harwich Town railway station are still in position across the road, although the line is blocked by the Trinity House buoy store.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its small size Harwich is highly regarded in terms of architectural heritage, and the whole of the older part of the town, excluding Navyard Wharf, is a conservation area.
The regular street plan with principal thoroughfares connected by numerous small alleys indicates the town's medieval origins, although many buildings of this period are hidden behind 18th century facades.
The extant medieval structures are largely private homes. The house featured in the image of Kings Head St to the left is unique in the town and is an example of a sailmaker's house, thought to have been built circa 1600. Notable public buildings include the parish church of St. Nicholas (1821) in a restrained Gothic style, with many original furnishings, including a somewhat altered organ in the west end gallery. There is also the Harwich Guildhall of 1769, the only Grade I listed building in Harwich.
The Pier Hotel of 1860 and the building that was the Great Eastern Hotel of 1864 can both been seen on the quayside, both reflecting the town's new importance to travellers following the arrival of the Great Eastern Main Line from Colchester in 1854. In 1923, The Great Eastern Hotel was closed by the newly formed LNER, as the Great Eastern Railway had opened a new hotel with the same name at the new passenger port at Parkeston Quay, causing a decline in numbers. The hotel became the Harwich Town Hall, which included the Magistrates Court and, following changes in local government, was sold and divided into apartments.
Also of interest are the High Lighthouse (1818), the unusual Treadwheel Crane (late 17th century), the Old Custom Houses on West Street, a number of Victorian shopfronts and the Electric Palace Cinema (1911), one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas to survive complete with its ornamental frontage and original projection room still intact and operational.
There is little notable building from the later parts of the 20th century, but major recent additions include the lifeboat station and two new structures for Trinity House. The Trinity House office building, next door to the Old Custom Houses, was completed in 2005. All three additions are influenced by the high-tech style.
A Harwich International Shanty Festival was set up in 2006 to organise and co-ordinate an annual sea shanty festival in October. Through concerts, 'singarounds', pub sessions, talks and workshops, the seafaring history and heritage of Harwich is celebrated by local people and international groups. This unique event for Essex attracts audiences countrywide and beyond. The festival is one of the biggest shanty festivals in the country.
Harwich has also historically hosted a number of notable inhabitants, linked with Harwich's maritime past.
Harwich is home to Harwich & Parkeston F.C.; Harwich and Dovercourt RFC; Harwich Rangers FC; Sunday Shrimpers; Harwich & Dovercourt Sailing Club; Harwich, Dovercourt & Parkeston Swimming Club; Harwich & Dovercourt Rugby Union Football Club; Harwich & Dovercourt Cricket Club; and Harwich Runners who with support from Harwich Swimming Club host the annual Harwich Triathlons. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harwich /ˈhærɪtʃ/ is a town in Essex, England, and one of the Haven ports on the North Sea coast. It is in the Tendring district. Nearby places include Felixstowe to the north-east, Ipswich to the north-west, Colchester to the south-west and Clacton-on-Sea to the south. It is the northernmost coastal town in Essex.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Its position on the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell rivers, with its usefulness to mariners as the only safe anchorage between the Thames and the Humber, led to a long period of civil and military maritime significance. The town became a naval base in 1657 and was heavily fortified, with Harwich Redoubt, Beacon Hill Battery, and Bath Side Battery.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Harwich is the likely launch point of the Mayflower, which carried English Puritans to North America, and is the presumed birthplace of Mayflower captain Christopher Jones.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Harwich today is contiguous with Dovercourt and the two, along with Parkeston, are often referred to collectively as Harwich.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The town's name means \"military settlement\", from Old English here-wic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The town received its charter in 1238, although there is evidence of earlier settlement – for example, a record of a chapel in 1177, and some indications of a possible Roman presence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The town was the target of an abortive raid by French forces under Antonio Doria on 24 March 1339 during the Hundred Years' War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Because of its strategic position, Harwich was the target for the invasion of Britain by William of Orange on 11 November 1688. However, unfavourable winds forced his fleet to sail into the English Channel instead and eventually land at Torbay. Due to the involvement of the Schomberg family in the invasion, Charles Louis Schomberg was made Marquess of Harwich.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Writer Daniel Defoe devotes a few pages to the town in A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. Visiting in 1722, he noted its formidable fort and harbour \"of a vast extent\". The town, he recounts, was also known for an unusual chalybeate spring rising on Beacon Hill (a promontory to the north-east of the town), which \"petrified\" clay, allowing it to be used to pave Harwich's streets and build its walls. The locals also claimed that \"the same spring is said to turn wood into iron\", but Defoe put this down to the presence of \"copperas\" in the water. Regarding the atmosphere of the town, he states: \"Harwich is a town of hurry and business, not much of gaiety and pleasure; yet the inhabitants seem warm in their nests and some of them are very wealthy\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Harwich played an important part in the Napoleonic and more especially the two world wars. Of particular note:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "1793-1815—Post Office Station for communication with Europe, one of embarkation and evacuation bases for expeditions to Holland in 1799, 1809 and 1813/14; base for capturing enemy privateers. The dockyard built many ships for the Navy, including HMS Conqueror which captured the French Admiral Villeneuve at the Battle of Trafalgar. The Redoubt and the now-demolished Ordnance Building date from that era.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "1914-18—base for the Royal Navy's Harwich Force light cruisers and destroyers under Commodore Tyrwhitt, and for British submarines. In November 1918 the German U-boat fleet surrendered to the Royal Navy in the harbour.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "1939-1945—one of main East Coast minesweeping and destroyer bases, at one period base for British and French submarines; assembled fleets for Dutch and Dunkirk evacuations and follow-up to D-Day; unusually, a target for Italian bombers during the Battle of Britain.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Harwich Dockyard was established as a Naval Dockyard in 1652. It ceased to operate as a Royal Dockyard in 1713 (though a Royal Navy presence was maintained until 1829). During the various wars with France and Holland, through to 1815, the dockyard was responsible for both building and repairing numerous warships. HMS Conqueror, a 74-gun ship completed in 1801, captured the French admiral Villeneuve at Trafalgar. The yard was then a semi-private concern, with the actual shipbuilding contracted to Joseph Graham, who was sometimes mayor of the town. During World War II parts of Harwich were again requisitioned for naval use and ships were based at HMS Badger; Badger was decommissioned in 1946, but the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service maintained a headquarters on the site until 1992.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1665, not long after the establishment of the Dockyard, a pair of lighthouses were set up on the Town Green to serve as leading lights for ships entering the harbour. Completely rebuilt in 1818, both towers are still standing (though they ceased functioning as lighthouses in 1863, when they were replaced by a new pair of lights at Dovercourt).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Royal Navy no longer has a presence in Harwich but Harwich International Port at nearby Parkeston continues to offer regular ferry services to the Hook of Holland (Hoek van Holland) in the Netherlands. Mann Lines operates a roll-on roll-off ferry service from Harwich Navyard to Bremerhaven, Cuxhaven, Paldiski and Turku. Many operations of the Port of Felixstowe and of Trinity House, the lighthouse authority, are managed from Harwich.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Mayflower railway line serves Harwich and there are three operational passenger stations: Harwich International, Dovercourt and Harwich Town. The line also allows freight trains to access the Port.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The port is famous for the phrase \"Harwich for the Continent\", seen on road signs and in London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) advertisements.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "From 1924 to 1987 (with a break during the Second World War), a train ferry service operated between Harwich and Zeebrugge. The train ferry linkspan still exists today and the rails leading from the former goods yard of Harwich Town railway station are still in position across the road, although the line is blocked by the Trinity House buoy store.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Despite, or perhaps because of, its small size Harwich is highly regarded in terms of architectural heritage, and the whole of the older part of the town, excluding Navyard Wharf, is a conservation area.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The regular street plan with principal thoroughfares connected by numerous small alleys indicates the town's medieval origins, although many buildings of this period are hidden behind 18th century facades.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The extant medieval structures are largely private homes. The house featured in the image of Kings Head St to the left is unique in the town and is an example of a sailmaker's house, thought to have been built circa 1600. Notable public buildings include the parish church of St. Nicholas (1821) in a restrained Gothic style, with many original furnishings, including a somewhat altered organ in the west end gallery. There is also the Harwich Guildhall of 1769, the only Grade I listed building in Harwich.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Pier Hotel of 1860 and the building that was the Great Eastern Hotel of 1864 can both been seen on the quayside, both reflecting the town's new importance to travellers following the arrival of the Great Eastern Main Line from Colchester in 1854. In 1923, The Great Eastern Hotel was closed by the newly formed LNER, as the Great Eastern Railway had opened a new hotel with the same name at the new passenger port at Parkeston Quay, causing a decline in numbers. The hotel became the Harwich Town Hall, which included the Magistrates Court and, following changes in local government, was sold and divided into apartments.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Also of interest are the High Lighthouse (1818), the unusual Treadwheel Crane (late 17th century), the Old Custom Houses on West Street, a number of Victorian shopfronts and the Electric Palace Cinema (1911), one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas to survive complete with its ornamental frontage and original projection room still intact and operational.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "There is little notable building from the later parts of the 20th century, but major recent additions include the lifeboat station and two new structures for Trinity House. The Trinity House office building, next door to the Old Custom Houses, was completed in 2005. All three additions are influenced by the high-tech style.",
"title": "Architecture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A Harwich International Shanty Festival was set up in 2006 to organise and co-ordinate an annual sea shanty festival in October. Through concerts, 'singarounds', pub sessions, talks and workshops, the seafaring history and heritage of Harwich is celebrated by local people and international groups. This unique event for Essex attracts audiences countrywide and beyond. The festival is one of the biggest shanty festivals in the country.",
"title": "International Shanty Festival"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Harwich has also historically hosted a number of notable inhabitants, linked with Harwich's maritime past.",
"title": "Notable residents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Harwich is home to Harwich & Parkeston F.C.; Harwich and Dovercourt RFC; Harwich Rangers FC; Sunday Shrimpers; Harwich & Dovercourt Sailing Club; Harwich, Dovercourt & Parkeston Swimming Club; Harwich & Dovercourt Rugby Union Football Club; Harwich & Dovercourt Cricket Club; and Harwich Runners who with support from Harwich Swimming Club host the annual Harwich Triathlons.",
"title": "Sport"
}
]
| Harwich is a town in Essex, England, and one of the Haven ports on the North Sea coast. It is in the Tendring district. Nearby places include Felixstowe to the north-east, Ipswich to the north-west, Colchester to the south-west and Clacton-on-Sea to the south. It is the northernmost coastal town in Essex. Its position on the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell rivers, with its usefulness to mariners as the only safe anchorage between the Thames and the Humber, led to a long period of civil and military maritime significance. The town became a naval base in 1657 and was heavily fortified, with Harwich Redoubt, Beacon Hill Battery, and Bath Side Battery. Harwich is the likely launch point of the Mayflower, which carried English Puritans to North America, and is the presumed birthplace of Mayflower captain Christopher Jones. Harwich today is contiguous with Dovercourt and the two, along with Parkeston, are often referred to collectively as Harwich. | 2001-11-03T12:25:57Z | 2023-09-04T17:58:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwich |
14,067 | Hendrick Avercamp | Hendrick Avercamp (January 27, 1585 (bapt.) – May 15, 1634 (buried)) was a Dutch painter during the Dutch Golden Age of painting. He was one of the earliest landscape painters of the 17th-century Dutch school, he specialized in painting the Netherlands in winter. His paintings are colorful and lively, with carefully crafted images of the people in the landscape. His works give a vivid depiction of sport and leisure in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century. Many of Avercamp's paintings feature people ice skating on frozen lakes.
Avercamp's work enjoyed great popularity and he sold his drawings, many of which were tinted with water-color, as finished pictures to be pasted into the albums of collectors. The Royal Collection has an outstanding collection of his works.
Avercamp was born in Amsterdam, where he studied with the Danish-born portrait painter Pieter Isaacsz (1569–1625), and perhaps also with David Vinckboons, who was a follower of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. In 1608 he moved from Amsterdam to Kampen in the province of Overijssel. Avercamp was mute and probably deaf, he was known as "de Stomme van Kampen" (the mute of Kampen). He also had a nephew Barent Avercamp (1621-1679) who was also a painter and who imitated Hendrick's style of painting. Avercamp lived his entire life through the Eighty Years' war, where the young Dutch Republic resisted in a war against the Spanish Habsburgs. He died in Kampen and was interred there in the Sint Nicolaaskerk.
Avercamp probably painted in his studio on the basis of sketches he had made in the winter. Avercamp was famous even from abroad for his winter landscapes. The passion for painting skating characters probably came from his childhood as he practiced skating with his parents. The last quarter of the 16th century, during which Avercamp was born, was one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age.
The Flemish painting tradition is mainly expressed in Avercamp's early work. This is consistent with the landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Avercamp painted landscapes with a high horizon and many figures who are working on something. Many of his paintings are narrative based, with many anecdotes. For instance, included in the painting Winter Landscape with Skaters are several prurient details: a couple making love, naked buttocks, and a peeing male.
Avercamp used the painting technique of aerial perspective. The depth is suggested by change of color in the distance. To the front objects are painted in richer colors, such as trees or a boat, while farther objects are lighter. This technique strengthens the impression of depth in the painting.
Sometimes Avercamp used paper frames, which were a cheap alternative to oil paintings. He first drew with pen and ink. This work was then covered with finishing paint. The contours of the drawing remained. Even with this technique, Avercamp could show the pale wintry colors and nuances of the ice. Avercamp has also painted cattle and seascapes. Later in his life drawing the atmosphere was also important in his work.
Avercamp produced about a hundred paintings. The bulk of his artwork can be seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. From November 20, 2009, to February 15, 2010, the Rijksmuseum presented an exhibition of his work entitled the "Little Ice Age". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hendrick Avercamp (January 27, 1585 (bapt.) – May 15, 1634 (buried)) was a Dutch painter during the Dutch Golden Age of painting. He was one of the earliest landscape painters of the 17th-century Dutch school, he specialized in painting the Netherlands in winter. His paintings are colorful and lively, with carefully crafted images of the people in the landscape. His works give a vivid depiction of sport and leisure in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century. Many of Avercamp's paintings feature people ice skating on frozen lakes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Avercamp's work enjoyed great popularity and he sold his drawings, many of which were tinted with water-color, as finished pictures to be pasted into the albums of collectors. The Royal Collection has an outstanding collection of his works.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Avercamp was born in Amsterdam, where he studied with the Danish-born portrait painter Pieter Isaacsz (1569–1625), and perhaps also with David Vinckboons, who was a follower of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. In 1608 he moved from Amsterdam to Kampen in the province of Overijssel. Avercamp was mute and probably deaf, he was known as \"de Stomme van Kampen\" (the mute of Kampen). He also had a nephew Barent Avercamp (1621-1679) who was also a painter and who imitated Hendrick's style of painting. Avercamp lived his entire life through the Eighty Years' war, where the young Dutch Republic resisted in a war against the Spanish Habsburgs. He died in Kampen and was interred there in the Sint Nicolaaskerk.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Avercamp probably painted in his studio on the basis of sketches he had made in the winter. Avercamp was famous even from abroad for his winter landscapes. The passion for painting skating characters probably came from his childhood as he practiced skating with his parents. The last quarter of the 16th century, during which Avercamp was born, was one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age.",
"title": "Artwork"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Flemish painting tradition is mainly expressed in Avercamp's early work. This is consistent with the landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Avercamp painted landscapes with a high horizon and many figures who are working on something. Many of his paintings are narrative based, with many anecdotes. For instance, included in the painting Winter Landscape with Skaters are several prurient details: a couple making love, naked buttocks, and a peeing male.",
"title": "Artwork"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Avercamp used the painting technique of aerial perspective. The depth is suggested by change of color in the distance. To the front objects are painted in richer colors, such as trees or a boat, while farther objects are lighter. This technique strengthens the impression of depth in the painting.",
"title": "Artwork"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Sometimes Avercamp used paper frames, which were a cheap alternative to oil paintings. He first drew with pen and ink. This work was then covered with finishing paint. The contours of the drawing remained. Even with this technique, Avercamp could show the pale wintry colors and nuances of the ice. Avercamp has also painted cattle and seascapes. Later in his life drawing the atmosphere was also important in his work.",
"title": "Artwork"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Avercamp produced about a hundred paintings. The bulk of his artwork can be seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. From November 20, 2009, to February 15, 2010, the Rijksmuseum presented an exhibition of his work entitled the \"Little Ice Age\".",
"title": "Artwork"
}
]
| Hendrick Avercamp was a Dutch painter during the Dutch Golden Age of painting. He was one of the earliest landscape painters of the 17th-century Dutch school, he specialized in painting the Netherlands in winter. His paintings are colorful and lively, with carefully crafted images of the people in the landscape. His works give a vivid depiction of sport and leisure in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century. Many of Avercamp's paintings feature people ice skating on frozen lakes. Avercamp's work enjoyed great popularity and he sold his drawings, many of which were tinted with water-color, as finished pictures to be pasted into the albums of collectors. The Royal Collection has an outstanding collection of his works. | 2001-11-03T20:13:51Z | 2023-08-09T14:27:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrick_Avercamp |
14,068 | Hans Baldung | Hans Baldung (1484 or 1485 – September 1545), called Hans Baldung Grien, (being an early nickname, because of his predilection for the colour green), was a painter, printer, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered the most gifted student of Albrecht Dürer and whose art belongs to both German Renaissance and Mannerism.
Throughout his lifetime, he developed a distinctive style, full of colour, expression and imagination. His talents were varied, and he produced a great and extensive variety of work including portraits, woodcuts, drawings, tapestries, altarpieces, and stained glass, often relying on allegories and mythological motifs.
Hans was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd (formerly Gmünd in Germany), a small free city of the Empire, part of the East Württemberg region in former Swabia, Germany, in the year 1484 or 1485. Baldung was the son of Johann Baldung, a university-educated jurist, who held the office of legal adviser to the bishop of Strasbourg (Albert of Bavaria) from 1492, and Margarethe Herlin, daughter of Arbogast Herlin. His uncle, Hieronymus Baldung, was a doctor in medicine, with a son, Pius Hieronymus, Hans' cousin, who taught law at Freiburg and became chancellor of Tyrol in 1527.
Hans was not propertyless, but with unknown occupation. He was the first male in his family not to attend university, but was one of the first German artists to come from an academic family.
Baldung's earliest training as an artist began around 1500 in the Upper Rhineland with an artist from Strasbourg. Beginning in 1503, during the "Wanderjahre" ("years of wandering") required of artists of the time, Baldung became an assistant in Albrecht Dürer's studio in Nuremberg, where he perfected his art between 1503 and 1507.
Here, he may have been given his nickname "Grien". This name is thought to have come foremost from a preference to the color green: he seems to have worn green clothing. He may also have been given this nickname to distinguish him from at least two other Hanses in Dürer's shop, Hans Schäufelin and Hans Suess von Kulmbach. He later included the name "Grien" in his monogram, and it has also been suggested that the name came from, or consciously echoed, "grienhals", a German word for witch—one of his signature themes.
Hans quickly picked up Dürer's influence and style, and they became friends. Baldung seems to have managed Dürer's workshop during the latter's second sojourn in Venice. In a later trip to the Netherlands in 1521 Dürer's account book records that he took with him and sold prints by Baldung. Near the end of his Nuremberg years, Grien oversaw the production by Dürer of stained glass, woodcuts and engravings, and therefore developed an affinity for these media and for the Nuremberg master's handing of them. On Dürer's death Baldung was sent a lock of his hair, which suggests a close friendship.
In 1509, when Baldung's time in Nuremberg was complete, he moved back to Strasbourg and became a citizen there. He became a celebrity of the town and received many important commissions. The following year, at age 26, he married Margarethe Herlin, a local merchant's daughter, with whom he had one child, Margarethe Baldungin. He also joined the guild "Zur Steltz", opened a workshop, and began signing his works with the HGB monogram that he used for the rest of his career.
His style became much more deliberately individual—a tendency art historians used to term "mannerist." He stayed in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1513–1516 where he made, among other things, the High altar of the Freiburg Münster [de].
Like Dürer and Cranach, Baldung supported the Protestant Reformation. He was present at the diet of Augsburg in 1518, and one of his woodcuts represents Luther in quasi-saintly guise, under the protection of (or being inspired by) the Holy Spirit, which hovers over him in the shape of a dove.
In addition to traditional religious subjects, Baldung was concerned during these years with the profane themes of the imminence of death and the relation between the sexes, as well as with scenes of sorcery and witchcraft. The number of Baldung's religious works diminished with the Protestant Reformation, which generally repudiated church art as either wasteful or idolatrous.
While Dürer had occasionally included images of witches in his work, Baldung was the first German artist to heavily incorporate witches and witchcraft and erotic themes into his artwork. His most characteristic works in this area are small in scale and mostly in the medium of drawing; these include a series of puzzling, often erotic allegories and mythological works executed in quill pen and ink and white body color on primed paper.
His fascination with witchcraft began early, in 1510 when he produced an important chiaroscuro woodcut known as The Witches' Sabbath, and lasted to the end of his career. Witches were also a local interest: Strasbourg's humanists studied witchcraft and its bishop was charged with finding and prosecuting witches.
Baldung's work depicting witches was produced in the first half of the 16th century, before witch hunting became a widespread cultural phenomenon in Europe. According to one view, Baldung's work did not represent widespread cultural beliefs at the time of creation but reflected largely individual choices.
On the other hand, Baldung may have taken inspiration from the humanism of the early 16th century. Baldung, through his family, stood closer to the leading humanist intellectuals of the day than any of his contemporaries and partook in this culture, producing not only many works depicting Strasbourg humanists and scenes from ancient art and literature, but also works reflecting their attitude, drawn in large part from classical poetry and satire, toward witches. To take one example, Baldung is believed to have alluded to the notion expressed in Latin and Greek literature that witches could control the weather in his 1523 oil painting Weather Witches, which showcases two attractive and naked witches in front of a stormy sky. As Gert von der Osten commented, "Baldung [treats] his witches humorously, an attitude that reflects the dominant viewpoint of the humanists in Strasbourg at this time who viewed witchcraft as 'lustig,' a matter that was more amusing than serious".
However, it has also proved difficult to distinguish between the satirical tone that some critics observe in Baldung's work and a more serious vilifying intent, just as it is for many other artists, including his rough contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. Baldung could also draw on a burgeoning literature on witchcraft, as well as on developing juridical and forensic strategies for witch-hunting. While Baldung never worked directly with any Reformation leaders to spread religious ideals through his artwork, even though he lived in fervently religious Strasbourg, he was a supporter of the movement, working on the high altar in the city of Münster, Germany.
Baldung also regularly incorporated scenes of witches flying in his art, a characteristic that had been contested centuries before his artwork came into being. Flying was inherently attributed to witches by those who believed in the myth of the Sabbath Flight; without their ability to fly, the myth fragmented. Baldung depicted this in works such as Witches Preparing for the Sabbath Flight (1514).
Baldung settled eventually in Strasbourg and then to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he executed what is held to be his masterpiece: an eleven-panel altarpiece for the Freiburg Cathedral, still intact today, depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin, including The Annunciation, The Visitation, The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt, The Crucifixion, Four Saints and The Donators. These depictions were a large part of the artist's greater body of work containing several renowned depictions of the Virgin.
The earliest pictures assigned to him by some are altar-pieces with the monogram H. B. interlaced, and the date of 1496, in the monastery chapel of Lichtenthal near Baden-Baden. The Martyrdom of St Sebastian and the Epiphany (now Berlin, 1507) was painted for the market-church of Halle in Saxony.
Baldung is well known as a portrait painter, known for his sharp characterization of his subjects. His works include historical pictures and portraits, such as Maximilian I and Charles V. At a later period he had sittings with Margrave Christopher of Baden, Ottilia his wife, and all their children, and the picture containing these portraits is still in the gallery at Karlsruhe.
While Dürer rigorously details his models, Baldung's style differs by focusing more on the personality of the represented character, an abstract conception of the model's state of mind.
His prints are more important than his paintings. Baldung's prints, though Düreresque, are very individual in style, and often in subject, showing little direct Italian influence. He worked mainly in woodcut, although he made six engravings, one very fine. He joined in the fashion for chiaroscuro woodcuts, adding a tone block to a woodcut of 1510. Most of his hundreds of woodcuts were commissioned for books, as was usual at the time; his "single-leaf" woodcuts (i.e. prints not for book illustration) are fewer than 100, though no two catalogues agree as to the exact number.
Unconventional as a draughtsman, his treatment of human form is often exaggerated and eccentric (hence his linkage, in the art historical literature, with European Mannerism), whilst his ornamental style—profuse, eclectic, and akin to the self-consciously "German" strain of contemporary limewood sculptors—is equally distinctive. Though Baldung has been commonly called the Correggio of the north, his compositions are a curious medley of glaring and heterogeneous colours, in which pure black is contrasted with pale yellow, dirty grey, impure red and glowing green. Flesh is a mere glaze under which the features are indicated by lines.
His works are notable for their individualistic departure from the Renaissance composure of his model, Dürer, for the wild and fantastic strength that some of them display, and for their remarkable themes. In the field of painting, his Eve, the Serpent and Death (National Gallery of Canada) shows his strengths well. There is special force in the Death and the Maiden panel of 1517 (Basel), in the Weather Witches (Frankfurt), in the monumental panels of Adam and Eve (Madrid), and in his many powerful portraits. Baldung's most sustained effort is the altarpiece of Freiburg, where the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Twelve Apostles, the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity and Flight into Egypt, and the Crucifixion, with portraits of donors, are executed with some of that fanciful power that Martin Schongauer bequeathed to the Swabian school.
One of his earliest works is a portrait of the emperor Maximilian, drawn in 1501 on a leaf of a sketch-book now in the print-room at Karlsruhe.
His bust of Margrave Philip in the Munich Gallery tells us that he was connected with the reigning family of Baden as early as 1514.
Attribution: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hans Baldung (1484 or 1485 – September 1545), called Hans Baldung Grien, (being an early nickname, because of his predilection for the colour green), was a painter, printer, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered the most gifted student of Albrecht Dürer and whose art belongs to both German Renaissance and Mannerism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Throughout his lifetime, he developed a distinctive style, full of colour, expression and imagination. His talents were varied, and he produced a great and extensive variety of work including portraits, woodcuts, drawings, tapestries, altarpieces, and stained glass, often relying on allegories and mythological motifs.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hans was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd (formerly Gmünd in Germany), a small free city of the Empire, part of the East Württemberg region in former Swabia, Germany, in the year 1484 or 1485. Baldung was the son of Johann Baldung, a university-educated jurist, who held the office of legal adviser to the bishop of Strasbourg (Albert of Bavaria) from 1492, and Margarethe Herlin, daughter of Arbogast Herlin. His uncle, Hieronymus Baldung, was a doctor in medicine, with a son, Pius Hieronymus, Hans' cousin, who taught law at Freiburg and became chancellor of Tyrol in 1527.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hans was not propertyless, but with unknown occupation. He was the first male in his family not to attend university, but was one of the first German artists to come from an academic family.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Baldung's earliest training as an artist began around 1500 in the Upper Rhineland with an artist from Strasbourg. Beginning in 1503, during the \"Wanderjahre\" (\"years of wandering\") required of artists of the time, Baldung became an assistant in Albrecht Dürer's studio in Nuremberg, where he perfected his art between 1503 and 1507.",
"title": "Life as a student of Dürer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Here, he may have been given his nickname \"Grien\". This name is thought to have come foremost from a preference to the color green: he seems to have worn green clothing. He may also have been given this nickname to distinguish him from at least two other Hanses in Dürer's shop, Hans Schäufelin and Hans Suess von Kulmbach. He later included the name \"Grien\" in his monogram, and it has also been suggested that the name came from, or consciously echoed, \"grienhals\", a German word for witch—one of his signature themes.",
"title": "Life as a student of Dürer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hans quickly picked up Dürer's influence and style, and they became friends. Baldung seems to have managed Dürer's workshop during the latter's second sojourn in Venice. In a later trip to the Netherlands in 1521 Dürer's account book records that he took with him and sold prints by Baldung. Near the end of his Nuremberg years, Grien oversaw the production by Dürer of stained glass, woodcuts and engravings, and therefore developed an affinity for these media and for the Nuremberg master's handing of them. On Dürer's death Baldung was sent a lock of his hair, which suggests a close friendship.",
"title": "Life as a student of Dürer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1509, when Baldung's time in Nuremberg was complete, he moved back to Strasbourg and became a citizen there. He became a celebrity of the town and received many important commissions. The following year, at age 26, he married Margarethe Herlin, a local merchant's daughter, with whom he had one child, Margarethe Baldungin. He also joined the guild \"Zur Steltz\", opened a workshop, and began signing his works with the HGB monogram that he used for the rest of his career.",
"title": "Strasbourg"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "His style became much more deliberately individual—a tendency art historians used to term \"mannerist.\" He stayed in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1513–1516 where he made, among other things, the High altar of the Freiburg Münster [de].",
"title": "Strasbourg"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Like Dürer and Cranach, Baldung supported the Protestant Reformation. He was present at the diet of Augsburg in 1518, and one of his woodcuts represents Luther in quasi-saintly guise, under the protection of (or being inspired by) the Holy Spirit, which hovers over him in the shape of a dove.",
"title": "Strasbourg"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In addition to traditional religious subjects, Baldung was concerned during these years with the profane themes of the imminence of death and the relation between the sexes, as well as with scenes of sorcery and witchcraft. The number of Baldung's religious works diminished with the Protestant Reformation, which generally repudiated church art as either wasteful or idolatrous.",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "While Dürer had occasionally included images of witches in his work, Baldung was the first German artist to heavily incorporate witches and witchcraft and erotic themes into his artwork. His most characteristic works in this area are small in scale and mostly in the medium of drawing; these include a series of puzzling, often erotic allegories and mythological works executed in quill pen and ink and white body color on primed paper.",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "His fascination with witchcraft began early, in 1510 when he produced an important chiaroscuro woodcut known as The Witches' Sabbath, and lasted to the end of his career. Witches were also a local interest: Strasbourg's humanists studied witchcraft and its bishop was charged with finding and prosecuting witches.",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Baldung's work depicting witches was produced in the first half of the 16th century, before witch hunting became a widespread cultural phenomenon in Europe. According to one view, Baldung's work did not represent widespread cultural beliefs at the time of creation but reflected largely individual choices.",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On the other hand, Baldung may have taken inspiration from the humanism of the early 16th century. Baldung, through his family, stood closer to the leading humanist intellectuals of the day than any of his contemporaries and partook in this culture, producing not only many works depicting Strasbourg humanists and scenes from ancient art and literature, but also works reflecting their attitude, drawn in large part from classical poetry and satire, toward witches. To take one example, Baldung is believed to have alluded to the notion expressed in Latin and Greek literature that witches could control the weather in his 1523 oil painting Weather Witches, which showcases two attractive and naked witches in front of a stormy sky. As Gert von der Osten commented, \"Baldung [treats] his witches humorously, an attitude that reflects the dominant viewpoint of the humanists in Strasbourg at this time who viewed witchcraft as 'lustig,' a matter that was more amusing than serious\".",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "However, it has also proved difficult to distinguish between the satirical tone that some critics observe in Baldung's work and a more serious vilifying intent, just as it is for many other artists, including his rough contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. Baldung could also draw on a burgeoning literature on witchcraft, as well as on developing juridical and forensic strategies for witch-hunting. While Baldung never worked directly with any Reformation leaders to spread religious ideals through his artwork, even though he lived in fervently religious Strasbourg, he was a supporter of the movement, working on the high altar in the city of Münster, Germany.",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Baldung also regularly incorporated scenes of witches flying in his art, a characteristic that had been contested centuries before his artwork came into being. Flying was inherently attributed to witches by those who believed in the myth of the Sabbath Flight; without their ability to fly, the myth fragmented. Baldung depicted this in works such as Witches Preparing for the Sabbath Flight (1514).",
"title": "Witchcraft and religious imagery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Baldung settled eventually in Strasbourg and then to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he executed what is held to be his masterpiece: an eleven-panel altarpiece for the Freiburg Cathedral, still intact today, depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin, including The Annunciation, The Visitation, The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt, The Crucifixion, Four Saints and The Donators. These depictions were a large part of the artist's greater body of work containing several renowned depictions of the Virgin.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The earliest pictures assigned to him by some are altar-pieces with the monogram H. B. interlaced, and the date of 1496, in the monastery chapel of Lichtenthal near Baden-Baden. The Martyrdom of St Sebastian and the Epiphany (now Berlin, 1507) was painted for the market-church of Halle in Saxony.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Baldung is well known as a portrait painter, known for his sharp characterization of his subjects. His works include historical pictures and portraits, such as Maximilian I and Charles V. At a later period he had sittings with Margrave Christopher of Baden, Ottilia his wife, and all their children, and the picture containing these portraits is still in the gallery at Karlsruhe.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "While Dürer rigorously details his models, Baldung's style differs by focusing more on the personality of the represented character, an abstract conception of the model's state of mind.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "His prints are more important than his paintings. Baldung's prints, though Düreresque, are very individual in style, and often in subject, showing little direct Italian influence. He worked mainly in woodcut, although he made six engravings, one very fine. He joined in the fashion for chiaroscuro woodcuts, adding a tone block to a woodcut of 1510. Most of his hundreds of woodcuts were commissioned for books, as was usual at the time; his \"single-leaf\" woodcuts (i.e. prints not for book illustration) are fewer than 100, though no two catalogues agree as to the exact number.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Unconventional as a draughtsman, his treatment of human form is often exaggerated and eccentric (hence his linkage, in the art historical literature, with European Mannerism), whilst his ornamental style—profuse, eclectic, and akin to the self-consciously \"German\" strain of contemporary limewood sculptors—is equally distinctive. Though Baldung has been commonly called the Correggio of the north, his compositions are a curious medley of glaring and heterogeneous colours, in which pure black is contrasted with pale yellow, dirty grey, impure red and glowing green. Flesh is a mere glaze under which the features are indicated by lines.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "His works are notable for their individualistic departure from the Renaissance composure of his model, Dürer, for the wild and fantastic strength that some of them display, and for their remarkable themes. In the field of painting, his Eve, the Serpent and Death (National Gallery of Canada) shows his strengths well. There is special force in the Death and the Maiden panel of 1517 (Basel), in the Weather Witches (Frankfurt), in the monumental panels of Adam and Eve (Madrid), and in his many powerful portraits. Baldung's most sustained effort is the altarpiece of Freiburg, where the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Twelve Apostles, the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity and Flight into Egypt, and the Crucifixion, with portraits of donors, are executed with some of that fanciful power that Martin Schongauer bequeathed to the Swabian school.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "One of his earliest works is a portrait of the emperor Maximilian, drawn in 1501 on a leaf of a sketch-book now in the print-room at Karlsruhe.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "His bust of Margrave Philip in the Munich Gallery tells us that he was connected with the reigning family of Baden as early as 1514.",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Attribution:",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Hans Baldung, called Hans Baldung Grien,, was a painter, printer, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered the most gifted student of Albrecht Dürer and whose art belongs to both German Renaissance and Mannerism. Throughout his lifetime, he developed a distinctive style, full of colour, expression and imagination. His talents were varied, and he produced a great and extensive variety of work including portraits, woodcuts, drawings, tapestries, altarpieces, and stained glass, often relying on allegories and mythological motifs. | 2001-11-03T20:16:05Z | 2023-12-05T00:16:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Baldung |
14,070 | Hammered dulcimer | The hammered dulcimer (also called the hammer dulcimer) is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. The hammered dulcimer is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings. The Graeco-Roman word dulcimer ("sweet song") derives from the Latin dulcis (sweet) and the Greek melos (song). The dulcimer, in which the strings are beaten with small hammers, originated from the psaltery, in which the strings are plucked.
Hammered dulcimers and other similar instruments are traditionally played in Iraq, India, Iran, Southwest Asia, China, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia, Central Europe (Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland (particularly Appenzell), Austria and Bavaria), the Balkans, Eastern Europe (Ukraine and Belarus), and Scandinavia. The instrument is also played in the United Kingdom (Wales, East Anglia, Northumbria), and the United States, where its traditional use in folk music saw a revival in the late 20th century.
A dulcimer usually has two bridges, a bass bridge near the right and a treble bridge on the left side. The bass bridge holds up bass strings, which are played to the left of the bridge. The treble strings can be played on either side of the treble bridge. In the usual construction, playing them on the left side gives a note a fifth higher than playing them on the right of the bridge.
The dulcimer comes in various sizes, identified by the number of strings that cross each of the bridges. A 15/14, for example, has 15 strings crossing the treble bridge and 14 crossing the bass bridge, and can span three octaves. The strings of a hammered dulcimer are usually found in pairs, two strings for each note (though some instruments have three or four strings per note). Each set of strings is tuned in unison and is called a course. As with a piano, the purpose of using multiple strings per course is to make the instrument louder, although as the courses are rarely in perfect unison, a chorus effect usually results like a mandolin. A hammered dulcimer, like an autoharp, harp, or piano, requires a tuning wrench for tuning, since the dulcimer's strings are wound around tuning pins with square heads. (Ordinarily, 5 mm "zither pins" are used, similar to, but smaller in diameter than piano tuning pins, which come in various sizes ranging upwards from "1/0" or 7 mm.)
The strings of the hammered dulcimer are often tuned according to a circle of fifths pattern. Typically, the lowest note (often a G or D) is struck at the lower right-hand of the instrument, just to the left of the right-hand (bass) bridge. As a player strikes the courses above in sequence, they ascend following a repeating sequence of two whole steps and a half step. With this tuning, a diatonic scale is broken into two tetrachords, or groups of four notes. For example, on an instrument with D as the lowest note, the D major scale is played starting in the lower-right corner and ascending the bass bridge: D – E – F♯ – G. This is the lower tetrachord of the D major scale. At this point the player returns to the bottom of the instrument and shifts to the treble strings to the right of the treble bridge to play the higher tetrachord: A – B – C♯ – D. The player can continue up the scale on the right side of the treble bridge with E – F♯ – G – A – B, but the next note will be C, not C♯, so he or she must switch to the left side of the treble bridge (and closer to the player) to continue the D major scale. See the drawing on the left above, in which "DO" would correspond to D (see Movable do solfège).
The shift from the bass bridge to the treble bridge is required because the bass bridge's fourth string G is the start of the lower tetrachord of the G scale. The player could go on up a couple notes (G – A – B), but the next note will be a flatted seventh (C natural in this case), because this note is drawn from the G tetrachord. This D major scale with a flatted seventh is the mixolydian mode in D.
The same thing happens as the player goes up the treble bridge – after getting to La (B in this case), one has to go to the left of the treble bridge. Moving from the left side of the bass bridge to the right side of the treble bridge is analogous to moving from the right side of the treble bridge to the left side of the treble bridge.
The whole pattern can be shifted up by three courses, so that instead of a D-major scale one would have a G-major scale, and so on. This transposes one equally tempered scale to another. Shifting down three courses transposes the D-major scale to A-major, but of course the first Do-Re-Mi would be shifted off the instrument.
This tuning results in most, but not all, notes of the chromatic scale being available. To fill in the gaps, many modern dulcimer builders include extra short bridges at the top and bottom of the soundboard, where extra strings are tuned to some or all of the missing pitches. Such instruments are often called "chromatic dulcimers" as opposed to the more traditional "diatonic dulcimers".
The tetrachord markers found on the bridges of most hammered dulcimers in the English-speaking world were introduced by the American player and maker Sam Rizzetta in the 1960s.
In the Alps there are also chromatic dulcimers with crossed strings, which are in a whole tone distance in every row. This chromatic Salzburger hackbrett was developed in the mid 1930s from the diatonic hammered dulcimer by Tobi Reizer and his son along with Franz Peyer and Heinrich Bandzauner. In the postwar period it was one of the instruments taught in state-sponsored music schools.
Hammered dulcimers of non-European descent may have other tuning patterns, and builders of European-style dulcimers sometimes experiment with alternate tuning patterns.
The instrument is referred to as "hammered" in reference to the small mallets (referred to as hammers) that players use to strike the strings. Hammers are usually made of wood (most likely hardwoods such as maple, cherry, padauk, oak, walnut, or any other hardwood), but can also be made from any material, including metal and plastic. In the Western hemisphere, hammers are usually stiff, but in Asia, flexible hammers are often used. The head of the hammer can be left bare for a sharp attack sound, or can be covered with adhesive tape, leather, or fabric for a softer sound. Two-sided hammers are also available. The heads of two sided hammers are usually oval or round. Most of the time, one side is left as bare wood while the other side may be covered in leather or a softer material such as piano felt.
Several traditional players have used hammers that differ substantially from those in common use today. Paul Van Arsdale (1920–2018), a player from upstate New York, used flexible hammers made from hacksaw blades, with leather-covered wooden blocks attached to the ends (these were modeled after the hammers used by his grandfather, Jesse Martin). The Irish player John Rea (1915–1983) used hammers made of thick steel wire, which he made himself from old bicycle spokes wrapped with wool. Billy Bennington (1900–1986), a player from Norfolk, England, used cane hammers bound with wool.
The hammered dulcimer was extensively used during the Middle Ages in England, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. Although it had a distinctive name in each country, it was everywhere regarded as a kind of psalterium. The importance of the method of setting the strings in vibration by means of hammers, and its bearing on the acoustics of the instrument, were recognized only when the invention of the pianoforte had become a matter of history. It was then perceived that the psalterium (in which the strings were plucked) and the dulcimer (in which they were struck), when provided with keyboards would give rise to two distinct families of instruments, differing essentially in tone quality, in technique and in capabilities. The evolution of the psalterium resulted in the harpsichord; that of the dulcimer produced the pianoforte.
Versions of the hammered dulcimer, each of which has its own distinct manner of construction and playing style, are used throughout the world:
(རྒྱུད་མང་, literally "many strings") | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The hammered dulcimer (also called the hammer dulcimer) is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. The hammered dulcimer is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings. The Graeco-Roman word dulcimer (\"sweet song\") derives from the Latin dulcis (sweet) and the Greek melos (song). The dulcimer, in which the strings are beaten with small hammers, originated from the psaltery, in which the strings are plucked.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hammered dulcimers and other similar instruments are traditionally played in Iraq, India, Iran, Southwest Asia, China, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia, Central Europe (Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland (particularly Appenzell), Austria and Bavaria), the Balkans, Eastern Europe (Ukraine and Belarus), and Scandinavia. The instrument is also played in the United Kingdom (Wales, East Anglia, Northumbria), and the United States, where its traditional use in folk music saw a revival in the late 20th century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A dulcimer usually has two bridges, a bass bridge near the right and a treble bridge on the left side. The bass bridge holds up bass strings, which are played to the left of the bridge. The treble strings can be played on either side of the treble bridge. In the usual construction, playing them on the left side gives a note a fifth higher than playing them on the right of the bridge.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The dulcimer comes in various sizes, identified by the number of strings that cross each of the bridges. A 15/14, for example, has 15 strings crossing the treble bridge and 14 crossing the bass bridge, and can span three octaves. The strings of a hammered dulcimer are usually found in pairs, two strings for each note (though some instruments have three or four strings per note). Each set of strings is tuned in unison and is called a course. As with a piano, the purpose of using multiple strings per course is to make the instrument louder, although as the courses are rarely in perfect unison, a chorus effect usually results like a mandolin. A hammered dulcimer, like an autoharp, harp, or piano, requires a tuning wrench for tuning, since the dulcimer's strings are wound around tuning pins with square heads. (Ordinarily, 5 mm \"zither pins\" are used, similar to, but smaller in diameter than piano tuning pins, which come in various sizes ranging upwards from \"1/0\" or 7 mm.)",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The strings of the hammered dulcimer are often tuned according to a circle of fifths pattern. Typically, the lowest note (often a G or D) is struck at the lower right-hand of the instrument, just to the left of the right-hand (bass) bridge. As a player strikes the courses above in sequence, they ascend following a repeating sequence of two whole steps and a half step. With this tuning, a diatonic scale is broken into two tetrachords, or groups of four notes. For example, on an instrument with D as the lowest note, the D major scale is played starting in the lower-right corner and ascending the bass bridge: D – E – F♯ – G. This is the lower tetrachord of the D major scale. At this point the player returns to the bottom of the instrument and shifts to the treble strings to the right of the treble bridge to play the higher tetrachord: A – B – C♯ – D. The player can continue up the scale on the right side of the treble bridge with E – F♯ – G – A – B, but the next note will be C, not C♯, so he or she must switch to the left side of the treble bridge (and closer to the player) to continue the D major scale. See the drawing on the left above, in which \"DO\" would correspond to D (see Movable do solfège).",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The shift from the bass bridge to the treble bridge is required because the bass bridge's fourth string G is the start of the lower tetrachord of the G scale. The player could go on up a couple notes (G – A – B), but the next note will be a flatted seventh (C natural in this case), because this note is drawn from the G tetrachord. This D major scale with a flatted seventh is the mixolydian mode in D.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The same thing happens as the player goes up the treble bridge – after getting to La (B in this case), one has to go to the left of the treble bridge. Moving from the left side of the bass bridge to the right side of the treble bridge is analogous to moving from the right side of the treble bridge to the left side of the treble bridge.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The whole pattern can be shifted up by three courses, so that instead of a D-major scale one would have a G-major scale, and so on. This transposes one equally tempered scale to another. Shifting down three courses transposes the D-major scale to A-major, but of course the first Do-Re-Mi would be shifted off the instrument.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "This tuning results in most, but not all, notes of the chromatic scale being available. To fill in the gaps, many modern dulcimer builders include extra short bridges at the top and bottom of the soundboard, where extra strings are tuned to some or all of the missing pitches. Such instruments are often called \"chromatic dulcimers\" as opposed to the more traditional \"diatonic dulcimers\".",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The tetrachord markers found on the bridges of most hammered dulcimers in the English-speaking world were introduced by the American player and maker Sam Rizzetta in the 1960s.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the Alps there are also chromatic dulcimers with crossed strings, which are in a whole tone distance in every row. This chromatic Salzburger hackbrett was developed in the mid 1930s from the diatonic hammered dulcimer by Tobi Reizer and his son along with Franz Peyer and Heinrich Bandzauner. In the postwar period it was one of the instruments taught in state-sponsored music schools.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hammered dulcimers of non-European descent may have other tuning patterns, and builders of European-style dulcimers sometimes experiment with alternate tuning patterns.",
"title": "Strings and tuning"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The instrument is referred to as \"hammered\" in reference to the small mallets (referred to as hammers) that players use to strike the strings. Hammers are usually made of wood (most likely hardwoods such as maple, cherry, padauk, oak, walnut, or any other hardwood), but can also be made from any material, including metal and plastic. In the Western hemisphere, hammers are usually stiff, but in Asia, flexible hammers are often used. The head of the hammer can be left bare for a sharp attack sound, or can be covered with adhesive tape, leather, or fabric for a softer sound. Two-sided hammers are also available. The heads of two sided hammers are usually oval or round. Most of the time, one side is left as bare wood while the other side may be covered in leather or a softer material such as piano felt.",
"title": "Hammers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Several traditional players have used hammers that differ substantially from those in common use today. Paul Van Arsdale (1920–2018), a player from upstate New York, used flexible hammers made from hacksaw blades, with leather-covered wooden blocks attached to the ends (these were modeled after the hammers used by his grandfather, Jesse Martin). The Irish player John Rea (1915–1983) used hammers made of thick steel wire, which he made himself from old bicycle spokes wrapped with wool. Billy Bennington (1900–1986), a player from Norfolk, England, used cane hammers bound with wool.",
"title": "Hammers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The hammered dulcimer was extensively used during the Middle Ages in England, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. Although it had a distinctive name in each country, it was everywhere regarded as a kind of psalterium. The importance of the method of setting the strings in vibration by means of hammers, and its bearing on the acoustics of the instrument, were recognized only when the invention of the pianoforte had become a matter of history. It was then perceived that the psalterium (in which the strings were plucked) and the dulcimer (in which they were struck), when provided with keyboards would give rise to two distinct families of instruments, differing essentially in tone quality, in technique and in capabilities. The evolution of the psalterium resulted in the harpsichord; that of the dulcimer produced the pianoforte.",
"title": "Variants and adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Versions of the hammered dulcimer, each of which has its own distinct manner of construction and playing style, are used throughout the world:",
"title": "Around the world"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "(རྒྱུད་མང་, literally \"many strings\")",
"title": "Around the world"
}
]
| The hammered dulcimer is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. The hammered dulcimer is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings. The Graeco-Roman word dulcimer derives from the Latin dulcis (sweet) and the Greek melos (song). The dulcimer, in which the strings are beaten with small hammers, originated from the psaltery, in which the strings are plucked. Hammered dulcimers and other similar instruments are traditionally played in Iraq, India, Iran, Southwest Asia, China, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia, Central Europe, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. The instrument is also played in the United Kingdom, and the United States, where its traditional use in folk music saw a revival in the late 20th century. | 2001-11-04T03:27:10Z | 2023-11-27T16:46:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammered_dulcimer |
14,071 | Humanae vitae | Humanae vitae (Latin, meaning 'Of Human Life') is an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI and dated 25 July 1968. The text was issued at a Vatican press conference on 29 July. Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirmed the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding married love, responsible parenthood, and the rejection of artificial contraception. In formulating his teaching he explained why he did not accept the conclusions of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control established by his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, a commission he himself had expanded.
Mainly because of its restatement of the Church's opposition to artificial contraception, the encyclical was politically controversial. It affirmed traditional Church moral teaching on the sanctity of life and the procreative and unitive nature of conjugal relations.
It was the last of Paul's seven encyclicals.
In this encyclical Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic Church's view of marriage and marital relations and a continued condemnation of "artificial" birth control. Referencing two Papal committees and numerous independent experts examining new developments in artificial birth control, Paul VI built on the teachings of his predecessors, especially Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXIII, all of whom had insisted on the divine obligations of the marital partners in light of their partnership with God the creator.
Paul VI himself, even as commission members issued their personal views over the years, always reaffirmed the teachings of the Church, repeating them more than once in the first years of his Pontificate.
To Pope Paul VI, marital relations were much more than a union of two people. In his view, they constitute a union of the loving couple with a loving God, in which the two persons generate the matter for the body, while God creates the unique soul of a person. For this reason, Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae vitae, that the "transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator." This is divine partnership, so Paul VI does not allow for arbitrary human decisions, which may limit divine providence. According to Paul VI, marital relations are a source of great joy, but also of difficulties and hardships. The question of human procreation with God, exceeds in the view of Paul VI specific disciplines such as biology, psychology, demography or sociology. According to Paul VI, married love takes its origin from God, who is love, and from this basic dignity, he defines his position:
Love is total – that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.
The encyclical opens with an assertion of the competency of the magisterium of the Catholic Church to decide questions of morality. It then goes on to observe that circumstances often dictate that married couples should limit the number of children, and that the sexual act between husband and wife is still worthy even if it can be foreseen not to result in procreation. Nevertheless, it is held that the sexual act must retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.
Every action specifically intended to prevent procreation is forbidden, except in medically necessary circumstances. Therapeutic means necessary to cure diseases are exempted, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result, but only if infertility is not directly intended. This is held to directly contradict the moral order which was established by God. Abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, is absolutely forbidden, as is sterilization, even if temporary. Therapeutic means which induce infertility are allowed (e.g., hysterectomy), if they are not specifically intended to cause infertility (e.g., the uterus is cancerous, so the preservation of life is intended). If there are well grounded reasons (arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances), natural family planning methods (abstaining from intercourse during certain parts of the menstrual cycle) are allowed, since they take advantage of a faculty provided by nature.
The acceptance of artificial methods of birth control is then claimed to result in several negative consequences, among them a general lowering of moral standards resulting from sex without consequences, and the danger that men may reduce women to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of [their] own desires; finally, abuse of power by public authorities, and a false sense of autonomy.
Public authorities should oppose laws which undermine natural law; scientists should further study effective methods of natural birth control; doctors should further familiarize themselves with this teaching, in order to be able to give advice to their patients, and priests must spell out clearly and completely the Church's teaching on marriage. The encyclical acknowledges that "perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching", but that "it comes as no surprise to the church that she, no less than her Divine founder is destined to be a sign of contradiction." Noted is the duty of proclaiming the entire moral law, "both natural and evangelical." The encyclical also points out that the Roman Catholic Church cannot "declare lawful what is in fact unlawful", because she is concerned with "safeguarding the holiness of marriage, in order to guide married life to its full human and Christian perfection." This is to be the priority for his fellow bishops and priests and lay people. Paul VI predicted that future progress in social cultural and economic spheres would make marital and family life more joyful, provided God's design for the world was faithfully followed. The encyclical closes with an appeal to observe the natural laws of the most high God. "These laws must be wisely and lovingly observed."
There had been a long-standing general Christian prohibition on contraception and abortion, with such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria and Saint Augustine condemning the practices. It was not until the 1930 Lambeth Conference that the Anglican Communion allowed for contraception in limited circumstances. Mainline Protestant denominations have since removed prohibitions against artificial contraception. In a partial reaction, Pope Pius XI wrote the encyclical Casti connubii (On Christian Marriage) in 1930, reaffirming the Catholic Church's belief in various traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality, including the prohibition of artificial birth control even within marriage. Casti connubii is against contraception and regarding natural family planning allowed married couples to use their nuptial rights "in the proper manner" when because of either time or defects, new life could not be brought forth.
With the appearance of the first oral contraceptives in 1960, dissenters in the Church argued for a reconsideration of the Church positions. In 1963 Pope John XXIII established a commission of six European non-theologians to study questions of birth control and population. It met once in 1963 and twice in 1964. As Vatican Council II was concluding, Pope Paul VI enlarged it to fifty-eight members, including married couples, laywomen, theologians and bishops. The last document issued by the council (Gaudium et spes) contained a section titled "Fostering the Nobility of Marriage" (1965, nos. 47–52), which discussed marriage from the personalist point of view. The "duty of responsible parenthood" was affirmed, but the determination of licit and illicit forms of regulating birth was reserved to Pope Paul VI. In the spring of 1966, following the close of the council, the commission held its fifth and final meeting, having been enlarged again to include sixteen bishops as an executive committee. The commission was only consultative but it submitted a report approved by a majority of 64 members to Paul VI. It proposed he approve of artificial contraception without distinction of the various means. A minority of four members opposed this report and issued a parallel report to the Pope. Arguments in the minority report, against change in the church's teaching, were that a loosening of contraception restrictions would mean the Catholic Church would "have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930" (when Casti connubii was promulgated), and that "it should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error."
After two more years of study and consultation, the pope issued Humanae vitae, which removed any doubt that the Church views hormonal anti-ovulants as contraceptive. He explained why he did not accept the opinion of the majority report of the commission (1968, #6). Arguments were raised in the decades that followed that his decision has never passed the condition of "reception" to become church doctrine.
In his role as Theologian of the Pontifical Household, Mario Luigi Ciappi advised Pope Paul VI during the drafting of Humanae vitae. Ciappi, a doctoral graduate of the Pontificium Athenaeum Internationale Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum, served as professor of dogmatic theology there and was Dean of the Angelicum's Faculty of Theology from 1935 to 1955.
According to George Weigel, Paul VI named Archbishop Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) to the commission, but Polish government authorities would not permit him to travel to Rome. Wojtyła had earlier defended the church's position from a philosophical standpoint in his 1960 book Love and Responsibility. Wojtyła's position was strongly considered and it was reflected in the final draft of the encyclical, although much of his language and arguments were not incorporated. Weigel attributes much of the poor reception of the encyclical to the omission of many of Wojtyła's arguments.
In 2017, anticipating the 50th anniversary of the encyclical, four theologians led by Mgr. Gilfredo Marengo, a professor of theological anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, launched a research project he called "a work of historical-critical investigation without any aim other than reconstructing as well as possible the whole process of composing the encyclical". Using the resources of the Vatican Secret Archives and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, they hope to detail the writing process and the interaction between the commission, publicity surrounding the commission's work, and Paul's own authorship.
13. Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one's partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. "Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact," Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. "From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God."
15. [...] the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result therefrom — provided such impediment is not directly intended.
16. [...] If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.
18. It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that it, no less than its divine Founder, is destined to be a "sign of contradiction." The Church does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on it of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical. Since the Church did not make either of these laws, it cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for the Church to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man. In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that it is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. The Church urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way it defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in its regard for men whom it strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage "to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men".
23. We are fully aware of the difficulties confronting the public authorities in this matter, especially in the developing countries. In fact, We had in mind the justifiable anxieties which weigh upon them when We published Our encyclical letter Populorum Progressio. But now We join Our voice to that of Our predecessor John XXIII of venerable memory, and We make Our own his words: "No statement of the problem and no solution to it is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity; those who propose such solutions base them on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values." No one can, without being grossly unfair, make divine Providence responsible for what clearly seems to be the result of misguided governmental policies, of an insufficient sense of social justice, of a selfish accumulation of material goods, and finally of a culpable failure to undertake those initiatives and responsibilities which would raise the standard of living of peoples and their children.
Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, a moderator of the ecumenical council, questioned, "whether moral theology took sufficient account of scientific progress, which can help determine, what is according to nature. I beg you my brothers let us avoid another Galileo affair. One is enough for the Church." In an interview in Informations Catholiques Internationales on 15 May 1969, he criticized the Pope's decision again as frustrating the collegiality defined by the council, calling it a non-collegial or even an anti-collegial act. He was supported by Vatican II theologians such as Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, several Episcopal conferences, e.g. the Episcopal Conference of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as several bishops, including Christopher Butler, who called it one of the most important contributions to contemporary discussion in the Church.
The publication of the encyclical marks the first time in the twentieth century that open dissent from the laity about teachings of the Church was voiced widely and publicly. The teaching has been criticized by development organizations and others who claim that it limits the methods available to fight worldwide population growth and struggle against HIV/AIDS. Within two days of the encyclical's release, a group of dissident theologians, led by Rev. Charles Curran, then of The Catholic University of America, issued a statement stating, "spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the value and sacredness of marriage."
Two months later, the controversial "Winnipeg Statement" issued by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that those who cannot accept the teaching should not be considered shut off from the Catholic Church, and that individuals can in good conscience use contraception as long as they have first made an honest attempt to accept the difficult directives of the encyclical.
The Dutch Catechism of 1966, based on the Dutch bishops' interpretation of the just completed Vatican Council, and the first post-Council comprehensive Catholic catechism, noted the lack of mention of artificial contraception in the Council. "As everyone can ascertain nowadays, there are several methods of regulating births. The Second Vatican Council did not speak of any of these concrete methods [...] This is a different standpoint than that taken under Pius XI some thirty years ago which was also maintained by his successor [...] we can sense here a clear development in the Church, a development, which is also going on outside the Church."
In the Soviet Union, Literaturnaja Gazeta, a publication of Soviet intellectuals, included an editorial and statement by Russian physicians against the encyclical.
Ecumenical reactions were mixed. Liberal and Moderate Lutherans and the World Council of Churches were disappointed. Eugene Carson Blake criticised the concepts of nature and natural law, which, in his view, still dominated Catholic theology, as outdated. This concern dominated several articles in Catholic and non-Catholic journals at the time. Patriarch Athenagoras I stated his full agreement with Pope Paul VI: "He could not have spoken in any other way."
In Latin America, much support developed for the Pope and his encyclical. As World Bank President Robert McNamara declared at the 1968 Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group that countries permitting birth control practices will get preferential access to resources, doctors in La Paz, Bolivia, called it insulting that money should be exchanged for the conscience of a Catholic nation. In Colombia, Cardinal Aníbal Muñoz Duque declared, "if American conditionality undermines Papal teachings, we prefer not to receive one cent". The Senate of Bolivia passed a resolution, stating that Humanae vitae can be discussed in its implications on individual consciences, but is of greatest significance because it defends the rights of developing nations to determine their own population policies. The Jesuit Journal Sic dedicated one edition to the encyclical with supportive contributions. However, against eighteen insubordinate priests, professors of theology at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and the ensuing conspiracy of silence practiced by the Chilean Episcopate, which had to be censured by the Nuncio in Santiago at the behest of Cardinal Gabriel-Marie Garrone, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, triggering eventually a media conflict with El Diario Ilustrado [es], Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira expressed his affliction with the lamentations of Jeremiah: "O ye all that pass through the way…" (Lamentations 1:12, King James Bible).
In the book "Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem. On the risk of faith.", well-known liberal Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini accused Paul VI of deliberately concealing the truth, leaving it to theologians and pastors to fix things by adapting precepts to practice: "I knew Paul VI well. With the encyclical, he wanted to express consideration for human life. He explained his intention to some of his friends by using a comparison: although one must not lie, sometimes it is not possible to do otherwise; it may be necessary to conceal the truth, or it may be unavoidable to tell a lie. It is up to the moralists to explain where sin begins, especially in the cases in which there is a higher duty than the transmission of life."
Pope Paul VI was troubled by the encyclical's reception in the West. Acknowledging the controversy, Paul VI in a letter to the Congress of German Catholics (30 August 1968), stated: "May the lively debate aroused by our encyclical lead to a better knowledge of God's will." In March 1969, he had a meeting with one of the main critics of Humanae vitae, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens. Paul heard him out and said merely, "Yes, pray for me; because of my weaknesses, the Church is badly governed." To jog the memory of his critics, he also put in their minds the experience of no less a figure than Peter: "[n]ow I understand St Peter: he came to Rome twice, the second time to be crucified", – herewith directing their attention to his rejoicing in glorifying the Lord. Increasingly convinced, that "the smoke of Satan entered the temple of God from some fissure", Paul VI reaffirmed, on 23 June 1978, weeks before his death, in an address to the College of Cardinals, his Humanae vitae: "following the confirmations of serious science", and which sought to affirm the principle of respect for the laws of nature and of "a conscious and ethically responsible paternity".
In his last letter to Pope Paul VI, Christian mystic and canonized saint Padre Pio called Humanae vitae "clear and decisive words".
Polls have shown that many self-identified Catholics use artificial means of contraception, and that very few use natural family planning. However, John L. Allen Jr. wrote in 2008: "Three decades of bishops' appointments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both unambiguously committed to Humanae Vitae, mean that senior leaders in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. Some Catholic bishops have brought out documents of their own defending Humanae Vitae." Developments in fertility awareness since the 1960s have also given rise to natural family planning organizations such as the Billings Ovulation Method, Couple to Couple League and the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, which actively provide formal instruction on the use and reliability of natural methods of birth control.
Albino Luciani's views on Humanae vitae have been debated. Journalist John L. Allen Jr. claims that "it's virtually certain that John Paul I would not have reversed Paul VI's teaching, particularly since he was no doctrinal radical. Moreover, as Patriarch in Venice some had seen a hardening of his stance on social issues as the years went by." According to Allen, "it is reasonable to assume that John Paul I would not have insisted upon the negative judgment in Humanae Vitae as aggressively and publicly as John Paul II did, and probably would not have treated it as a quasi-infallible teaching. It would have remained a more 'open' question". Other sources take a different view and note that during his time as Patriarch of Venice that "Luciani was intransigent with his upholding of the teaching of the Church and severe with those, through intellectual pride and disobedience paid no attention to the Church's prohibition of contraception", though while not condoning the sin, he was tolerant of those who sincerely tried and failed to live up to the Church's teaching. Raymond and Lauretta's book The Smiling Pope, The Life & Teaching of John Paul I states that "if some people think that his compassion and gentleness in this respect implies he was against Humanae Vitae one can only infer it was wishful thinking on their part and an attempt to find an ally in favor of artificial contraception."
After he became pope in 1978, John Paul II continued on the Catholic Theology of the Body of his predecessors with a series of lectures, entitled Theology of the Body, in which he talked about an "original unity between man and women", purity of heart (on the Sermon on the Mount), marriage and celibacy and reflections on Humanae vitae, focusing largely on responsible parenthood and marital chastity.
In 1981, the Pope's Apostolic exhortation, Familiaris consortio, restated the Church's opposition to artificial birth control stated previously in Humanae vitae.
John Paul II readdressed some of the same issues in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor. He reaffirmed much of Humanae vitae, and specifically described the practice of artificial contraception as an act not permitted by Catholic teaching in any circumstances. The same encyclical also clarifies the use of conscience in arriving at moral decisions, including in the use of contraception. However, John Paul also said, "It is not right then to regard the moral conscience of the individual and the magisterium of the Church as two contenders, as two realities in conflict. The authority which the magisterium enjoys by the will of Christ exists so that the moral conscience can attain the truth with security and remain in it." John Paul quoted Humanae vitae as a compassionate encyclical, "Christ has come not to judge the world but to save it, and while he was uncompromisingly stern towards sin, he was patient and rich in mercy towards sinners".
Pope John Paul's 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae ('The Gospel of Life') affirmed the Church's position on contraception and multiple topics related to the culture of life.
On 12 May 2008, Benedict XVI accepted an invitation to talk to participants in the International Congress organized by the Pontifical Lateran University on the 40th anniversary of Humanae vitae. He put the encyclical in the broader view of love in a global context, a topic he called "so controversial, yet so crucial for humanity's future." Humanae vitae became "a sign of contradiction but also of continuity of the Church's doctrine and tradition... What was true yesterday is true also today." The Church continues to reflect "in an ever new and deeper way on the fundamental principles that concern marriage and procreation." The key message of Humanae vitae is love. Benedict states, that the fullness of a person is achieved by a unity of soul and body, but neither spirit nor body alone can love, only the two together. If this unity is broken, if only the body is satisfied, love becomes a commodity.
On 16 January 2015, Pope Francis said to a meeting with families in Manila, insisting on the need to protect the family: "The family is [...] threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life. I think of Blessed Paul VI. At a time when the problem of population growth was being raised, he had the courage to defend openness to life in families. He knew the difficulties that are there in every family, and so in his Encyclical he was very merciful towards particular cases, and he asked confessors to be very merciful and understanding in dealing with particular cases. But he also had a broader vision: he looked at the peoples of the earth and he saw this threat of the destruction of the family through the privation of children [original Spanish: destrucción de la familia por la privación de los hijos]. Paul VI was courageous; he was a good pastor and he warned his flock of the wolves who were coming."
A year before, on 1 May 2014, Pope Francis, in an interview given to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, expressed his opinion and praise for Humanae vitae: "Everything depends on how Humanae vitae is interpreted. Paul VI himself, in the end, urged confessors to be very merciful and pay attention to concrete situations. But his genius was prophetic, he had the courage to take a stand against the majority, to defend moral discipline, to exercise a cultural restraint, to oppose present and future neo-Malthusianism. The question is not of changing doctrine, but of digging deep and making sure that pastoral care takes into account situations and what it is possible for persons to do." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Humanae vitae (Latin, meaning 'Of Human Life') is an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI and dated 25 July 1968. The text was issued at a Vatican press conference on 29 July. Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirmed the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding married love, responsible parenthood, and the rejection of artificial contraception. In formulating his teaching he explained why he did not accept the conclusions of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control established by his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, a commission he himself had expanded.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Mainly because of its restatement of the Church's opposition to artificial contraception, the encyclical was politically controversial. It affirmed traditional Church moral teaching on the sanctity of life and the procreative and unitive nature of conjugal relations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "It was the last of Paul's seven encyclicals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In this encyclical Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic Church's view of marriage and marital relations and a continued condemnation of \"artificial\" birth control. Referencing two Papal committees and numerous independent experts examining new developments in artificial birth control, Paul VI built on the teachings of his predecessors, especially Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXIII, all of whom had insisted on the divine obligations of the marital partners in light of their partnership with God the creator.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Paul VI himself, even as commission members issued their personal views over the years, always reaffirmed the teachings of the Church, repeating them more than once in the first years of his Pontificate.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "To Pope Paul VI, marital relations were much more than a union of two people. In his view, they constitute a union of the loving couple with a loving God, in which the two persons generate the matter for the body, while God creates the unique soul of a person. For this reason, Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae vitae, that the \"transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator.\" This is divine partnership, so Paul VI does not allow for arbitrary human decisions, which may limit divine providence. According to Paul VI, marital relations are a source of great joy, but also of difficulties and hardships. The question of human procreation with God, exceeds in the view of Paul VI specific disciplines such as biology, psychology, demography or sociology. According to Paul VI, married love takes its origin from God, who is love, and from this basic dignity, he defines his position:",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Love is total – that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The encyclical opens with an assertion of the competency of the magisterium of the Catholic Church to decide questions of morality. It then goes on to observe that circumstances often dictate that married couples should limit the number of children, and that the sexual act between husband and wife is still worthy even if it can be foreseen not to result in procreation. Nevertheless, it is held that the sexual act must retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Every action specifically intended to prevent procreation is forbidden, except in medically necessary circumstances. Therapeutic means necessary to cure diseases are exempted, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result, but only if infertility is not directly intended. This is held to directly contradict the moral order which was established by God. Abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, is absolutely forbidden, as is sterilization, even if temporary. Therapeutic means which induce infertility are allowed (e.g., hysterectomy), if they are not specifically intended to cause infertility (e.g., the uterus is cancerous, so the preservation of life is intended). If there are well grounded reasons (arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances), natural family planning methods (abstaining from intercourse during certain parts of the menstrual cycle) are allowed, since they take advantage of a faculty provided by nature.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The acceptance of artificial methods of birth control is then claimed to result in several negative consequences, among them a general lowering of moral standards resulting from sex without consequences, and the danger that men may reduce women to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of [their] own desires; finally, abuse of power by public authorities, and a false sense of autonomy.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Public authorities should oppose laws which undermine natural law; scientists should further study effective methods of natural birth control; doctors should further familiarize themselves with this teaching, in order to be able to give advice to their patients, and priests must spell out clearly and completely the Church's teaching on marriage. The encyclical acknowledges that \"perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching\", but that \"it comes as no surprise to the church that she, no less than her Divine founder is destined to be a sign of contradiction.\" Noted is the duty of proclaiming the entire moral law, \"both natural and evangelical.\" The encyclical also points out that the Roman Catholic Church cannot \"declare lawful what is in fact unlawful\", because she is concerned with \"safeguarding the holiness of marriage, in order to guide married life to its full human and Christian perfection.\" This is to be the priority for his fellow bishops and priests and lay people. Paul VI predicted that future progress in social cultural and economic spheres would make marital and family life more joyful, provided God's design for the world was faithfully followed. The encyclical closes with an appeal to observe the natural laws of the most high God. \"These laws must be wisely and lovingly observed.\"",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "There had been a long-standing general Christian prohibition on contraception and abortion, with such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria and Saint Augustine condemning the practices. It was not until the 1930 Lambeth Conference that the Anglican Communion allowed for contraception in limited circumstances. Mainline Protestant denominations have since removed prohibitions against artificial contraception. In a partial reaction, Pope Pius XI wrote the encyclical Casti connubii (On Christian Marriage) in 1930, reaffirming the Catholic Church's belief in various traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality, including the prohibition of artificial birth control even within marriage. Casti connubii is against contraception and regarding natural family planning allowed married couples to use their nuptial rights \"in the proper manner\" when because of either time or defects, new life could not be brought forth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "With the appearance of the first oral contraceptives in 1960, dissenters in the Church argued for a reconsideration of the Church positions. In 1963 Pope John XXIII established a commission of six European non-theologians to study questions of birth control and population. It met once in 1963 and twice in 1964. As Vatican Council II was concluding, Pope Paul VI enlarged it to fifty-eight members, including married couples, laywomen, theologians and bishops. The last document issued by the council (Gaudium et spes) contained a section titled \"Fostering the Nobility of Marriage\" (1965, nos. 47–52), which discussed marriage from the personalist point of view. The \"duty of responsible parenthood\" was affirmed, but the determination of licit and illicit forms of regulating birth was reserved to Pope Paul VI. In the spring of 1966, following the close of the council, the commission held its fifth and final meeting, having been enlarged again to include sixteen bishops as an executive committee. The commission was only consultative but it submitted a report approved by a majority of 64 members to Paul VI. It proposed he approve of artificial contraception without distinction of the various means. A minority of four members opposed this report and issued a parallel report to the Pope. Arguments in the minority report, against change in the church's teaching, were that a loosening of contraception restrictions would mean the Catholic Church would \"have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930\" (when Casti connubii was promulgated), and that \"it should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After two more years of study and consultation, the pope issued Humanae vitae, which removed any doubt that the Church views hormonal anti-ovulants as contraceptive. He explained why he did not accept the opinion of the majority report of the commission (1968, #6). Arguments were raised in the decades that followed that his decision has never passed the condition of \"reception\" to become church doctrine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In his role as Theologian of the Pontifical Household, Mario Luigi Ciappi advised Pope Paul VI during the drafting of Humanae vitae. Ciappi, a doctoral graduate of the Pontificium Athenaeum Internationale Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum, served as professor of dogmatic theology there and was Dean of the Angelicum's Faculty of Theology from 1935 to 1955.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "According to George Weigel, Paul VI named Archbishop Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) to the commission, but Polish government authorities would not permit him to travel to Rome. Wojtyła had earlier defended the church's position from a philosophical standpoint in his 1960 book Love and Responsibility. Wojtyła's position was strongly considered and it was reflected in the final draft of the encyclical, although much of his language and arguments were not incorporated. Weigel attributes much of the poor reception of the encyclical to the omission of many of Wojtyła's arguments.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 2017, anticipating the 50th anniversary of the encyclical, four theologians led by Mgr. Gilfredo Marengo, a professor of theological anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, launched a research project he called \"a work of historical-critical investigation without any aim other than reconstructing as well as possible the whole process of composing the encyclical\". Using the resources of the Vatican Secret Archives and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, they hope to detail the writing process and the interaction between the commission, publicity surrounding the commission's work, and Paul's own authorship.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "13. Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one's partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. \"Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact,\" Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. \"From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God.\"",
"title": "Highlights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "15. [...] the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result therefrom — provided such impediment is not directly intended.",
"title": "Highlights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "16. [...] If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.",
"title": "Highlights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "18. It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that it, no less than its divine Founder, is destined to be a \"sign of contradiction.\" The Church does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on it of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical. Since the Church did not make either of these laws, it cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for the Church to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man. In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that it is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. The Church urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way it defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in its regard for men whom it strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage \"to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men\".",
"title": "Highlights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "23. We are fully aware of the difficulties confronting the public authorities in this matter, especially in the developing countries. In fact, We had in mind the justifiable anxieties which weigh upon them when We published Our encyclical letter Populorum Progressio. But now We join Our voice to that of Our predecessor John XXIII of venerable memory, and We make Our own his words: \"No statement of the problem and no solution to it is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity; those who propose such solutions base them on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values.\" No one can, without being grossly unfair, make divine Providence responsible for what clearly seems to be the result of misguided governmental policies, of an insufficient sense of social justice, of a selfish accumulation of material goods, and finally of a culpable failure to undertake those initiatives and responsibilities which would raise the standard of living of peoples and their children.",
"title": "Highlights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, a moderator of the ecumenical council, questioned, \"whether moral theology took sufficient account of scientific progress, which can help determine, what is according to nature. I beg you my brothers let us avoid another Galileo affair. One is enough for the Church.\" In an interview in Informations Catholiques Internationales on 15 May 1969, he criticized the Pope's decision again as frustrating the collegiality defined by the council, calling it a non-collegial or even an anti-collegial act. He was supported by Vatican II theologians such as Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, several Episcopal conferences, e.g. the Episcopal Conference of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as several bishops, including Christopher Butler, who called it one of the most important contributions to contemporary discussion in the Church.",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The publication of the encyclical marks the first time in the twentieth century that open dissent from the laity about teachings of the Church was voiced widely and publicly. The teaching has been criticized by development organizations and others who claim that it limits the methods available to fight worldwide population growth and struggle against HIV/AIDS. Within two days of the encyclical's release, a group of dissident theologians, led by Rev. Charles Curran, then of The Catholic University of America, issued a statement stating, \"spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the value and sacredness of marriage.\"",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Two months later, the controversial \"Winnipeg Statement\" issued by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that those who cannot accept the teaching should not be considered shut off from the Catholic Church, and that individuals can in good conscience use contraception as long as they have first made an honest attempt to accept the difficult directives of the encyclical.",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Dutch Catechism of 1966, based on the Dutch bishops' interpretation of the just completed Vatican Council, and the first post-Council comprehensive Catholic catechism, noted the lack of mention of artificial contraception in the Council. \"As everyone can ascertain nowadays, there are several methods of regulating births. The Second Vatican Council did not speak of any of these concrete methods [...] This is a different standpoint than that taken under Pius XI some thirty years ago which was also maintained by his successor [...] we can sense here a clear development in the Church, a development, which is also going on outside the Church.\"",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the Soviet Union, Literaturnaja Gazeta, a publication of Soviet intellectuals, included an editorial and statement by Russian physicians against the encyclical.",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Ecumenical reactions were mixed. Liberal and Moderate Lutherans and the World Council of Churches were disappointed. Eugene Carson Blake criticised the concepts of nature and natural law, which, in his view, still dominated Catholic theology, as outdated. This concern dominated several articles in Catholic and non-Catholic journals at the time. Patriarch Athenagoras I stated his full agreement with Pope Paul VI: \"He could not have spoken in any other way.\"",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In Latin America, much support developed for the Pope and his encyclical. As World Bank President Robert McNamara declared at the 1968 Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group that countries permitting birth control practices will get preferential access to resources, doctors in La Paz, Bolivia, called it insulting that money should be exchanged for the conscience of a Catholic nation. In Colombia, Cardinal Aníbal Muñoz Duque declared, \"if American conditionality undermines Papal teachings, we prefer not to receive one cent\". The Senate of Bolivia passed a resolution, stating that Humanae vitae can be discussed in its implications on individual consciences, but is of greatest significance because it defends the rights of developing nations to determine their own population policies. The Jesuit Journal Sic dedicated one edition to the encyclical with supportive contributions. However, against eighteen insubordinate priests, professors of theology at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and the ensuing conspiracy of silence practiced by the Chilean Episcopate, which had to be censured by the Nuncio in Santiago at the behest of Cardinal Gabriel-Marie Garrone, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, triggering eventually a media conflict with El Diario Ilustrado [es], Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira expressed his affliction with the lamentations of Jeremiah: \"O ye all that pass through the way…\" (Lamentations 1:12, King James Bible).",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the book \"Nighttime conversations in Jerusalem. On the risk of faith.\", well-known liberal Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini accused Paul VI of deliberately concealing the truth, leaving it to theologians and pastors to fix things by adapting precepts to practice: \"I knew Paul VI well. With the encyclical, he wanted to express consideration for human life. He explained his intention to some of his friends by using a comparison: although one must not lie, sometimes it is not possible to do otherwise; it may be necessary to conceal the truth, or it may be unavoidable to tell a lie. It is up to the moralists to explain where sin begins, especially in the cases in which there is a higher duty than the transmission of life.\"",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Pope Paul VI was troubled by the encyclical's reception in the West. Acknowledging the controversy, Paul VI in a letter to the Congress of German Catholics (30 August 1968), stated: \"May the lively debate aroused by our encyclical lead to a better knowledge of God's will.\" In March 1969, he had a meeting with one of the main critics of Humanae vitae, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens. Paul heard him out and said merely, \"Yes, pray for me; because of my weaknesses, the Church is badly governed.\" To jog the memory of his critics, he also put in their minds the experience of no less a figure than Peter: \"[n]ow I understand St Peter: he came to Rome twice, the second time to be crucified\", – herewith directing their attention to his rejoicing in glorifying the Lord. Increasingly convinced, that \"the smoke of Satan entered the temple of God from some fissure\", Paul VI reaffirmed, on 23 June 1978, weeks before his death, in an address to the College of Cardinals, his Humanae vitae: \"following the confirmations of serious science\", and which sought to affirm the principle of respect for the laws of nature and of \"a conscious and ethically responsible paternity\".",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In his last letter to Pope Paul VI, Christian mystic and canonized saint Padre Pio called Humanae vitae \"clear and decisive words\".",
"title": "Response and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Polls have shown that many self-identified Catholics use artificial means of contraception, and that very few use natural family planning. However, John L. Allen Jr. wrote in 2008: \"Three decades of bishops' appointments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both unambiguously committed to Humanae Vitae, mean that senior leaders in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. Some Catholic bishops have brought out documents of their own defending Humanae Vitae.\" Developments in fertility awareness since the 1960s have also given rise to natural family planning organizations such as the Billings Ovulation Method, Couple to Couple League and the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, which actively provide formal instruction on the use and reliability of natural methods of birth control.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Albino Luciani's views on Humanae vitae have been debated. Journalist John L. Allen Jr. claims that \"it's virtually certain that John Paul I would not have reversed Paul VI's teaching, particularly since he was no doctrinal radical. Moreover, as Patriarch in Venice some had seen a hardening of his stance on social issues as the years went by.\" According to Allen, \"it is reasonable to assume that John Paul I would not have insisted upon the negative judgment in Humanae Vitae as aggressively and publicly as John Paul II did, and probably would not have treated it as a quasi-infallible teaching. It would have remained a more 'open' question\". Other sources take a different view and note that during his time as Patriarch of Venice that \"Luciani was intransigent with his upholding of the teaching of the Church and severe with those, through intellectual pride and disobedience paid no attention to the Church's prohibition of contraception\", though while not condoning the sin, he was tolerant of those who sincerely tried and failed to live up to the Church's teaching. Raymond and Lauretta's book The Smiling Pope, The Life & Teaching of John Paul I states that \"if some people think that his compassion and gentleness in this respect implies he was against Humanae Vitae one can only infer it was wishful thinking on their part and an attempt to find an ally in favor of artificial contraception.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "After he became pope in 1978, John Paul II continued on the Catholic Theology of the Body of his predecessors with a series of lectures, entitled Theology of the Body, in which he talked about an \"original unity between man and women\", purity of heart (on the Sermon on the Mount), marriage and celibacy and reflections on Humanae vitae, focusing largely on responsible parenthood and marital chastity.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1981, the Pope's Apostolic exhortation, Familiaris consortio, restated the Church's opposition to artificial birth control stated previously in Humanae vitae.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "John Paul II readdressed some of the same issues in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor. He reaffirmed much of Humanae vitae, and specifically described the practice of artificial contraception as an act not permitted by Catholic teaching in any circumstances. The same encyclical also clarifies the use of conscience in arriving at moral decisions, including in the use of contraception. However, John Paul also said, \"It is not right then to regard the moral conscience of the individual and the magisterium of the Church as two contenders, as two realities in conflict. The authority which the magisterium enjoys by the will of Christ exists so that the moral conscience can attain the truth with security and remain in it.\" John Paul quoted Humanae vitae as a compassionate encyclical, \"Christ has come not to judge the world but to save it, and while he was uncompromisingly stern towards sin, he was patient and rich in mercy towards sinners\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Pope John Paul's 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae ('The Gospel of Life') affirmed the Church's position on contraception and multiple topics related to the culture of life.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On 12 May 2008, Benedict XVI accepted an invitation to talk to participants in the International Congress organized by the Pontifical Lateran University on the 40th anniversary of Humanae vitae. He put the encyclical in the broader view of love in a global context, a topic he called \"so controversial, yet so crucial for humanity's future.\" Humanae vitae became \"a sign of contradiction but also of continuity of the Church's doctrine and tradition... What was true yesterday is true also today.\" The Church continues to reflect \"in an ever new and deeper way on the fundamental principles that concern marriage and procreation.\" The key message of Humanae vitae is love. Benedict states, that the fullness of a person is achieved by a unity of soul and body, but neither spirit nor body alone can love, only the two together. If this unity is broken, if only the body is satisfied, love becomes a commodity.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 16 January 2015, Pope Francis said to a meeting with families in Manila, insisting on the need to protect the family: \"The family is [...] threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life. I think of Blessed Paul VI. At a time when the problem of population growth was being raised, he had the courage to defend openness to life in families. He knew the difficulties that are there in every family, and so in his Encyclical he was very merciful towards particular cases, and he asked confessors to be very merciful and understanding in dealing with particular cases. But he also had a broader vision: he looked at the peoples of the earth and he saw this threat of the destruction of the family through the privation of children [original Spanish: destrucción de la familia por la privación de los hijos]. Paul VI was courageous; he was a good pastor and he warned his flock of the wolves who were coming.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A year before, on 1 May 2014, Pope Francis, in an interview given to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, expressed his opinion and praise for Humanae vitae: \"Everything depends on how Humanae vitae is interpreted. Paul VI himself, in the end, urged confessors to be very merciful and pay attention to concrete situations. But his genius was prophetic, he had the courage to take a stand against the majority, to defend moral discipline, to exercise a cultural restraint, to oppose present and future neo-Malthusianism. The question is not of changing doctrine, but of digging deep and making sure that pastoral care takes into account situations and what it is possible for persons to do.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Humanae vitae is an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI and dated 25 July 1968. The text was issued at a Vatican press conference on 29 July. Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirmed the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding married love, responsible parenthood, and the rejection of artificial contraception. In formulating his teaching he explained why he did not accept the conclusions of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control established by his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, a commission he himself had expanded. Mainly because of its restatement of the Church's opposition to artificial contraception, the encyclical was politically controversial. It affirmed traditional Church moral teaching on the sanctity of life and the procreative and unitive nature of conjugal relations. It was the last of Paul's seven encyclicals. | 2001-11-04T05:11:45Z | 2023-10-01T07:30:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanae_vitae |
14,072 | History of Wikipedia | Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.
Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a complementary project, using an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool. While Wikipedia was initially imagined as a place to draft articles and ideas for eventual polishing in Nupedia, it quickly overtook its predecessor, becoming both draft space and home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages, inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.
In 2014, Wikipedia had approximately 495 million monthly readers. In 2015, according to comScore, Wikipedia received over 115 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone. In September 2018, the projects saw 15.5 billion monthly page views.
The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Library of Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934 book Traité de Documentation. Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his essay "As We May Think" (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which began in 1960.
The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia. However, even without the internet, huge complex projects of similar nature had made use of volunteers. Specifically, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1857, by Richard Chenevix Trench. It took about 70 years to complete. Dr. Trench envisioned a grand new dictionary of every word in the English language, and to be used democratically and freely. According to author Simon Winchester, "The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals – must be instead 'the combined action of many.' It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge one – probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers."
Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica, were often book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. His published document outlined how to "ensure that progress continues towards this best and most natural outcome."
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that the concept of Wikipedia came when he was a graduate student at Indiana University, where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy interesting. At the time, Wales was studying finance and was intrigued by the incentives of the many people who contributed as volunteers toward creating free software, where many examples were having excellent results.
According to The Economist, Wikipedia "has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment."
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of qualified volunteer contributors and a considered multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing list of over 2000 interested editors, and the presence of Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief, the production of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year.
The Nupedians discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. Wikis had been used elsewhere on the web to organize knowledge, and the idea of a wiki-based complement to Nupedia was seeded by a conversation between Sanger and Ben Kovitz, and by another between Wales and Jeremy Rosenfeld. Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software" for people bored by Nupedia process, and later stated in December 2005 that Rosenfeld had introduced him to the wiki concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not... As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general, are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source of content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.
Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001, under the nupedia.com domain. This moved to a new wiki under the wikipedia.com domain on 15 January. On 17 January, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project went online, potentially competing with Nupedia, but within a few years the FSF encouraged people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]" instead.
There was some hesitation among editors about binding Nupedia too closely to a wiki-style workflow. After a Nupedia wiki was launched under nupedia.com on 10 January 2001, Wales proposed launching the new project under its own name, and Sanger proposed Wikipedia, framing it as "a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently." A new wiki was launched at wikipedia.com on Monday 15 January 2001.
The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these initial projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.
Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!", but this may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon after was scrapped and replaced by a restart. The first recovered edit to Wikipedia.com was to the HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading "This is the new WikiPedia!"; it can be found here. The existence of the project was formally announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was made to the Nupedia mailing list on 17 January 2001.
The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the Slashdot website in July 2001, having already earned two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July. Between these influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001.
The project gained its 1,000th article around Monday 12 February 2001 and reached 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On Friday 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000.
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on Friday 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC). The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These languages were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, fewer than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase as the encyclopedia grows. As of 2014, about 85% of all Wikipedia articles were in non-English Wikipedia versions, and by 2023, the early ratio had reversed: despite English and Simple English Wikipedias continuing to grow and having 7 million articles between them, roughly 90% of all Wikipedia articles were not in English.
In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2002, he and Wales differed in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but they disagreed on how to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.
Wales went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricted his role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.
Sanger said he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything, and proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. In 2006 he founded Citizendium, an open encyclopedia that used real names for contributors to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement about "family-friendly content".
Old, even obsolete, encyclopedia articles are highly valuable for historical research. For each Wikipedia article, past versions are accessible through the "View history" link at the top of the page. In addition, the ZIM File Archive, at Internet Archive, contains past full snapshots of Wikipedia as well as article selections, in multiple languages, from different years. They can be opened with Kiwix software.
Between 2007 and 2011, three CD/DVD versions (called Wikipedia Version 0.5, 0.7 and 0.8) containing a selection of articles from English Wikipedia were released. They became available as Kiwix ZIM files, both from the ZIM File Archive and from the Kiwix download site.
In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to publish articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Wales, with Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising company Bomis.
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. The name was suggested by Sanger on 11 January 2001 as a portmanteau of the words wiki (Hawaiian for "quick") and encyclopedia. The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 and 13 January, respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.
The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.
2002 saw the reduction of funding for Wikipedia from Bomis and the departure of Sanger. A fork of the Spanish Wikipedia took place, with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre. Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising. The first portable MediaWiki software went live on 25 January. Bots were introduced. The first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. The creation of a community body to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia. Close to 200 contributors were editing Wikipedia daily.
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established. Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo. Mathematical formulae using TeX were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich, Germany, in October. The basic principles of English Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee ("ArbCom") were developed.
Wikisource was created as a separate project on 24 November 2003, to host free textual sources as its aim in multiple languages and translations.
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004. The English Wikipedia accounted for just under half of these articles. The website's server farms were moved from California to Florida. Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced. The first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. Formal elections began for a board for the Foundation, and an Arbitration Committee on English Wikipedia. The first national chapter of the Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, was recognized.
The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure. The first social meeting in the United States took place in Boston, Massachusetts, in July.
Wikimedia Commons was created on 7 September 2004 to host media files for Wikipedia in all languages.
Bourgeois v. Peters, (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was 'elevated' at the time of the protest, 'to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times.'"
In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, with English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005.
The first major Wikipedia scandal, the Seigenthaler incident, occurred in 2005 when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography that had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns, the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.
Wikimania 2005, the first Wikimania conference, was held from 4 to 8 August 2005 at the Haus der Jugend in Frankfurt, Germany, attracting about 380 attendees.
The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals – multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top five global brands of 2006.
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and called for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. A new privilege, "oversight", was created, allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable. Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006.
Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor accounts by 13 August. The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words, by 13 August. The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day, with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world. Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversy broke out when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creating a distinct biographical article. On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia gained its two-millionth article, El Hormiguero. There was some controversy in late 2007 when the Volapük Wikipedia jumped from 797 to over 112,000 articles, briefly becoming the 15th-largest Wikipedia edition, due to automated stub generation by an enthusiast for the Volapük constructed language.
According to the MIT Technology Review, the number of regularly active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000, and has since been declining.
In April 2007, Wikipedia Version 0.5 article selection release was published.
Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.
On 25 June 2009 at 3:15 pm PDT (22:15 UTC), following the death of pop icon Michael Jackson, the website temporarily crashed.
The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to Jackson's biography within one hour, probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history. By late August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions had exceeded 14 million. The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia, Beate Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC. On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.
Wikipedia content became licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in 2009.
On 24 March, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. Failover to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.
On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16 April.
In early 2010, Wikipedia Version 0.7 article selection release was published.
Wikipedia and its users held many celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January. The site began efforts to expand its growth in India, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November 2011. The English Wikipedia passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011. The Dutch Wikipedia exceeded 1 million articles on 17 December 2011, becoming the fourth Wikipedia edition to do so.
On 3 March 2011, Wikipedia Version 0.8 article selection release was published.
The "Wikimania 2011 – Haifa, Israel" stamp was issued by Israel Post on 2 August 2011. This was the first-ever stamp dedicated to a Wikimedia-related project.
Between 4 and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.
Also in October 2011, Wikimedia announced the launch of Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries through partnerships with mobile operators.
On 16 January, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English Wikipedia would shut down for 24 hours on 18 January as part of a protest meant to call public attention to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-piracy laws under debate in the United States Congress. Calling the blackout a "community decision", Wales and other opponents of the laws believed that they would endanger free speech and online innovation. A similar blackout was staged on 10 July by the Russian Wikipedia, in protest against a proposed Russian internet regulation law.
In late March 2012, the Wikimedia Deutschland announced Wikidata, a universal platform for sharing data between all Wikipedia language editions. The US$1.7-million Wikidata project was partly funded by Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Wikimedia Deutschland assumed responsibility for the first phase of Wikidata, and initially planned to make the platform available to editors by December 2012. Wikidata's first phase became fully operational in March 2013.
In April 2012, Justin Knapp became the first single contributor to make over one million edits to Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales congratulated Knapp for his work and presented him with the site's Special Barnstar medal and the Golden Wiki award for his achievement. Wales also declared that 20 April would be "Justin Knapp Day".
On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia gained its 4-millionth article, Izbat al-Burj. In October 2012, historian and Wikipedia editor Richard J. Jensen opined that the English Wikipedia was "nearing completion", noting that the number of regularly active editors had fallen significantly since 2007, despite Wikipedia's rapid growth in article count and readership.
According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia was the world's sixth-most-popular website as of November 2012. Dow Jones ranked Wikipedia fifth worldwide as of December 2012.
On 22 January 2013, the Italian Wikipedia became the fifth language edition of Wikipedia to exceed 1 million articles, while the Russian and Spanish Wikipedias gained their millionth articles on 11 and 16 May respectively. On 15 July the Swedish and on 24 September the Polish Wikipedias gained their millionth articles, becoming the eighth and ninth Wikipedia editions to do so.
On 27 January, the main belt asteroid 274301 was officially renamed "Wikipedia" by the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature.
The first phase of the Wikidata database, automatically providing interlanguage links and other data, became available for all language editions in March 2013.
In April 2013, the French secret service was accused of attempting to censor Wikipedia by threatening a Wikipedia volunteer with arrest unless "classified information" about a military radio station was deleted.
In July, the VisualEditor editing system was launched, forming the first stage of an effort to allow articles to be edited with a word processor-like interface instead of using wiki markup. An editor specifically designed for smartphones and other mobile devices was also launched.
In February 2014, a project to make a print edition of the English Wikipedia, consisting of 1,000 volumes and over 1,100,000 pages, was launched by German Wikipedia contributors. The project sought funding through Indiegogo, and was intended to honor the contributions of Wikipedia's editors. On 22 October 2014, the first monument to Wikipedia was unveiled in the Polish town of Slubice.
On 8 June 15 June, and 16 July 2014, the Waray Wikipedia, the Vietnamese Wikipedia and the Cebuano Wikipedia each exceeded the one million article mark. They were the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Wikipedias to reach that milestone. Despite having very few active users, the Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias had a high number of automatically generated articles created by bots.
In mid-2015, Wikipedia was the world's seventh-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, down one place from the position it held in November 2012. At the start of 2015, Wikipedia remained the largest general-knowledge encyclopedia online, with a combined total of over 36 million mainspace articles across all 291 language editions. On average, Wikipedia receives a total of 10 billion global pageviews from around 495 million unique visitors every month, including 85 million visitors from the United States alone, where it is the sixth-most-popular site.
Print Wikipedia was an art project by Michael Mandiberg that created the ability to print 7473 volumes of Wikipedia as it existed on 7 April 2015. Each volume has 700 pages and only 110 were printed by the artist.
On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia reached 5,000,000 articles with the creation of an article on Persoonia terminalis, a type of shrub.
On 19 January 2016, the Japanese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the thirteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was 波号第二百二十四潜水艦 (a World War II submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy).
In mid-2016, Wikipedia was once again the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, up one place from the position it held in the previous year.
In October 2016, the mobile version of Wikipedia got a new look.
In mid-2017, Wikipedia was listed as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, rising one place from the position it held in the previous year. Wikipedia Zero was made available in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On 29 April 2017, online access to Wikipedia was blocked across all language editions in Turkey by the Turkish authorities. This block lasted until 15 January 2020, as the court of Turkey ruled that the block violated human rights. The encrypted Japanese Wikipedia has been blocked in China since 28 December 2017.
During 2018, Wikipedia retained its listing as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet. One notable development was the use of Artificial Intelligence to create draft articles on overlooked topics.
On 13 April 2018, the number of Chinese Wikipedia articles exceeded 1 million, becoming the fourteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in Mainland China since May 2015. Later in the year, on 26 June, the Portuguese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the fifteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was Perdão de Richard Nixon (the Pardon of Richard Nixon).
In August 2019, according to Alexa.com, Wikipedia fell from fifth-placed to seventh-placed website in the world for global internet engagement.
On 23 April 2019, Chinese authorities expanded the block of Wikipedia to versions in all languages. The timing of the block coincided with the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, resulting in stricter internet censorship in China.
On 23 January 2020, the six millionth article, the biography of Maria Elise Turner Lauder, was added to the English Wikipedia. Despite this growth in articles, Wikipedia's global internet engagement, as measured by Alexa, continued to decline. By February 2020, Wikipedia fell to the eleventh-placed website in the world for global internet engagement. Both Wikipedia's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the supporting edits, discussions, and even deletions were thought to be a useful resource for future historians seeking to understand the period in detail. The World Health Organization collaborated with Wikipedia as a key resource for the dissemination of COVID-19-related information as to help combat the spread of misinformation.
In January 2021, Wikipedia's 20th anniversary was noted in the media.
On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt.
MIT Press published an open access book of essays Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Unfinished Revolution, edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner with contributions from prominent Wikipedians, Wikimedians, researchers, journalists, librarians and other experts reflecting on particular histories and themes.
By November 2021, Wikipedia had fallen to the thirteenth-placed website in the world for global internet engagement.
On 6 December 2022, Wikipedian Richard Knipel created the article Artwork title, whose first revision was a draft generated by ChatGPT that Knipel had made minor edits to more closely conform with Wikipedia standards. Knipel stated on a talk page that he believed this was the first time anyone had used ChatGPT to compose a Wikipedia article. The posting of this article was criticized by other editors and sparked controversy within the Wikipedia community, leading to an extensive debate about whether ChatGPT and similar models should be used in writing content for Wikipedia and, if so, to what extent.
In January 2023, the default Wikipedia desktop interface was changed for the first time since 2010, to Vector 2022.
After consultation and a contest, the first sound logo of Wikimedia (including Wikipedia) was adopted.
Vector 2022, an update to Wikipedia's previous skin Vector 2010, was announced in September 2020, and initially slated for debut in 2021, before being ultimately deployed in January 2023. It is now the default skin on the desktop in over 300 of its language editions and some sister projects.
Vector 2022 features a revised user interface which makes numerous changes to the arrangement of the interface elements. Among them, the language selection menu, previously located to the left of the screen, now is found in the top right corner of the display of the article that is currently read. Additionally, the sidebar is collapsible behind a hamburger button. Vector 2022 additionally increases the margins of the article display, which has the effect of limiting the width of the article; a toggle exists which can decrease the margins and expand the line width of the article to fill the screen. The default size of the text has not been increased, although the Wikimedia Foundation told Engadget that they hope to make this an option in future. The search function was also updated in Vector 2022, as the suggested results in response to user queries now include images and short descriptions from the pages in question.
The Wikimedia Foundation said that the change was motivated by a desire to modernize the site and improve the navigation and editing experience for readers inexperienced with the internet, as the previous skin was deemed "clunky and overwhelming." Tests conducted by the foundation yielded results of a 30 percent increase in user searches, and a 15 percent decrease in scrolling. Early versions of Vector 2022 first went live in 2020 on the French-, Hebrew-, and Portuguese-language Wikipedia sites, as the skin's new features were rolled out to users for testing gradually before its full release. The skin went live as the default skin for readers of Wikimedia sites in 300 (out of 318) languages on 18 January 2023.
Following the mass rollout of Vector 2022, it is still possible to read Wikipedia using the previous skin. However, to do so requires readers to register for a Wikipedia account, and then set their preferences to display Vector 2010 instead. No changes were made to existing Wikipedia skins such as Monobook and Timeless, which also remain available to use.
Wikipedia users were divided on the changes. A request for comment on the English Wikipedia asking the community whether or not Vector 2022 should be deployed as the default skin accumulated over 90,000 words in responses. Critics of the redesign objected most prominently to the white space left empty in the new skin, while other users criticized said critics as having a kneejerk resistance to change. 165 editors participating in the discussion disapproved of the new skin, while 153 were in favor, and nine remained neutral. Despite the larger number of editors who expressed that they did not want Vector 2022 to be deployed in its then-current form, as consensus on Wikipedia is not decided by vote, the discussion was closed in favor of the redesign, considering the positive comments left by other users. The Vector 2022 developers made some changes to the skin in response to the criticisms, such as adding a toggle to enable article content to fill the entire width of the screen. Users on the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously disagreed with the enactment of the new skin.
Journalists responding to Vector 2022's rollout considered the update and the new features introduced as useful additions, but generally characterized the skin as a minor update that did not fundamentally change their reading experience on Wikipedia. Annie Rauwerda, creator of the Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts, wrote in Slate that Vector 2022 was not "dramatically different" from the previous skin. Rauwerda additionally noted the similarity between the Wikipedia community backlash against the design and previous resistances to similar visual changes on popular sites such as Reddit. Rauwerda, and Mike Pearl of Mashable, commented that users displeased with the change could weigh in on a discussion about the skin, or use the site's built-in customization features to alter their reading experience.
Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation runs fundraising campaigns on Wikipedia to support its operations. These generally last about a month and happen at different times of the year in different countries. In addition to the fundraising banners on Wikipedia itself, there are also email campaigns; some emails invite people to leave the Wikimedia Foundation money in their wills.
Revenue has risen every year of the Wikimedia Foundation's existence, reaching US$154.69 million in 2021/2022, versus expenses of US$145.97 million:
In addition, the Wikimedia Endowment, an organizationally separate fundraising effort begun in 2016, reached $100 million in 2021, five years sooner than planned.
Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.
Wales, along with others, came up with and funded the idea of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept contributions from ordinary people. Sanger played an important role in this as Nupedia's Editor in Chief and main employee. In Sanger's introductory message to the Nupedia mailing list, he said that Jimmy Wales "contacted me and asked me to apply as editor-in-chief of Nupedia. [...] He had had the idea for Nupedia since at least last fall. He tells me that, when thinking about people (particularly philosophers) he knew who could manage this sort of long-term project, he thought I would be perfect for the job. This is indeed my dream job".
Sanger suggested using a wiki to provide a complementary project for people "intimidated and bored" by Nupedia's elaborate processes, and coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name. This was broadly seen as a way to unblock the growing community of Nupedians who found it hard to contribute. Sanger continued to work on Nupedia while contributing to Wikipedia (including drafting policies such as "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view") and worked with an outreach lead to build up the community of both Nupedia and Wikipedia editors. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and encouraged others to continue contributing to Wikipedia while noting that Nupedia could not survive without a full-time editor in chief. Later that year he stopped contributing to either project, and by 2004 had become publicly critical of Wikipedia. In December 2004 he wrote an essay arguing that Wikipedia was suffering from anti-elitism. In April 2005 he published a two-part memoir of his work on Nupedia and Wikipedia, highlighting his role in their creation and continuing belief that Nupedia deserved to be saved. Later that year Wales began to push back on Sanger's characterization of his role in the project. By 2006, after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger was harshly critical of Wikipedia, describing it as "broken beyond repair."
In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; however, according to Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder." Sanger and Wales were referred to as co-founders in various press releases, interviews, and news reports from 2001 and 2002. Before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder. In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title". Starting in 2006, when Sanger wrote and was interviewed extensively about the launch of Citizendium, he emphasized his status as co-founder, and these earlier sources that described him as such.
The goals which led to GNUpedia were published at least as early as 18 December 2000, and these exact goals were finalized on the 12th and 13th of January 2001, albeit with a copyright of 1999, from when Stallman had first started considering the problem. The only sentence added between 18 December and the unveiling of GNUpedia the week of 12–16 January was this: "The GNU Free Documentation License would be a good license to use for courses."
GNUpedia was "formally" announced on the slashdot website, on 16 January, the same day that their mailing list first went online with a test-message. Wales posted to the list on 17 January, the first full day of messages, explaining the discussions with Stallman concerning the change in Nupedia content licensing, and suggesting cooperation. Stallman himself first posted on 19 January, and, in his second post on 22 January, mentioned that discussions about merging Wikipedia and GNUpedia were ongoing. Within a couple of months, Wales had changed his email signature from the open source encyclopedia to the free encyclopedia; both Nupedia and Wikipedia had adopted the GFDL; and the merger of GNUpedia into Wikipedia was effectively accomplished.
In a separate but similar incident, the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006.
There are a large number of Wikipedia mirror and forks. Other sites also use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. No list of them is maintained.
Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to the exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.
In 2006, Sanger founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. The site said it aimed 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'. (See also Nupedia). In 2006, conservative activist and lawyer Andrew Schlafly founded Conservapedia, based on MediaWiki.
The German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139-page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. The publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.
In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.
A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of English Wikipedia available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th-generation iPods.
As of June 2022, there have been no more article selection releases since Wikipedia Version 0.8.
In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer because of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007. In 2013, a German appeals court or Oberlandesgericht (the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart) ruled that Wikipedia is a "service provider" not a "content provider", and as such is immune from liability as long as it takes down content that is accused of being illegal.
Historical summaries
Milestones, size and statistics
Discussion and debate archives
Other | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a complementary project, using an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool. While Wikipedia was initially imagined as a place to draft articles and ideas for eventual polishing in Nupedia, it quickly overtook its predecessor, becoming both draft space and home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages, inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 2014, Wikipedia had approximately 495 million monthly readers. In 2015, according to comScore, Wikipedia received over 115 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone. In September 2018, the projects saw 15.5 billion monthly page views.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Library of Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934 book Traité de Documentation. Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his essay \"As We May Think\" (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which began in 1960.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia. However, even without the internet, huge complex projects of similar nature had made use of volunteers. Specifically, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1857, by Richard Chenevix Trench. It took about 70 years to complete. Dr. Trench envisioned a grand new dictionary of every word in the English language, and to be used democratically and freely. According to author Simon Winchester, \"The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals – must be instead 'the combined action of many.' It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge one – probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.\"",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica, were often book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a \"Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource\" in 1998. His published document outlined how to \"ensure that progress continues towards this best and most natural outcome.\"",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that the concept of Wikipedia came when he was a graduate student at Indiana University, where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy interesting. At the time, Wales was studying finance and was intrigued by the incentives of the many people who contributed as volunteers toward creating free software, where many examples were having excellent results.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "According to The Economist, Wikipedia \"has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment.\"",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of qualified volunteer contributors and a considered multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing list of over 2000 interested editors, and the presence of Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief, the production of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Nupedians discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. Wikis had been used elsewhere on the web to organize knowledge, and the idea of a wiki-based complement to Nupedia was seeded by a conversation between Sanger and Ben Kovitz, and by another between Wales and Jeremy Rosenfeld. Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki \"the WikiWikiWeb\". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales stated in October 2001 that \"Larry had the idea to use Wiki software\" for people bored by Nupedia process, and later stated in December 2005 that Rosenfeld had introduced him to the wiki concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a \"feeder\" project for Nupedia. Under the subject \"Let's make a wiki\", he wrote:",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not... As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE \"open\" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general, are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source of content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001, under the nupedia.com domain. This moved to a new wiki under the wikipedia.com domain on 15 January. On 17 January, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project went online, potentially competing with Nupedia, but within a few years the FSF encouraged people \"to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]\" instead.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "There was some hesitation among editors about binding Nupedia too closely to a wiki-style workflow. After a Nupedia wiki was launched under nupedia.com on 10 January 2001, Wales proposed launching the new project under its own name, and Sanger proposed Wikipedia, framing it as \"a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently.\" A new wiki was launched at wikipedia.com on Monday 15 January 2001.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these initial projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text \"Hello, World!\", but this may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon after was scrapped and replaced by a restart. The first recovered edit to Wikipedia.com was to the HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading \"This is the new WikiPedia!\"; it can be found here. The existence of the project was formally announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was made to the Nupedia mailing list on 17 January 2001.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the Slashdot website in July 2001, having already earned two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July. Between these influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The project gained its 1,000th article around Monday 12 February 2001 and reached 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On Friday 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on Friday 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC). The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These languages were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, fewer than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase as the encyclopedia grows. As of 2014, about 85% of all Wikipedia articles were in non-English Wikipedia versions, and by 2023, the early ratio had reversed: despite English and Simple English Wikipedias continuing to grow and having 7 million articles between them, roughly 90% of all Wikipedia articles were not in English.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2002, he and Wales differed in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but they disagreed on how to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Wales went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricted his role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Sanger said he is an \"inclusionist\" and is open to almost anything, and proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. In 2006 he founded Citizendium, an open encyclopedia that used real names for contributors to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate \"gentle expert guidance\" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement about \"family-friendly content\".",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Old, even obsolete, encyclopedia articles are highly valuable for historical research. For each Wikipedia article, past versions are accessible through the \"View history\" link at the top of the page. In addition, the ZIM File Archive, at Internet Archive, contains past full snapshots of Wikipedia as well as article selections, in multiple languages, from different years. They can be opened with Kiwix software.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Between 2007 and 2011, three CD/DVD versions (called Wikipedia Version 0.5, 0.7 and 0.8) containing a selection of articles from English Wikipedia were released. They became available as Kiwix ZIM files, both from the ZIM File Archive and from the Kiwix download site.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to publish articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Wales, with Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising company Bomis.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. The name was suggested by Sanger on 11 January 2001 as a portmanteau of the words wiki (Hawaiian for \"quick\") and encyclopedia. The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 and 13 January, respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January (\"Wikipedia Day\"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The \"neutral point of view\" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "2002 saw the reduction of funding for Wikipedia from Bomis and the departure of Sanger. A fork of the Spanish Wikipedia took place, with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre. Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising. The first portable MediaWiki software went live on 25 January. Bots were introduced. The first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. The creation of a community body to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia. Close to 200 contributors were editing Wikipedia daily.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established. Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo. Mathematical formulae using TeX were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich, Germany, in October. The basic principles of English Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee (\"ArbCom\") were developed.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Wikisource was created as a separate project on 24 November 2003, to host free textual sources as its aim in multiple languages and translations.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004. The English Wikipedia accounted for just under half of these articles. The website's server farms were moved from California to Florida. Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced. The first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. Formal elections began for a board for the Foundation, and an Arbitration Committee on English Wikipedia. The first national chapter of the Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, was recognized.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure. The first social meeting in the United States took place in Boston, Massachusetts, in July.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Wikimedia Commons was created on 7 September 2004 to host media files for Wikipedia in all languages.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Bourgeois v. Peters, (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: \"We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was 'elevated' at the time of the protest, 'to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times.'\"",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, with English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The first major Wikipedia scandal, the Seigenthaler incident, occurred in 2005 when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography that had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns, the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Wikimania 2005, the first Wikimania conference, was held from 4 to 8 August 2005 at the Haus der Jugend in Frankfurt, Germany, attracting about 380 attendees.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and \"Wikipedia\" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals – multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top five global brands of 2006.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and called for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. A new privilege, \"oversight\", was created, allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable. Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor accounts by 13 August. The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words, by 13 August. The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day, with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world. Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversy broke out when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creating a distinct biographical article. On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia gained its two-millionth article, El Hormiguero. There was some controversy in late 2007 when the Volapük Wikipedia jumped from 797 to over 112,000 articles, briefly becoming the 15th-largest Wikipedia edition, due to automated stub generation by an enthusiast for the Volapük constructed language.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "According to the MIT Technology Review, the number of regularly active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000, and has since been declining.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In April 2007, Wikipedia Version 0.5 article selection release was published.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On 25 June 2009 at 3:15 pm PDT (22:15 UTC), following the death of pop icon Michael Jackson, the website temporarily crashed.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to Jackson's biography within one hour, probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history. By late August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions had exceeded 14 million. The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia, Beate Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC. On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Wikipedia content became licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in 2009.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "On 24 March, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. Failover to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16 April.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In early 2010, Wikipedia Version 0.7 article selection release was published.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Wikipedia and its users held many celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January. The site began efforts to expand its growth in India, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November 2011. The English Wikipedia passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011. The Dutch Wikipedia exceeded 1 million articles on 17 December 2011, becoming the fourth Wikipedia edition to do so.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "On 3 March 2011, Wikipedia Version 0.8 article selection release was published.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The \"Wikimania 2011 – Haifa, Israel\" stamp was issued by Israel Post on 2 August 2011. This was the first-ever stamp dedicated to a Wikimedia-related project.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Between 4 and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Also in October 2011, Wikimedia announced the launch of Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries through partnerships with mobile operators.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "On 16 January, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English Wikipedia would shut down for 24 hours on 18 January as part of a protest meant to call public attention to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-piracy laws under debate in the United States Congress. Calling the blackout a \"community decision\", Wales and other opponents of the laws believed that they would endanger free speech and online innovation. A similar blackout was staged on 10 July by the Russian Wikipedia, in protest against a proposed Russian internet regulation law.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In late March 2012, the Wikimedia Deutschland announced Wikidata, a universal platform for sharing data between all Wikipedia language editions. The US$1.7-million Wikidata project was partly funded by Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Wikimedia Deutschland assumed responsibility for the first phase of Wikidata, and initially planned to make the platform available to editors by December 2012. Wikidata's first phase became fully operational in March 2013.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In April 2012, Justin Knapp became the first single contributor to make over one million edits to Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales congratulated Knapp for his work and presented him with the site's Special Barnstar medal and the Golden Wiki award for his achievement. Wales also declared that 20 April would be \"Justin Knapp Day\".",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia gained its 4-millionth article, Izbat al-Burj. In October 2012, historian and Wikipedia editor Richard J. Jensen opined that the English Wikipedia was \"nearing completion\", noting that the number of regularly active editors had fallen significantly since 2007, despite Wikipedia's rapid growth in article count and readership.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia was the world's sixth-most-popular website as of November 2012. Dow Jones ranked Wikipedia fifth worldwide as of December 2012.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On 22 January 2013, the Italian Wikipedia became the fifth language edition of Wikipedia to exceed 1 million articles, while the Russian and Spanish Wikipedias gained their millionth articles on 11 and 16 May respectively. On 15 July the Swedish and on 24 September the Polish Wikipedias gained their millionth articles, becoming the eighth and ninth Wikipedia editions to do so.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "On 27 January, the main belt asteroid 274301 was officially renamed \"Wikipedia\" by the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The first phase of the Wikidata database, automatically providing interlanguage links and other data, became available for all language editions in March 2013.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In April 2013, the French secret service was accused of attempting to censor Wikipedia by threatening a Wikipedia volunteer with arrest unless \"classified information\" about a military radio station was deleted.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In July, the VisualEditor editing system was launched, forming the first stage of an effort to allow articles to be edited with a word processor-like interface instead of using wiki markup. An editor specifically designed for smartphones and other mobile devices was also launched.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In February 2014, a project to make a print edition of the English Wikipedia, consisting of 1,000 volumes and over 1,100,000 pages, was launched by German Wikipedia contributors. The project sought funding through Indiegogo, and was intended to honor the contributions of Wikipedia's editors. On 22 October 2014, the first monument to Wikipedia was unveiled in the Polish town of Slubice.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "On 8 June 15 June, and 16 July 2014, the Waray Wikipedia, the Vietnamese Wikipedia and the Cebuano Wikipedia each exceeded the one million article mark. They were the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Wikipedias to reach that milestone. Despite having very few active users, the Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias had a high number of automatically generated articles created by bots.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In mid-2015, Wikipedia was the world's seventh-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, down one place from the position it held in November 2012. At the start of 2015, Wikipedia remained the largest general-knowledge encyclopedia online, with a combined total of over 36 million mainspace articles across all 291 language editions. On average, Wikipedia receives a total of 10 billion global pageviews from around 495 million unique visitors every month, including 85 million visitors from the United States alone, where it is the sixth-most-popular site.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Print Wikipedia was an art project by Michael Mandiberg that created the ability to print 7473 volumes of Wikipedia as it existed on 7 April 2015. Each volume has 700 pages and only 110 were printed by the artist.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia reached 5,000,000 articles with the creation of an article on Persoonia terminalis, a type of shrub.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "On 19 January 2016, the Japanese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the thirteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was 波号第二百二十四潜水艦 (a World War II submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy).",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In mid-2016, Wikipedia was once again the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, up one place from the position it held in the previous year.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In October 2016, the mobile version of Wikipedia got a new look.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In mid-2017, Wikipedia was listed as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, rising one place from the position it held in the previous year. Wikipedia Zero was made available in Iraq and Afghanistan.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "On 29 April 2017, online access to Wikipedia was blocked across all language editions in Turkey by the Turkish authorities. This block lasted until 15 January 2020, as the court of Turkey ruled that the block violated human rights. The encrypted Japanese Wikipedia has been blocked in China since 28 December 2017.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "During 2018, Wikipedia retained its listing as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet. One notable development was the use of Artificial Intelligence to create draft articles on overlooked topics.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "On 13 April 2018, the number of Chinese Wikipedia articles exceeded 1 million, becoming the fourteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in Mainland China since May 2015. Later in the year, on 26 June, the Portuguese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the fifteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was Perdão de Richard Nixon (the Pardon of Richard Nixon).",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In August 2019, according to Alexa.com, Wikipedia fell from fifth-placed to seventh-placed website in the world for global internet engagement.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "On 23 April 2019, Chinese authorities expanded the block of Wikipedia to versions in all languages. The timing of the block coincided with the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, resulting in stricter internet censorship in China.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "On 23 January 2020, the six millionth article, the biography of Maria Elise Turner Lauder, was added to the English Wikipedia. Despite this growth in articles, Wikipedia's global internet engagement, as measured by Alexa, continued to decline. By February 2020, Wikipedia fell to the eleventh-placed website in the world for global internet engagement. Both Wikipedia's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the supporting edits, discussions, and even deletions were thought to be a useful resource for future historians seeking to understand the period in detail. The World Health Organization collaborated with Wikipedia as a key resource for the dissemination of COVID-19-related information as to help combat the spread of misinformation.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In January 2021, Wikipedia's 20th anniversary was noted in the media.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "MIT Press published an open access book of essays Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Unfinished Revolution, edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner with contributions from prominent Wikipedians, Wikimedians, researchers, journalists, librarians and other experts reflecting on particular histories and themes.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "By November 2021, Wikipedia had fallen to the thirteenth-placed website in the world for global internet engagement.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "On 6 December 2022, Wikipedian Richard Knipel created the article Artwork title, whose first revision was a draft generated by ChatGPT that Knipel had made minor edits to more closely conform with Wikipedia standards. Knipel stated on a talk page that he believed this was the first time anyone had used ChatGPT to compose a Wikipedia article. The posting of this article was criticized by other editors and sparked controversy within the Wikipedia community, leading to an extensive debate about whether ChatGPT and similar models should be used in writing content for Wikipedia and, if so, to what extent.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In January 2023, the default Wikipedia desktop interface was changed for the first time since 2010, to Vector 2022.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "After consultation and a contest, the first sound logo of Wikimedia (including Wikipedia) was adopted.",
"title": "Timeline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Vector 2022, an update to Wikipedia's previous skin Vector 2010, was announced in September 2020, and initially slated for debut in 2021, before being ultimately deployed in January 2023. It is now the default skin on the desktop in over 300 of its language editions and some sister projects.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Vector 2022 features a revised user interface which makes numerous changes to the arrangement of the interface elements. Among them, the language selection menu, previously located to the left of the screen, now is found in the top right corner of the display of the article that is currently read. Additionally, the sidebar is collapsible behind a hamburger button. Vector 2022 additionally increases the margins of the article display, which has the effect of limiting the width of the article; a toggle exists which can decrease the margins and expand the line width of the article to fill the screen. The default size of the text has not been increased, although the Wikimedia Foundation told Engadget that they hope to make this an option in future. The search function was also updated in Vector 2022, as the suggested results in response to user queries now include images and short descriptions from the pages in question.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The Wikimedia Foundation said that the change was motivated by a desire to modernize the site and improve the navigation and editing experience for readers inexperienced with the internet, as the previous skin was deemed \"clunky and overwhelming.\" Tests conducted by the foundation yielded results of a 30 percent increase in user searches, and a 15 percent decrease in scrolling. Early versions of Vector 2022 first went live in 2020 on the French-, Hebrew-, and Portuguese-language Wikipedia sites, as the skin's new features were rolled out to users for testing gradually before its full release. The skin went live as the default skin for readers of Wikimedia sites in 300 (out of 318) languages on 18 January 2023.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Following the mass rollout of Vector 2022, it is still possible to read Wikipedia using the previous skin. However, to do so requires readers to register for a Wikipedia account, and then set their preferences to display Vector 2010 instead. No changes were made to existing Wikipedia skins such as Monobook and Timeless, which also remain available to use.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Wikipedia users were divided on the changes. A request for comment on the English Wikipedia asking the community whether or not Vector 2022 should be deployed as the default skin accumulated over 90,000 words in responses. Critics of the redesign objected most prominently to the white space left empty in the new skin, while other users criticized said critics as having a kneejerk resistance to change. 165 editors participating in the discussion disapproved of the new skin, while 153 were in favor, and nine remained neutral. Despite the larger number of editors who expressed that they did not want Vector 2022 to be deployed in its then-current form, as consensus on Wikipedia is not decided by vote, the discussion was closed in favor of the redesign, considering the positive comments left by other users. The Vector 2022 developers made some changes to the skin in response to the criticisms, such as adding a toggle to enable article content to fill the entire width of the screen. Users on the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously disagreed with the enactment of the new skin.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Journalists responding to Vector 2022's rollout considered the update and the new features introduced as useful additions, but generally characterized the skin as a minor update that did not fundamentally change their reading experience on Wikipedia. Annie Rauwerda, creator of the Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts, wrote in Slate that Vector 2022 was not \"dramatically different\" from the previous skin. Rauwerda additionally noted the similarity between the Wikipedia community backlash against the design and previous resistances to similar visual changes on popular sites such as Reddit. Rauwerda, and Mike Pearl of Mashable, commented that users displeased with the change could weigh in on a discussion about the skin, or use the site's built-in customization features to alter their reading experience.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation runs fundraising campaigns on Wikipedia to support its operations. These generally last about a month and happen at different times of the year in different countries. In addition to the fundraising banners on Wikipedia itself, there are also email campaigns; some emails invite people to leave the Wikimedia Foundation money in their wills.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Revenue has risen every year of the Wikimedia Foundation's existence, reaching US$154.69 million in 2021/2022, versus expenses of US$145.97 million:",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "In addition, the Wikimedia Endowment, an organizationally separate fundraising effort begun in 2016, reached $100 million in 2021, five years sooner than planned.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Wales, along with others, came up with and funded the idea of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept contributions from ordinary people. Sanger played an important role in this as Nupedia's Editor in Chief and main employee. In Sanger's introductory message to the Nupedia mailing list, he said that Jimmy Wales \"contacted me and asked me to apply as editor-in-chief of Nupedia. [...] He had had the idea for Nupedia since at least last fall. He tells me that, when thinking about people (particularly philosophers) he knew who could manage this sort of long-term project, he thought I would be perfect for the job. This is indeed my dream job\".",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Sanger suggested using a wiki to provide a complementary project for people \"intimidated and bored\" by Nupedia's elaborate processes, and coined the portmanteau \"Wikipedia\" as the project name. This was broadly seen as a way to unblock the growing community of Nupedians who found it hard to contribute. Sanger continued to work on Nupedia while contributing to Wikipedia (including drafting policies such as \"Ignore all rules\" and \"Neutral point of view\") and worked with an outreach lead to build up the community of both Nupedia and Wikipedia editors. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and encouraged others to continue contributing to Wikipedia while noting that Nupedia could not survive without a full-time editor in chief. Later that year he stopped contributing to either project, and by 2004 had become publicly critical of Wikipedia. In December 2004 he wrote an essay arguing that Wikipedia was suffering from anti-elitism. In April 2005 he published a two-part memoir of his work on Nupedia and Wikipedia, highlighting his role in their creation and continuing belief that Nupedia deserved to be saved. Later that year Wales began to push back on Sanger's characterization of his role in the project. By 2006, after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger was harshly critical of Wikipedia, describing it as \"broken beyond repair.\"",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; however, according to Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, \"Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder.\" Sanger and Wales were referred to as co-founders in various press releases, interviews, and news reports from 2001 and 2002. Before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder. In 2006, Wales said, \"He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title\". Starting in 2006, when Sanger wrote and was interviewed extensively about the launch of Citizendium, he emphasized his status as co-founder, and these earlier sources that described him as such.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The goals which led to GNUpedia were published at least as early as 18 December 2000, and these exact goals were finalized on the 12th and 13th of January 2001, albeit with a copyright of 1999, from when Stallman had first started considering the problem. The only sentence added between 18 December and the unveiling of GNUpedia the week of 12–16 January was this: \"The GNU Free Documentation License would be a good license to use for courses.\"",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "GNUpedia was \"formally\" announced on the slashdot website, on 16 January, the same day that their mailing list first went online with a test-message. Wales posted to the list on 17 January, the first full day of messages, explaining the discussions with Stallman concerning the change in Nupedia content licensing, and suggesting cooperation. Stallman himself first posted on 19 January, and, in his second post on 22 January, mentioned that discussions about merging Wikipedia and GNUpedia were ongoing. Within a couple of months, Wales had changed his email signature from the open source encyclopedia to the free encyclopedia; both Nupedia and Wikipedia had adopted the GFDL; and the merger of GNUpedia into Wikipedia was effectively accomplished.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "In a separate but similar incident, the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "There are a large number of Wikipedia mirror and forks. Other sites also use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. No list of them is maintained.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to the exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 2006, Sanger founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. The site said it aimed 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with \"gentle expert oversight\", among other things'. (See also Nupedia). In 2006, conservative activist and lawyer Andrew Schlafly founded Conservapedia, based on MediaWiki.",
"title": "History by subject area"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139-page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. The publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.",
"title": "History by subject area"
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{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.",
"title": "History by subject area"
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{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of English Wikipedia available for use on iPods. The \"Encyclopodia\" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th-generation iPods.",
"title": "History by subject area"
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{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "As of June 2022, there have been no more article selection releases since Wikipedia Version 0.8.",
"title": "History by subject area"
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{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer because of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007. In 2013, a German appeals court or Oberlandesgericht (the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart) ruled that Wikipedia is a \"service provider\" not a \"content provider\", and as such is immune from liability as long as it takes down content that is accused of being illegal.",
"title": "History by subject area"
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"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "",
"title": "See also"
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"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
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{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Historical summaries",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Milestones, size and statistics",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Discussion and debate archives",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Other",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations. The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998. Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a complementary project, using an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool. While Wikipedia was initially imagined as a place to draft articles and ideas for eventual polishing in Nupedia, it quickly overtook its predecessor, becoming both draft space and home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages, inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects. In 2014, Wikipedia had approximately 495 million monthly readers. In 2015, according to comScore, Wikipedia received over 115 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone. In September 2018, the projects saw 15.5 billion monthly page views. | 2001-11-04T07:46:09Z | 2023-12-30T19:00:16Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia |
14,073 | Hydropower | Hydropower (from Ancient Greek ὑδρο-, "water"), also known as water power, is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by converting the gravitational potential or kinetic energy of a water source to produce power. Hydropower is a method of sustainable energy production. Hydropower is now used principally for hydroelectric power generation, and is also applied as one half of an energy storage system known as pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
Hydropower is an attractive alternative to fossil fuels as it does not directly produce carbon dioxide or other atmospheric pollutants and it provides a relatively consistent source of power. Nonetheless, it has economic, sociological, and environmental downsides and requires a sufficiently energetic source of water, such as a river or elevated lake. International institutions such as the World Bank view hydropower as a low-carbon means for economic development.
Since ancient times, hydropower from watermills has been used as a renewable energy source for irrigation and the operation of mechanical devices, such as gristmills, sawmills, textile mills, trip hammers, dock cranes, domestic lifts, and ore mills. A trompe, which produces compressed air from falling water, is sometimes used to power other machinery at a distance.
A hydropower resource can be evaluated by its available power. Power is a function of the hydraulic head and volumetric flow rate. The head is the energy per unit weight (or unit mass) of water. The static head is proportional to the difference in height through which the water falls. Dynamic head is related to the velocity of moving water. Each unit of water can do an amount of work equal to its weight times the head.
The power available from falling water can be calculated from the flow rate and density of water, the height of fall, and the local acceleration due to gravity:
To illustrate, the power output of a turbine that is 85% efficient, with a flow rate of 80 cubic metres per second (2800 cubic feet per second) and a head of 145 metres (476 feet), is 97 megawatts:
Operators of hydroelectric stations compare the total electrical energy produced with the theoretical potential energy of the water passing through the turbine to calculate efficiency. Procedures and definitions for calculation of efficiency are given in test codes such as ASME PTC 18 and IEC 60041. Field testing of turbines is used to validate the manufacturer's efficiency guarantee. Detailed calculation of the efficiency of a hydropower turbine accounts for the head lost due to flow friction in the power canal or penstock, rise in tailwater level due to flow, the location of the station and effect of varying gravity, the air temperature and barometric pressure, the density of the water at ambient temperature, and the relative altitudes of the forebay and tailbay. For precise calculations, errors due to rounding and the number of significant digits of constants must be considered.
Some hydropower systems such as water wheels can draw power from the flow of a body of water without necessarily changing its height. In this case, the available power is the kinetic energy of the flowing water. Over-shot water wheels can efficiently capture both types of energy. The flow in a stream can vary widely from season to season. The development of a hydropower site requires analysis of flow records, sometimes spanning decades, to assess the reliable annual energy supply. Dams and reservoirs provide a more dependable source of power by smoothing seasonal changes in water flow. However, reservoirs have a significant environmental impact, as does alteration of naturally occurring streamflow. Dam design must account for the worst-case, "probable maximum flood" that can be expected at the site; a spillway is often included to route flood flows around the dam. A computer model of the hydraulic basin and rainfall and snowfall records are used to predict the maximum flood.
Some disadvantages of hydropower have been identified. Dam failures can have catastrophic effects, including loss of life, property and pollution of land.
Dams and reservoirs can have major negative impacts on river ecosystems such as preventing some animals traveling upstream, cooling and de-oxygenating of water released downstream, and loss of nutrients due to settling of particulates. River sediment builds river deltas and dams prevent them from restoring what is lost from erosion. Furthermore, studies found that the construction of dams and reservoirs can result in habitat loss for some aquatic species.
Large and deep dam and reservoir plants cover large areas of land which causes greenhouse gas emissions from underwater rotting vegetation. Furthermore, although at lower levels than other renewable energy sources, it was found that hydropower produces methane gas which is a greenhouse gas. This occurs when organic matters accumulate at the bottom of the reservoir because of the deoxygenation of water which triggers anaerobic digestion.
People who live near a hydro plant site are displaced during construction or when reservoir banks become unstable. Another potential disadvantage is cultural or religious sites may block construction.
A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower. It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour, lumber, paper, textiles, and many metal products. These watermills may comprise gristmills, sawmills, paper mills, textile mills, hammermills, trip hammering mills, rolling mills, wire drawing mills.
One major way to classify watermills is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship.
A plentiful head of water can be made to generate compressed air directly without moving parts. In these designs, a falling column of water is deliberately mixed with air bubbles generated through turbulence or a venturi pressure reducer at the high-level intake. This allows it to fall down a shaft into a subterranean, high-roofed chamber where the now-compressed air separates from the water and becomes trapped. The height of the falling water column maintains compression of the air in the top of the chamber, while an outlet, submerged below the water level in the chamber allows water to flow back to the surface at a lower level than the intake. A separate outlet in the roof of the chamber supplies the compressed air. A facility on this principle was built on the Montreal River at Ragged Shutes near Cobalt, Ontario, in 1910 and supplied 5,000 horsepower to nearby mines.
Hydroelectricity is the biggest hydropower application. Hydroelectricity generates about 15% of global electricity and provides at least 50% of the total electricity supply for more than 35 countries. In 2021, global installed hydropower electrical capacity reached almost 1400 GW, the highest among all renewable energy technologies.
Hydroelectricity generation starts with converting either the potential energy of water that is present due to the site's elevation or the kinetic energy of moving water into electrical energy.
Hydroelectric power plants vary in terms of the way they harvest energy. One type involves a dam and a reservoir. The water in the reservoir is available on demand to be used to generate electricity by passing through channels that connect the dam to the reservoir. The water spins a turbine, which is connected to the generator that produces electricity.
The other type is called a run-of-river plant. In this case, a barrage is built to control the flow of water, absent a reservoir. The run-of river power plant needs continuous water flow and therefore has less ability to provide power on demand. The kinetic energy of flowing water is the main source of energy.
Both designs have limitations. For example, dam construction can result in discomfort to nearby residents. The dam and reservoirs occupy a relatively large amount of space that may be opposed by nearby communities. Moreover, reservoirs can potentially have major environmental consequences such as harming downstream habitats. On the other hand, the limitation of the run-of-river project is the decreased efficiency of electricity generation because the process depends on the speed of the seasonal river flow. This means that the rainy season increases electricity generation compared to the dry season.
The size of hydroelectric plants can vary from small plants called micro hydro, to large plants that supply power to a whole country. As of 2019, the five largest power stations in the world are conventional hydroelectric power stations with dams.
Hydroelectricity can also be used to store energy in the form of potential energy between two reservoirs at different heights with pumped-storage. Water is pumped uphill into reservoirs during periods of low demand to be released for generation when demand is high or system generation is low.
Other forms of electricity generation with hydropower include tidal stream generators using energy from tidal power generated from oceans, rivers, and human-made canal systems to generating electricity.
Rain has been referred to as "one of the last unexploited energy sources in nature. When it rains, billions of litres of water can fall, which have enormous electric potential if used in the right way." Research is being done into the different methods of generating power from rain, such as by using the energy in the impact of raindrops. This is in its very early stages with new and emerging technologies being tested, prototyped and created. Such power has been called rain power. One method in which this has been attempted is by using hybrid solar panels called "all-weather solar panels" that can generate electricity from both the sun and the rain.
According to zoologist and science and technology educator, Luis Villazon, "A 2008 French study estimated that you could use piezoelectric devices, which generate power when they move, to extract 12 milliwatts from a raindrop. Over a year, this would amount to less than 0.001kWh per square metre – enough to power a remote sensor." Villazon suggested a better application would be to collect the water from fallen rain and use it to drive a turbine, with an estimated energy generation of 3 kWh of energy per year for a 185 m roof. A microturbine-based system created by three students from the Technological University of Mexico has been used to generate electricity. The Pluvia system "uses the stream of rainwater runoff from houses' rooftop rain gutters to spin a microturbine in a cylindrical housing. Electricity generated by that turbine is used to charge 12-volt batteries."
The term rain power has also been applied to hydropower systems which include the process of capturing the rain.
Evidence suggests that the fundamentals of hydropower date to ancient Greek civilization. Other evidence indicates that the waterwheel independently emerged in China around the same period. Evidence of water wheels and watermills date to the ancient Near East in the 4th century BC. Moreover, evidence indicates the use of hydropower using irrigation machines to ancient civilizations such as Sumer and Babylonia. Studies suggest that the water wheel was the initial form of water power and it was driven by either humans or animals.
In the Roman Empire, water-powered mills were described by Vitruvius by the first century BC. The Barbegal mill, located in modern-day France, had 16 water wheels processing up to 28 tons of grain per day. Roman waterwheels were also used for sawing marble such as the Hierapolis sawmill of the late 3rd century AD. Such sawmills had a waterwheel that drove two crank-and-connecting rods to power two saws. It also appears in two 6th century Eastern Roman sawmills excavated at Ephesus and Gerasa respectively. The crank and connecting rod mechanism of these Roman watermills converted the rotary motion of the waterwheel into the linear movement of the saw blades.
Water-powered trip hammers and bellows in China, during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), were initially thought to be powered by water scoops. However, some historians suggested that they were powered by waterwheels. This is since it was theorized that water scoops would not have had the motive force to operate their blast furnace bellows. Many texts describe the Hun waterwheel; some of the earliest ones are the Jijiupian dictionary of 40 BC, Yang Xiong's text known as the Fangyan of 15 BC, as well as Xin Lun, written by Huan Tan about 20 AD. It was also during this time that the engineer Du Shi (c. AD 31) applied the power of waterwheels to piston-bellows in forging cast iron.
Another example of the early use of hydropower is seen in hushing, a historic method of mining that uses flood or torrent of water to reveal mineral veins. The method was first used at the Dolaucothi Gold Mines in Wales from 75 AD onwards. This method was further developed in Spain in mines such as Las Médulas. Hushing was also widely used in Britain in the Medieval and later periods to extract lead and tin ores. It later evolved into hydraulic mining when used during the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.
The Islamic Empire spanned a large region, mainly in Asia and Africa, along with other surrounding areas. During the Islamic Golden Age and the Arab Agricultural Revolution (8th–13th centuries), hydropower was widely used and developed. Early uses of tidal power emerged along with large hydraulic factory complexes. A wide range of water-powered industrial mills were used in the region including fulling mills, gristmills, paper mills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, sugar mills, and tide mills. By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic Empire had these industrial mills in operation, from Al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslim engineers also used water turbines while employing gears in watermills and water-raising machines. They also pioneered the use of dams as a source of water power, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines.
Furthermore, in his book, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, the Muslim mechanical engineer, Al-Jazari (1136–1206) described designs for 50 devices. Many of these devices were water-powered, including clocks, a device to serve wine, and five devices to lift water from rivers or pools, where three of them are animal-powered and one can be powered by animal or water. Moreover, they included an endless belt with jugs attached, a cow-powered shadoof (a crane-like irrigation tool), and a reciprocating device with hinged valves.
In the 19th century, French engineer Benoît Fourneyron developed the first hydropower turbine. This device was implemented in the commercial plant of Niagara Falls in 1895 and it is still operating. In the early 20th century, English engineer William Armstrong built and operated the first private electrical power station which was located in his house in Cragside in Northumberland, England. In 1753, the French engineer Bernard Forest de Bélidor published his book, Architecture Hydraulique, which described vertical-axis and horizontal-axis hydraulic machines.
The growing demand for the Industrial Revolution would drive development as well. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, water was the main power source for new inventions such as Richard Arkwright's water frame. Although water power gave way to steam power in many of the larger mills and factories, it was still used during the 18th and 19th centuries for many smaller operations, such as driving the bellows in small blast furnaces (e.g. the Dyfi Furnace) and gristmills, such as those built at Saint Anthony Falls, which uses the 50-foot (15 m) drop in the Mississippi River.
Technological advances moved the open water wheel into an enclosed turbine or water motor. In 1848, the British-American engineer James B. Francis, head engineer of Lowell's Locks and Canals company, improved on these designs to create a turbine with 90% efficiency. He applied scientific principles and testing methods to the problem of turbine design. His mathematical and graphical calculation methods allowed the confident design of high-efficiency turbines to exactly match a site's specific flow conditions. The Francis reaction turbine is still in use. In the 1870s, deriving from uses in the California mining industry, Lester Allan Pelton developed the high-efficiency Pelton wheel impulse turbine, which used hydropower from the high head streams characteristic of the Sierra Nevada.
The modern history of hydropower begins in the 1900s, with large dams built not simply to power neighboring mills or factories but provide extensive electricity for increasingly distant groups of people. Competition drove much of the global hydroelectric craze: Europe competed amongst itself to electrify first, and the United States' hydroelectric plants in Niagara Falls and the Sierra Nevada inspired bigger and bolder creations across the globe. American and USSR financers and hydropower experts also spread the gospel of dams and hydroelectricity across the globe during the Cold War, contributing to projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the Aswan High Dam. Feeding desire for large scale electrification with water inherently required large dams across powerful rivers, which impacted public and private interests downstream and in flood zones. Inevitably smaller communities and marginalized groups suffered. They were unable to successfully resist companies flooding them out of their homes or blocking traditional salmon passages. The stagnant water created by hydroelectric dams provides breeding ground for pests and pathogens, leading to local epidemics. However, in some cases, a mutual need for hydropower could lead to cooperation between otherwise adversarial nations.
Hydropower technology and attitude began to shift in the second half of the 20th century. While countries had largely abandoned their small hydropower systems by the 1930s, the smaller hydropower plants began to make a comeback in the 1970s, boosted by government subsidies and a push for more independent energy producers. Some politicians who once advocated for large hydropower projects in the first half of the 20th century began to speak out against them, and citizen groups organizing against dam projects increased.
In the 1980s and 90s the international anti-dam movement had made finding government or private investors for new large hydropower projects incredibly difficult, and given rise to NGOs devoted to fighting dams. Additionally, while the cost of other energy sources fell, the cost of building new hydroelectric dams increased 4% annually between 1965 and 1990, due both to the increasing costs of construction and to the decrease in high quality building sites. In the 1990s, only 18% of the world's electricity came from hydropower. Tidal power production also emerged in the 1960s as a burgeoning alternative hydropower system, though still has not taken hold as a strong energy contender.
Especially at the start of the American hydropower experiment, engineers and politicians began major hydroelectricity projects to solve a problem of 'wasted potential' rather than to power a population that needed the electricity. When the Niagara Falls Power Company began looking into damming Niagara, the first major hydroelectric project in the United States, in the 1890s they struggled to transport electricity from the falls far enough away to actually reach enough people and justify installation. The project succeeded in large part due to Nikola Tesla's invention of the alternating current motor. On the other side of the country, San Francisco engineers, the Sierra Club, and the federal government fought over acceptable use of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Despite ostensible protection within a national park, city engineers successfully won the rights to both water and power in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1913. After their victory they delivered Hetch Hetchy hydropower and water to San Francisco a decade later and at twice the promised cost, selling power to PG&E which resold to San Francisco residents at a profit.
The American West, with its mountain rivers and lack of coal, turned to hydropower early and often, especially along the Columbia River and its tributaries. The Bureau of Reclamation built the Hoover Dam in 1931, symbolically linking the job creation and economic growth priorities of the New Deal. The federal government quickly followed Hoover with the Shasta Dam and Grand Coulee Dam. Power demand in Oregon did not justify damming the Columbia until WWI revealed the weaknesses of a coal-based energy economy. The federal government then began prioritizing interconnected power—and lots of it. Electricity from all three dams poured into war production during WWII.
After the war, the Grand Coulee Dam and accompanying hydroelectric projects electrified almost all of the rural Columbia Basin, but failed to improve the lives of those living and farming there the way its boosters had promised and also damaged the river ecosystem and migrating salmon populations. In the 1940s as well, the federal government took advantage of the sheer amount of unused power and flowing water from the Grand Coulee to build a nuclear site placed on the banks of the Columbia. The nuclear site leaked radioactive matter into the river, contaminating the entire area.
Post-WWII Americans, especially engineers from the Tennessee Valley Authority, refocused from simply building domestic dams to promoting hydropower abroad. While domestic dam building continued well into the 1970s, with the Reclamation Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers building more than 150 new dams across the American West, organized opposition to hydroelectric dams sparked up in the 1950s and 60s based on environmental concerns. Environmental movements successfully shut down proposed hydropower dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, and gained more hydropower-fighting tools with 1970s environmental legislation. As nuclear and fossil fuels grew in the 70s and 80s and environmental activists push for river restoration, hydropower gradually faded in American importance.
Foreign powers and IGOs have frequently used hydropower projects in Africa as a tool to interfere in the economic development of African countries, such as the World Bank with the Kariba and Akosombo Dams, and the Soviet Union with the Aswan Dam. The Nile River especially has borne the consequences of countries both along the Nile and distant foreign actors using the river to expand their economic power or national force. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the British worked with Egypt to construct the first Aswan Dam, which they heightened in 1912 and 1934 to try to hold back the Nile floods. Egyptian engineer Adriano Daninos developed a plan for the Aswan High Dam, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority's multipurpose dam.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in the 1950s, his government decided to undertake the High Dam project, publicizing it as an economic development project. After American refusal to help fund the dam, and anti-British sentiment in Egypt and British interests in neighboring Sudan combined to make the United Kingdom pull out as well, the Soviet Union funded the Aswan High Dam. Between 1977 and 1990 the dam's turbines generated one third of Egypt's electricity. The building of the Aswan Dam triggered a dispute between Sudan and Egypt over the sharing of the Nile, especially since the dam flooded part of Sudan and decreased the volume of water available to them. Ethiopia, also located on the Nile, took advantage of the Cold War tensions to request assistance from the United States for their own irrigation and hydropower investments in the 1960s. While progress stalled due to the coup d'état of 1974 and following 17-year-long Ethiopian Civil War Ethiopia began construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2011.
Beyond the Nile, hydroelectric projects cover the rivers and lakes of Africa. The Inga powerplant on the Congo River had been discussed since Belgian colonization in the late 19th century, and was successfully built after independence. Mobutu's government failed to regularly maintain the plants and their capacity declined until the 1995 formation of the Southern African Power Pool created a multi-national power grid and plant maintenance program. States with an abundance of hydropower, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ghana, frequently sell excess power to neighboring countries. Foreign actors such as Chinese hydropower companies have proposed a significant amount of new hydropower projects in Africa, and already funded and consulted on many others in countries like Mozambique and Ghana.
Small hydropower also played an important role in early 20th century electrification across Africa. In South Africa, small turbines powered gold mines and the first electric railway in the 1890s, and Zimbabwean farmers installed small hydropower stations in the 1930s. While interest faded as national grids improved in the second half of the century, 21st century national governments in countries including South Africa and Mozambique, as well as NGOs serving countries like Zimbabwe, have begun re-exploring small-scale hydropower to diversify power sources and improve rural electrification.
In the early 20th century, two major factors motivated the expansion of hydropower in Europe: in the northern countries of Norway and Sweden high rainfall and mountains proved exceptional resources for abundant hydropower, and in the south coal shortages pushed governments and utility companies to seek alternative power sources.
Early on, Switzerland dammed the Alpine rivers and the Swiss Rhine, creating, along with Italy and Scandinavia, a Southern Europe hydropower race. In Italy's Po Valley, the main 20th century transition was not the creation of hydropower but the transition from mechanical to electrical hydropower. 12,000 watermills churned in the Po watershed in the 1890s, but the first commercial hydroelectric plant, completed in 1898, signaled the end of the mechanical reign. These new large plants moved power away from rural mountainous areas to urban centers in the lower plain. Italy prioritized early near-nationwide electrification, almost entirely from hydropower, which powered their rise as a dominant European and imperial force. However, they failed to reach any conclusive standard for determining water rights before WWI.
Modern German hydropower dam construction built off a history of small dams powering mines and mills going back to the 15th century. Some parts of Germany industry even relied more on waterwheels than steam until the 1870s. The German government did not set out building large dams such as the prewar Urft, Mohne, and Eder dams to expand hydropower: they mostly wanted to reduce flooding and improve navigation. However, hydropower quickly emerged as an added bonus for all these dams, especially in the coal-poor south. Bavaria even achieved a statewide power grid by damming the Walchensee in 1924, inspired in part by loss of coal reserves after WWI.
Hydropower became a symbol of regional pride and distaste for northern 'coal barons', although the north also held strong enthusiasm for hydropower. Dam building rapidly increased after WWII, this time with the express purpose of increasing hydropower. However, conflict accompanied the dam building and spread of hydropower: agrarian interests suffered from decreased irrigation, small mills lost water flow, and different interest groups fought over where dams should be located, controlling who benefited and whose homes they drowned. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hydropower (from Ancient Greek ὑδρο-, \"water\"), also known as water power, is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by converting the gravitational potential or kinetic energy of a water source to produce power. Hydropower is a method of sustainable energy production. Hydropower is now used principally for hydroelectric power generation, and is also applied as one half of an energy storage system known as pumped-storage hydroelectricity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hydropower is an attractive alternative to fossil fuels as it does not directly produce carbon dioxide or other atmospheric pollutants and it provides a relatively consistent source of power. Nonetheless, it has economic, sociological, and environmental downsides and requires a sufficiently energetic source of water, such as a river or elevated lake. International institutions such as the World Bank view hydropower as a low-carbon means for economic development.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Since ancient times, hydropower from watermills has been used as a renewable energy source for irrigation and the operation of mechanical devices, such as gristmills, sawmills, textile mills, trip hammers, dock cranes, domestic lifts, and ore mills. A trompe, which produces compressed air from falling water, is sometimes used to power other machinery at a distance.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A hydropower resource can be evaluated by its available power. Power is a function of the hydraulic head and volumetric flow rate. The head is the energy per unit weight (or unit mass) of water. The static head is proportional to the difference in height through which the water falls. Dynamic head is related to the velocity of moving water. Each unit of water can do an amount of work equal to its weight times the head.",
"title": "Calculating the amount of available power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The power available from falling water can be calculated from the flow rate and density of water, the height of fall, and the local acceleration due to gravity:",
"title": "Calculating the amount of available power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "To illustrate, the power output of a turbine that is 85% efficient, with a flow rate of 80 cubic metres per second (2800 cubic feet per second) and a head of 145 metres (476 feet), is 97 megawatts:",
"title": "Calculating the amount of available power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Operators of hydroelectric stations compare the total electrical energy produced with the theoretical potential energy of the water passing through the turbine to calculate efficiency. Procedures and definitions for calculation of efficiency are given in test codes such as ASME PTC 18 and IEC 60041. Field testing of turbines is used to validate the manufacturer's efficiency guarantee. Detailed calculation of the efficiency of a hydropower turbine accounts for the head lost due to flow friction in the power canal or penstock, rise in tailwater level due to flow, the location of the station and effect of varying gravity, the air temperature and barometric pressure, the density of the water at ambient temperature, and the relative altitudes of the forebay and tailbay. For precise calculations, errors due to rounding and the number of significant digits of constants must be considered.",
"title": "Calculating the amount of available power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Some hydropower systems such as water wheels can draw power from the flow of a body of water without necessarily changing its height. In this case, the available power is the kinetic energy of the flowing water. Over-shot water wheels can efficiently capture both types of energy. The flow in a stream can vary widely from season to season. The development of a hydropower site requires analysis of flow records, sometimes spanning decades, to assess the reliable annual energy supply. Dams and reservoirs provide a more dependable source of power by smoothing seasonal changes in water flow. However, reservoirs have a significant environmental impact, as does alteration of naturally occurring streamflow. Dam design must account for the worst-case, \"probable maximum flood\" that can be expected at the site; a spillway is often included to route flood flows around the dam. A computer model of the hydraulic basin and rainfall and snowfall records are used to predict the maximum flood.",
"title": "Calculating the amount of available power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Some disadvantages of hydropower have been identified. Dam failures can have catastrophic effects, including loss of life, property and pollution of land.",
"title": "Disadvantages and limitations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Dams and reservoirs can have major negative impacts on river ecosystems such as preventing some animals traveling upstream, cooling and de-oxygenating of water released downstream, and loss of nutrients due to settling of particulates. River sediment builds river deltas and dams prevent them from restoring what is lost from erosion. Furthermore, studies found that the construction of dams and reservoirs can result in habitat loss for some aquatic species.",
"title": "Disadvantages and limitations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Large and deep dam and reservoir plants cover large areas of land which causes greenhouse gas emissions from underwater rotting vegetation. Furthermore, although at lower levels than other renewable energy sources, it was found that hydropower produces methane gas which is a greenhouse gas. This occurs when organic matters accumulate at the bottom of the reservoir because of the deoxygenation of water which triggers anaerobic digestion.",
"title": "Disadvantages and limitations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "People who live near a hydro plant site are displaced during construction or when reservoir banks become unstable. Another potential disadvantage is cultural or religious sites may block construction.",
"title": "Disadvantages and limitations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower. It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour, lumber, paper, textiles, and many metal products. These watermills may comprise gristmills, sawmills, paper mills, textile mills, hammermills, trip hammering mills, rolling mills, wire drawing mills.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One major way to classify watermills is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A plentiful head of water can be made to generate compressed air directly without moving parts. In these designs, a falling column of water is deliberately mixed with air bubbles generated through turbulence or a venturi pressure reducer at the high-level intake. This allows it to fall down a shaft into a subterranean, high-roofed chamber where the now-compressed air separates from the water and becomes trapped. The height of the falling water column maintains compression of the air in the top of the chamber, while an outlet, submerged below the water level in the chamber allows water to flow back to the surface at a lower level than the intake. A separate outlet in the roof of the chamber supplies the compressed air. A facility on this principle was built on the Montreal River at Ragged Shutes near Cobalt, Ontario, in 1910 and supplied 5,000 horsepower to nearby mines.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Hydroelectricity is the biggest hydropower application. Hydroelectricity generates about 15% of global electricity and provides at least 50% of the total electricity supply for more than 35 countries. In 2021, global installed hydropower electrical capacity reached almost 1400 GW, the highest among all renewable energy technologies.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Hydroelectricity generation starts with converting either the potential energy of water that is present due to the site's elevation or the kinetic energy of moving water into electrical energy.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Hydroelectric power plants vary in terms of the way they harvest energy. One type involves a dam and a reservoir. The water in the reservoir is available on demand to be used to generate electricity by passing through channels that connect the dam to the reservoir. The water spins a turbine, which is connected to the generator that produces electricity.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The other type is called a run-of-river plant. In this case, a barrage is built to control the flow of water, absent a reservoir. The run-of river power plant needs continuous water flow and therefore has less ability to provide power on demand. The kinetic energy of flowing water is the main source of energy.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Both designs have limitations. For example, dam construction can result in discomfort to nearby residents. The dam and reservoirs occupy a relatively large amount of space that may be opposed by nearby communities. Moreover, reservoirs can potentially have major environmental consequences such as harming downstream habitats. On the other hand, the limitation of the run-of-river project is the decreased efficiency of electricity generation because the process depends on the speed of the seasonal river flow. This means that the rainy season increases electricity generation compared to the dry season.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The size of hydroelectric plants can vary from small plants called micro hydro, to large plants that supply power to a whole country. As of 2019, the five largest power stations in the world are conventional hydroelectric power stations with dams.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hydroelectricity can also be used to store energy in the form of potential energy between two reservoirs at different heights with pumped-storage. Water is pumped uphill into reservoirs during periods of low demand to be released for generation when demand is high or system generation is low.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Other forms of electricity generation with hydropower include tidal stream generators using energy from tidal power generated from oceans, rivers, and human-made canal systems to generating electricity.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Rain has been referred to as \"one of the last unexploited energy sources in nature. When it rains, billions of litres of water can fall, which have enormous electric potential if used in the right way.\" Research is being done into the different methods of generating power from rain, such as by using the energy in the impact of raindrops. This is in its very early stages with new and emerging technologies being tested, prototyped and created. Such power has been called rain power. One method in which this has been attempted is by using hybrid solar panels called \"all-weather solar panels\" that can generate electricity from both the sun and the rain.",
"title": "Rain power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to zoologist and science and technology educator, Luis Villazon, \"A 2008 French study estimated that you could use piezoelectric devices, which generate power when they move, to extract 12 milliwatts from a raindrop. Over a year, this would amount to less than 0.001kWh per square metre – enough to power a remote sensor.\" Villazon suggested a better application would be to collect the water from fallen rain and use it to drive a turbine, with an estimated energy generation of 3 kWh of energy per year for a 185 m roof. A microturbine-based system created by three students from the Technological University of Mexico has been used to generate electricity. The Pluvia system \"uses the stream of rainwater runoff from houses' rooftop rain gutters to spin a microturbine in a cylindrical housing. Electricity generated by that turbine is used to charge 12-volt batteries.\"",
"title": "Rain power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The term rain power has also been applied to hydropower systems which include the process of capturing the rain.",
"title": "Rain power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Evidence suggests that the fundamentals of hydropower date to ancient Greek civilization. Other evidence indicates that the waterwheel independently emerged in China around the same period. Evidence of water wheels and watermills date to the ancient Near East in the 4th century BC. Moreover, evidence indicates the use of hydropower using irrigation machines to ancient civilizations such as Sumer and Babylonia. Studies suggest that the water wheel was the initial form of water power and it was driven by either humans or animals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In the Roman Empire, water-powered mills were described by Vitruvius by the first century BC. The Barbegal mill, located in modern-day France, had 16 water wheels processing up to 28 tons of grain per day. Roman waterwheels were also used for sawing marble such as the Hierapolis sawmill of the late 3rd century AD. Such sawmills had a waterwheel that drove two crank-and-connecting rods to power two saws. It also appears in two 6th century Eastern Roman sawmills excavated at Ephesus and Gerasa respectively. The crank and connecting rod mechanism of these Roman watermills converted the rotary motion of the waterwheel into the linear movement of the saw blades.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Water-powered trip hammers and bellows in China, during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), were initially thought to be powered by water scoops. However, some historians suggested that they were powered by waterwheels. This is since it was theorized that water scoops would not have had the motive force to operate their blast furnace bellows. Many texts describe the Hun waterwheel; some of the earliest ones are the Jijiupian dictionary of 40 BC, Yang Xiong's text known as the Fangyan of 15 BC, as well as Xin Lun, written by Huan Tan about 20 AD. It was also during this time that the engineer Du Shi (c. AD 31) applied the power of waterwheels to piston-bellows in forging cast iron.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Another example of the early use of hydropower is seen in hushing, a historic method of mining that uses flood or torrent of water to reveal mineral veins. The method was first used at the Dolaucothi Gold Mines in Wales from 75 AD onwards. This method was further developed in Spain in mines such as Las Médulas. Hushing was also widely used in Britain in the Medieval and later periods to extract lead and tin ores. It later evolved into hydraulic mining when used during the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Islamic Empire spanned a large region, mainly in Asia and Africa, along with other surrounding areas. During the Islamic Golden Age and the Arab Agricultural Revolution (8th–13th centuries), hydropower was widely used and developed. Early uses of tidal power emerged along with large hydraulic factory complexes. A wide range of water-powered industrial mills were used in the region including fulling mills, gristmills, paper mills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, sugar mills, and tide mills. By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic Empire had these industrial mills in operation, from Al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslim engineers also used water turbines while employing gears in watermills and water-raising machines. They also pioneered the use of dams as a source of water power, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Furthermore, in his book, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, the Muslim mechanical engineer, Al-Jazari (1136–1206) described designs for 50 devices. Many of these devices were water-powered, including clocks, a device to serve wine, and five devices to lift water from rivers or pools, where three of them are animal-powered and one can be powered by animal or water. Moreover, they included an endless belt with jugs attached, a cow-powered shadoof (a crane-like irrigation tool), and a reciprocating device with hinged valves.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the 19th century, French engineer Benoît Fourneyron developed the first hydropower turbine. This device was implemented in the commercial plant of Niagara Falls in 1895 and it is still operating. In the early 20th century, English engineer William Armstrong built and operated the first private electrical power station which was located in his house in Cragside in Northumberland, England. In 1753, the French engineer Bernard Forest de Bélidor published his book, Architecture Hydraulique, which described vertical-axis and horizontal-axis hydraulic machines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The growing demand for the Industrial Revolution would drive development as well. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, water was the main power source for new inventions such as Richard Arkwright's water frame. Although water power gave way to steam power in many of the larger mills and factories, it was still used during the 18th and 19th centuries for many smaller operations, such as driving the bellows in small blast furnaces (e.g. the Dyfi Furnace) and gristmills, such as those built at Saint Anthony Falls, which uses the 50-foot (15 m) drop in the Mississippi River.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Technological advances moved the open water wheel into an enclosed turbine or water motor. In 1848, the British-American engineer James B. Francis, head engineer of Lowell's Locks and Canals company, improved on these designs to create a turbine with 90% efficiency. He applied scientific principles and testing methods to the problem of turbine design. His mathematical and graphical calculation methods allowed the confident design of high-efficiency turbines to exactly match a site's specific flow conditions. The Francis reaction turbine is still in use. In the 1870s, deriving from uses in the California mining industry, Lester Allan Pelton developed the high-efficiency Pelton wheel impulse turbine, which used hydropower from the high head streams characteristic of the Sierra Nevada.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The modern history of hydropower begins in the 1900s, with large dams built not simply to power neighboring mills or factories but provide extensive electricity for increasingly distant groups of people. Competition drove much of the global hydroelectric craze: Europe competed amongst itself to electrify first, and the United States' hydroelectric plants in Niagara Falls and the Sierra Nevada inspired bigger and bolder creations across the globe. American and USSR financers and hydropower experts also spread the gospel of dams and hydroelectricity across the globe during the Cold War, contributing to projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the Aswan High Dam. Feeding desire for large scale electrification with water inherently required large dams across powerful rivers, which impacted public and private interests downstream and in flood zones. Inevitably smaller communities and marginalized groups suffered. They were unable to successfully resist companies flooding them out of their homes or blocking traditional salmon passages. The stagnant water created by hydroelectric dams provides breeding ground for pests and pathogens, leading to local epidemics. However, in some cases, a mutual need for hydropower could lead to cooperation between otherwise adversarial nations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Hydropower technology and attitude began to shift in the second half of the 20th century. While countries had largely abandoned their small hydropower systems by the 1930s, the smaller hydropower plants began to make a comeback in the 1970s, boosted by government subsidies and a push for more independent energy producers. Some politicians who once advocated for large hydropower projects in the first half of the 20th century began to speak out against them, and citizen groups organizing against dam projects increased.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the 1980s and 90s the international anti-dam movement had made finding government or private investors for new large hydropower projects incredibly difficult, and given rise to NGOs devoted to fighting dams. Additionally, while the cost of other energy sources fell, the cost of building new hydroelectric dams increased 4% annually between 1965 and 1990, due both to the increasing costs of construction and to the decrease in high quality building sites. In the 1990s, only 18% of the world's electricity came from hydropower. Tidal power production also emerged in the 1960s as a burgeoning alternative hydropower system, though still has not taken hold as a strong energy contender.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Especially at the start of the American hydropower experiment, engineers and politicians began major hydroelectricity projects to solve a problem of 'wasted potential' rather than to power a population that needed the electricity. When the Niagara Falls Power Company began looking into damming Niagara, the first major hydroelectric project in the United States, in the 1890s they struggled to transport electricity from the falls far enough away to actually reach enough people and justify installation. The project succeeded in large part due to Nikola Tesla's invention of the alternating current motor. On the other side of the country, San Francisco engineers, the Sierra Club, and the federal government fought over acceptable use of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Despite ostensible protection within a national park, city engineers successfully won the rights to both water and power in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1913. After their victory they delivered Hetch Hetchy hydropower and water to San Francisco a decade later and at twice the promised cost, selling power to PG&E which resold to San Francisco residents at a profit.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The American West, with its mountain rivers and lack of coal, turned to hydropower early and often, especially along the Columbia River and its tributaries. The Bureau of Reclamation built the Hoover Dam in 1931, symbolically linking the job creation and economic growth priorities of the New Deal. The federal government quickly followed Hoover with the Shasta Dam and Grand Coulee Dam. Power demand in Oregon did not justify damming the Columbia until WWI revealed the weaknesses of a coal-based energy economy. The federal government then began prioritizing interconnected power—and lots of it. Electricity from all three dams poured into war production during WWII.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After the war, the Grand Coulee Dam and accompanying hydroelectric projects electrified almost all of the rural Columbia Basin, but failed to improve the lives of those living and farming there the way its boosters had promised and also damaged the river ecosystem and migrating salmon populations. In the 1940s as well, the federal government took advantage of the sheer amount of unused power and flowing water from the Grand Coulee to build a nuclear site placed on the banks of the Columbia. The nuclear site leaked radioactive matter into the river, contaminating the entire area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Post-WWII Americans, especially engineers from the Tennessee Valley Authority, refocused from simply building domestic dams to promoting hydropower abroad. While domestic dam building continued well into the 1970s, with the Reclamation Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers building more than 150 new dams across the American West, organized opposition to hydroelectric dams sparked up in the 1950s and 60s based on environmental concerns. Environmental movements successfully shut down proposed hydropower dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, and gained more hydropower-fighting tools with 1970s environmental legislation. As nuclear and fossil fuels grew in the 70s and 80s and environmental activists push for river restoration, hydropower gradually faded in American importance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Foreign powers and IGOs have frequently used hydropower projects in Africa as a tool to interfere in the economic development of African countries, such as the World Bank with the Kariba and Akosombo Dams, and the Soviet Union with the Aswan Dam. The Nile River especially has borne the consequences of countries both along the Nile and distant foreign actors using the river to expand their economic power or national force. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the British worked with Egypt to construct the first Aswan Dam, which they heightened in 1912 and 1934 to try to hold back the Nile floods. Egyptian engineer Adriano Daninos developed a plan for the Aswan High Dam, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority's multipurpose dam.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in the 1950s, his government decided to undertake the High Dam project, publicizing it as an economic development project. After American refusal to help fund the dam, and anti-British sentiment in Egypt and British interests in neighboring Sudan combined to make the United Kingdom pull out as well, the Soviet Union funded the Aswan High Dam. Between 1977 and 1990 the dam's turbines generated one third of Egypt's electricity. The building of the Aswan Dam triggered a dispute between Sudan and Egypt over the sharing of the Nile, especially since the dam flooded part of Sudan and decreased the volume of water available to them. Ethiopia, also located on the Nile, took advantage of the Cold War tensions to request assistance from the United States for their own irrigation and hydropower investments in the 1960s. While progress stalled due to the coup d'état of 1974 and following 17-year-long Ethiopian Civil War Ethiopia began construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2011.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Beyond the Nile, hydroelectric projects cover the rivers and lakes of Africa. The Inga powerplant on the Congo River had been discussed since Belgian colonization in the late 19th century, and was successfully built after independence. Mobutu's government failed to regularly maintain the plants and their capacity declined until the 1995 formation of the Southern African Power Pool created a multi-national power grid and plant maintenance program. States with an abundance of hydropower, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ghana, frequently sell excess power to neighboring countries. Foreign actors such as Chinese hydropower companies have proposed a significant amount of new hydropower projects in Africa, and already funded and consulted on many others in countries like Mozambique and Ghana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Small hydropower also played an important role in early 20th century electrification across Africa. In South Africa, small turbines powered gold mines and the first electric railway in the 1890s, and Zimbabwean farmers installed small hydropower stations in the 1930s. While interest faded as national grids improved in the second half of the century, 21st century national governments in countries including South Africa and Mozambique, as well as NGOs serving countries like Zimbabwe, have begun re-exploring small-scale hydropower to diversify power sources and improve rural electrification.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In the early 20th century, two major factors motivated the expansion of hydropower in Europe: in the northern countries of Norway and Sweden high rainfall and mountains proved exceptional resources for abundant hydropower, and in the south coal shortages pushed governments and utility companies to seek alternative power sources.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Early on, Switzerland dammed the Alpine rivers and the Swiss Rhine, creating, along with Italy and Scandinavia, a Southern Europe hydropower race. In Italy's Po Valley, the main 20th century transition was not the creation of hydropower but the transition from mechanical to electrical hydropower. 12,000 watermills churned in the Po watershed in the 1890s, but the first commercial hydroelectric plant, completed in 1898, signaled the end of the mechanical reign. These new large plants moved power away from rural mountainous areas to urban centers in the lower plain. Italy prioritized early near-nationwide electrification, almost entirely from hydropower, which powered their rise as a dominant European and imperial force. However, they failed to reach any conclusive standard for determining water rights before WWI.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Modern German hydropower dam construction built off a history of small dams powering mines and mills going back to the 15th century. Some parts of Germany industry even relied more on waterwheels than steam until the 1870s. The German government did not set out building large dams such as the prewar Urft, Mohne, and Eder dams to expand hydropower: they mostly wanted to reduce flooding and improve navigation. However, hydropower quickly emerged as an added bonus for all these dams, especially in the coal-poor south. Bavaria even achieved a statewide power grid by damming the Walchensee in 1924, inspired in part by loss of coal reserves after WWI.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Hydropower became a symbol of regional pride and distaste for northern 'coal barons', although the north also held strong enthusiasm for hydropower. Dam building rapidly increased after WWII, this time with the express purpose of increasing hydropower. However, conflict accompanied the dam building and spread of hydropower: agrarian interests suffered from decreased irrigation, small mills lost water flow, and different interest groups fought over where dams should be located, controlling who benefited and whose homes they drowned.",
"title": "History"
}
]
| Hydropower, also known as water power, is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by converting the gravitational potential or kinetic energy of a water source to produce power. Hydropower is a method of sustainable energy production. Hydropower is now used principally for hydroelectric power generation, and is also applied as one half of an energy storage system known as pumped-storage hydroelectricity. Hydropower is an attractive alternative to fossil fuels as it does not directly produce carbon dioxide or other atmospheric pollutants and it provides a relatively consistent source of power. Nonetheless, it has economic, sociological, and environmental downsides and requires a sufficiently energetic source of water, such as a river or elevated lake. International institutions such as the World Bank view hydropower as a low-carbon means for economic development. Since ancient times, hydropower from watermills has been used as a renewable energy source for irrigation and the operation of mechanical devices, such as gristmills, sawmills, textile mills, trip hammers, dock cranes, domestic lifts, and ore mills. A trompe, which produces compressed air from falling water, is sometimes used to power other machinery at a distance. | 2001-11-04T14:13:44Z | 2023-12-14T10:47:53Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower |
14,076 | Horse breed | A horse breed is a selectively bred population of domesticated horses, often with pedigrees recorded in a breed registry. However, the term is sometimes used in a broader sense to define landrace animals of a common phenotype located within a limited geographic region, or even feral "breeds" that are naturally selected. Depending on definition, hundreds of "breeds" exist today, developed for many different uses. Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods," such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods," developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe.
Horse breeds are groups of horses with distinctive characteristics that are transmitted consistently to their offspring, such as conformation, color, performance ability, or disposition. These inherited traits are usually the result of a combination of natural crosses and artificial selection methods aimed at producing horses for specific tasks. Certain breeds are known for certain talents. For example, Standardbreds are known for their speed in harness racing. Some breeds have been developed through centuries of crossings with other breeds, while others, such as the Morgan horse, originated via a single sire from which all current breed members descend. More than 300 horse breeds exist in the world today.
Modern horse breeds developed in response to a need for "form to function", the necessity to develop certain physical characteristics to perform a certain type of work. Thus, powerful but refined breeds such as the Andalusian or the Lusitano developed in the Iberian peninsula as riding horses that also had a great aptitude for dressage, while heavy draft horses such as the Clydesdale and the Shire developed out of a need to perform demanding farm work and pull heavy wagons. Ponies of all breeds originally developed mainly from the need for a working animal that could fulfill specific local draft and transportation needs while surviving in harsh environments. However, by the 20th century, many pony breeds had Arabian and other blood added to make a more refined pony suitable for riding. Other horse breeds developed specifically for light agricultural work, heavy and light carriage and road work, various equestrian disciplines, or simply as pets.
Horses have been selectively bred since their domestication. However, the concept of purebred bloodstock and a controlled, written breed registry only became of significant importance in modern times. Today, the standards for defining and registration of different breeds vary. Sometimes, purebred horses are called Thoroughbreds, which is incorrect; "Thoroughbred" is a specific breed of horse, while a "purebred" is a horse (or any other animal) with a defined pedigree recognized by a breed registry.
An early example of people who practiced selective horse breeding were the Bedouin, who had a reputation for careful breeding practices, keeping extensive pedigrees of their Arabian horses and placing great value upon pure bloodlines. Though these pedigrees were originally transmitted by an oral tradition, written pedigrees of Arabian horses can be found that date to the 14th century. In the same period of the early Renaissance, the Carthusian monks of southern Spain bred horses and kept meticulous pedigrees of the best bloodstock; the lineage survives to this day in the Andalusian horse. One of the earliest formal registries was General Stud Book for Thoroughbreds, which began in 1791 and traced back to the Arabian stallions imported to England from the Middle East that became the foundation stallions for the breed.
Some breed registries have a closed stud book, where registration is based on pedigree, and no outside animals can gain admittance. For example, a registered Thoroughbred or Arabian must have two registered parents of the same breed.
Other breeds have a partially closed stud book, but still allow certain infusions from other breeds. For example, the modern Appaloosa must have at least one Appaloosa parent, but may also have a Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred, or Arabian parent, so long as the offspring exhibits appropriate color characteristics. The Quarter Horse normally requires both parents to be registered Quarter Horses, but allows "Appendix" registration of horses with one Thoroughbred parent, and the horse may earn its way to full registration by completing certain performance requirements.
Open stud books exist for horse breeds that either have not yet developed a rigorously defined standard phenotype, or for breeds that register animals that conform to an ideal via the process of passing a studbook selection process. Most of the warmblood breeds used in sport horse disciplines have open stud books to varying degrees. While pedigree is considered, outside bloodlines are admitted to the registry if the horses meet the set standard for the registry. These registries usually require a selection process involving judging of an individual animal's quality, performance, and conformation before registration is finalized. A few "registries," particularly some color breed registries, are very open and will allow membership of all horses that meet limited criteria, such as coat color and species, regardless of pedigree or conformation.
Breed registries also differ as to their acceptance or rejection of breeding technology. For example, all Jockey Club Thoroughbred registries require that a registered Thoroughbred be a product of a natural mating, so-called "live cover". A foal born of two Thoroughbred parents, but by means of artificial insemination or embryo transfer, cannot be registered in the Thoroughbred studbook. However, since the advent of DNA testing to verify parentage, most breed registries now allow artificial insemination, embryo transfer, or both. The high value of stallions has helped with the acceptance of these techniques because they allow a stallion to breed more mares with each "collection" and greatly reduce the risk of injury during mating. Cloning of horses is highly controversial, and at the present time most mainstream breed registries will not accept cloned horses, though several cloned horses and mules have been produced. Such restrictions have led to legal challenges in the United States, sometime based on state law and sometimes based on antitrust laws.
Horses can crossbreed with other equine species to produce hybrids. These hybrid types are not breeds, but they resemble breeds in that crosses between certain horse breeds and other equine species produce characteristic offspring. The most common hybrid is the mule, a cross between a "jack" (male donkey) and a mare. A related hybrid, the hinny, is a cross between a stallion and a jenny (female donkey). Most other hybrids involve the zebra (see Zebroid). With rare exceptions, most equine hybrids are sterile and cannot reproduce. A notable exception is hybrid crosses between horses and Equus ferus przewalskii, commonly known as Przewalski's horse. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A horse breed is a selectively bred population of domesticated horses, often with pedigrees recorded in a breed registry. However, the term is sometimes used in a broader sense to define landrace animals of a common phenotype located within a limited geographic region, or even feral \"breeds\" that are naturally selected. Depending on definition, hundreds of \"breeds\" exist today, developed for many different uses. Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited \"hot bloods\" with speed and endurance; \"cold bloods,\" such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and \"warmbloods,\" developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Horse breeds are groups of horses with distinctive characteristics that are transmitted consistently to their offspring, such as conformation, color, performance ability, or disposition. These inherited traits are usually the result of a combination of natural crosses and artificial selection methods aimed at producing horses for specific tasks. Certain breeds are known for certain talents. For example, Standardbreds are known for their speed in harness racing. Some breeds have been developed through centuries of crossings with other breeds, while others, such as the Morgan horse, originated via a single sire from which all current breed members descend. More than 300 horse breeds exist in the world today.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Modern horse breeds developed in response to a need for \"form to function\", the necessity to develop certain physical characteristics to perform a certain type of work. Thus, powerful but refined breeds such as the Andalusian or the Lusitano developed in the Iberian peninsula as riding horses that also had a great aptitude for dressage, while heavy draft horses such as the Clydesdale and the Shire developed out of a need to perform demanding farm work and pull heavy wagons. Ponies of all breeds originally developed mainly from the need for a working animal that could fulfill specific local draft and transportation needs while surviving in harsh environments. However, by the 20th century, many pony breeds had Arabian and other blood added to make a more refined pony suitable for riding. Other horse breeds developed specifically for light agricultural work, heavy and light carriage and road work, various equestrian disciplines, or simply as pets.",
"title": "Origin of breeds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Horses have been selectively bred since their domestication. However, the concept of purebred bloodstock and a controlled, written breed registry only became of significant importance in modern times. Today, the standards for defining and registration of different breeds vary. Sometimes, purebred horses are called Thoroughbreds, which is incorrect; \"Thoroughbred\" is a specific breed of horse, while a \"purebred\" is a horse (or any other animal) with a defined pedigree recognized by a breed registry.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "An early example of people who practiced selective horse breeding were the Bedouin, who had a reputation for careful breeding practices, keeping extensive pedigrees of their Arabian horses and placing great value upon pure bloodlines. Though these pedigrees were originally transmitted by an oral tradition, written pedigrees of Arabian horses can be found that date to the 14th century. In the same period of the early Renaissance, the Carthusian monks of southern Spain bred horses and kept meticulous pedigrees of the best bloodstock; the lineage survives to this day in the Andalusian horse. One of the earliest formal registries was General Stud Book for Thoroughbreds, which began in 1791 and traced back to the Arabian stallions imported to England from the Middle East that became the foundation stallions for the breed.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Some breed registries have a closed stud book, where registration is based on pedigree, and no outside animals can gain admittance. For example, a registered Thoroughbred or Arabian must have two registered parents of the same breed.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Other breeds have a partially closed stud book, but still allow certain infusions from other breeds. For example, the modern Appaloosa must have at least one Appaloosa parent, but may also have a Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred, or Arabian parent, so long as the offspring exhibits appropriate color characteristics. The Quarter Horse normally requires both parents to be registered Quarter Horses, but allows \"Appendix\" registration of horses with one Thoroughbred parent, and the horse may earn its way to full registration by completing certain performance requirements.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Open stud books exist for horse breeds that either have not yet developed a rigorously defined standard phenotype, or for breeds that register animals that conform to an ideal via the process of passing a studbook selection process. Most of the warmblood breeds used in sport horse disciplines have open stud books to varying degrees. While pedigree is considered, outside bloodlines are admitted to the registry if the horses meet the set standard for the registry. These registries usually require a selection process involving judging of an individual animal's quality, performance, and conformation before registration is finalized. A few \"registries,\" particularly some color breed registries, are very open and will allow membership of all horses that meet limited criteria, such as coat color and species, regardless of pedigree or conformation.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Breed registries also differ as to their acceptance or rejection of breeding technology. For example, all Jockey Club Thoroughbred registries require that a registered Thoroughbred be a product of a natural mating, so-called \"live cover\". A foal born of two Thoroughbred parents, but by means of artificial insemination or embryo transfer, cannot be registered in the Thoroughbred studbook. However, since the advent of DNA testing to verify parentage, most breed registries now allow artificial insemination, embryo transfer, or both. The high value of stallions has helped with the acceptance of these techniques because they allow a stallion to breed more mares with each \"collection\" and greatly reduce the risk of injury during mating. Cloning of horses is highly controversial, and at the present time most mainstream breed registries will not accept cloned horses, though several cloned horses and mules have been produced. Such restrictions have led to legal challenges in the United States, sometime based on state law and sometimes based on antitrust laws.",
"title": "Purebreds and registries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Horses can crossbreed with other equine species to produce hybrids. These hybrid types are not breeds, but they resemble breeds in that crosses between certain horse breeds and other equine species produce characteristic offspring. The most common hybrid is the mule, a cross between a \"jack\" (male donkey) and a mare. A related hybrid, the hinny, is a cross between a stallion and a jenny (female donkey). Most other hybrids involve the zebra (see Zebroid). With rare exceptions, most equine hybrids are sterile and cannot reproduce. A notable exception is hybrid crosses between horses and Equus ferus przewalskii, commonly known as Przewalski's horse.",
"title": "Hybrids"
}
]
| A horse breed is a selectively bred population of domesticated horses, often with pedigrees recorded in a breed registry. However, the term is sometimes used in a broader sense to define landrace animals of a common phenotype located within a limited geographic region, or even feral "breeds" that are naturally selected. Depending on definition, hundreds of "breeds" exist today, developed for many different uses. Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods," such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods," developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe. Horse breeds are groups of horses with distinctive characteristics that are transmitted consistently to their offspring, such as conformation, color, performance ability, or disposition. These inherited traits are usually the result of a combination of natural crosses and artificial selection methods aimed at producing horses for specific tasks. Certain breeds are known for certain talents. For example, Standardbreds are known for their speed in harness racing. Some breeds have been developed through centuries of crossings with other breeds, while others, such as the Morgan horse, originated via a single sire from which all current breed members descend. More than 300 horse breeds exist in the world today. | 2001-11-04T21:28:14Z | 2023-11-13T00:34:07Z | [
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14,082 | Horse breeding | Horse breeding is reproduction in horses, and particularly the human-directed process of selective breeding of animals, particularly purebred horses of a given breed. Planned matings can be used to produce specifically desired characteristics in domesticated horses. Furthermore, modern breeding management and technologies can increase the rate of conception, a healthy pregnancy, and successful foaling.
The male parent of a horse, a stallion, is commonly known as the sire and the female parent, the mare, is called the dam. Both are genetically important, as each parent genes can be existent with a 50% probability in the foal. Contrary to popular misuse, "colt" refers to a young male horse only; "filly" is a young female. Though many horse owners may simply breed a family mare to a local stallion in order to produce a companion animal, most professional breeders use selective breeding to produce individuals of a given phenotype, or breed. Alternatively, a breeder could, using individuals of differing phenotypes, create a new breed with specific characteristics.
A horse is "bred" where it is foaled (born). Thus a colt conceived in England but foaled in the United States is regarded as being bred in the US. In some cases, most notably in the Thoroughbred breeding industry, American- and Canadian-bred horses may also be described by the state or province in which they are foaled. Some breeds denote the country, or state, where conception took place as the origin of the foal.
Similarly, the "breeder", is the person who owned or leased the mare at the time of foaling. That individual may not have had anything to do with the mating of the mare. It is important to review each breed registry's rules to determine which applies to any specific foal.
In the horse breeding industry, the term "half-brother" or "half-sister" only describes horses which have the same dam, but different sires. Horses with the same sire but different dams are simply said to be "by the same sire", and no sibling relationship is implied. "Full" (or "own") siblings have both the same dam and the same sire. The terms paternal half-sibling, and maternal half-sibling are also often used. Three-quarter siblings are horses out of the same dam, and are by sires that are either half-brothers (i.e. same dam) or who are by the same sire.
Thoroughbreds and Arabians are also classified through the "distaff" or direct female line, known as their "family" or "tail female" line, tracing back to their taproot foundation bloodstock or the beginning of their respective stud books. The female line of descent always appears at the bottom of a tabulated pedigree and is therefore often known as the bottom line. In addition, the maternal grandfather of a horse has a special term: damsire.
"Linebreeding" technically is the duplication of fourth-generation or more distant ancestors. However, the term is often used more loosely, describing horses with duplication of ancestors closer than the fourth generation. It also is sometimes used as a euphemism for the practice of inbreeding, a practice that is generally frowned upon by horse breeders, though used by some in an attempt to fix certain traits.
The estrous cycle (also spelled oestrous) controls when a mare is sexually receptive toward a stallion, and helps to physically prepare the mare for conception. It generally occurs during the spring and summer months, although some mares may be sexually receptive into the late fall, and is controlled by the photoperiod (length of the day), the cycle first triggered when the days begin to lengthen. The estrous cycle lasts about 19–22 days, with the average being 21 days. As the days shorten, the mare returns to a period when she is not sexually receptive, known as anestrus. Anestrus – occurring in the majority of, but not all, mares – prevents the mare from conceiving in the winter months, as that would result in her foaling during the harshest part of the year, a time when it would be most difficult for the foal to survive.
This cycle contains 2 phases:
Depending on breed, on average, 16% of mares have double ovulations, allowing them to twin, though this does not affect the length of time of estrus or diestrus.
Changes in hormone levels can have great effects on the physical characteristics of the reproductive organs of the mare, thereby preparing, or preventing, her from conceiving.
The cycle is controlled by several hormones which regulate the estrous cycle, the mare's behavior, and the reproductive system of the mare. The cycle begins when the increased day length causes the pineal gland to reduce the levels of melatonin, thereby allowing the hypothalamus to secrete GnRH.
While horses in the wild mate and foal in mid to late spring, in the case of horses domestically bred for competitive purposes, especially horse racing, it is desirable that they be born as close to January 1 in the northern hemisphere or August 1 in the southern hemisphere as possible, so as to be at an advantage in size and maturity when competing against other horses in the same age group. When an early foal is desired, barn managers will put the mare "under lights" by keeping the barn lights on in the winter to simulate a longer day, thus bringing the mare into estrus sooner than she would in nature. Mares signal estrus and ovulation by urination in the presence of a stallion, raising the tail and revealing the vulva. A stallion, approaching with a high head, will usually nicker, nip and nudge the mare, as well as sniff her urine to determine her readiness for mating.
Once fertilized, the oocyte (egg) remains in the oviduct for approximately 5.5 more days, and then descends into the uterus. The initial single cell combination is already dividing and by the time of entry into the uterus, the egg might have already reached the blastocyst stage.
The gestation period lasts for about eleven months, or about 340 days (normal average range 320–370 days). During the early days of pregnancy, the conceptus is mobile, moving about in the uterus until about day 16 when "fixation" occurs. Shortly after fixation, the embryo proper (so called up to about 35 days) will become visible on trans-rectal ultrasound (about day 21) and a heartbeat should be visible by about day 23. After the formation of the endometrial cups and early placentation is initiated (35–40 days of gestation) the terminology changes, and the embryo is referred to as a fetus. True implantation – invasion into the endometrium of any sort – does not occur until about day 35 of pregnancy with the formation of the endometrial cups, and true placentation (formation of the placenta) is not initiated until about day 40-45 and not completed until about 140 days of pregnancy. The fetus's sex can be determined by day 70 of the gestation using ultrasound. Halfway through gestation the fetus is the size of between a rabbit and a beagle. The most dramatic fetal development occurs in the last 3 months of pregnancy when 60% of fetal growth occurs.
Colts are carried on average about 4 days longer than fillies.
Domestic mares receive specific care and nutrition to ensure that they and their foals are healthy. Mares are given vaccinations against diseases such as the Rhinopneumonitis (EHV-1) virus (which can cause miscarriage) as well as vaccines for other conditions that may occur in a given region of the world. Pre-foaling vaccines are recommended 4–6 weeks prior to foaling to maximize the immunoglobulin content of the colostrum in the first milk. Mares are dewormed a few weeks prior to foaling, as the mare is the primary source of parasites for the foal.
Mares can be used for riding or driving during most of their pregnancy. Exercise is healthy, though should be moderated when a mare is heavily in foal. Exercise in excessively high temperatures has been suggested as being detrimental to pregnancy maintenance during the embryonic period; however ambient temperatures encountered during the research were in the region of 100 degrees F and the same results may not be encountered in regions with lower ambient temperatures.
During the first several months of pregnancy, the nutritional requirements do not increase significantly since the rate of growth of the fetus is very slow. However, during this time, the mare may be provided supplemental vitamins and minerals, particularly if forage quality is questionable. During the last 3–4 months of gestation, rapid growth of the fetus increases the mare's nutritional requirements. Energy requirements during these last few months, and during the first few months of lactation are similar to those of a horse in full training. Trace minerals such as copper are extremely important, particularly during the tenth month of pregnancy, for proper skeletal formation. Many feeds designed for pregnant and lactating mares provide the careful balance required of increased protein, increased calories through extra fat as well as vitamins and minerals. Overfeeding the pregnant mare, particularly during early gestation, should be avoided, as excess weight may contribute to difficulties foaling or fetal/foal related problems.
Mares due to foal are usually separated from other horses, both for the benefit of the mare and the safety of the soon-to-be-delivered foal. In addition, separation allows the mare to be monitored more closely by humans for any problems that may occur while giving birth. In the northern hemisphere, a special foaling stall that is large and clutter free is frequently used, particularly by major breeding farms. Originally, this was due in part to a need for protection from the harsh winter climate present when mares foal early in the year, but even in moderate climates, such as Florida, foaling stalls are still common because they allow closer monitoring of mares. Smaller breeders often use a small pen with a large shed for foaling, or they may remove a wall between two box stalls in a small barn to make a large stall. In the milder climates seen in much of the southern hemisphere, most mares foal outside, often in a paddock built specifically for foaling, especially on the larger stud farms. Many stud farms worldwide employ technology to alert human managers when the mare is about to foal, including webcams, closed-circuit television, or assorted types of devices that alert a handler via a remote alarm when a mare lies down in a position to foal.
On the other hand, some breeders, particularly those in remote areas or with extremely large numbers of horses, may allow mares to foal out in a field amongst a herd, but may also see higher rates of foal and mare mortality in doing so.
Most mares foal at night or early in the morning, and prefer to give birth alone when possible. Labor is rapid, often no more than 30 minutes, and from the time the feet of the foal appear to full delivery is often only about 15 to 20 minutes. Once the foal is born, the mare will lick the newborn foal to clean it and help blood circulation. In a very short time, the foal will attempt to stand and get milk from its mother. A foal should stand and nurse within the first hour of life.
To create a bond with her foal, the mare licks and nuzzles the foal, enabling her to distinguish the foal from others. Some mares are aggressive when protecting their foals, and may attack other horses or unfamiliar humans that come near their newborns.
After birth, a foal's navel is dipped in antiseptic to prevent infection. The foal is sometimes given an enema to help clear the meconium from its digestive tract. The newborn is monitored to ensure that it stands and nurses without difficulty. While most horse births happen without complications, many owners have first aid supplies prepared and a veterinarian on call in case of a birthing emergency. People who supervise foaling should also watch the mare to be sure that she passes the placenta in a timely fashion, and that it is complete with no fragments remaining in the uterus. Retained fetal membranes can cause a serious inflammatory condition (endometritis) and/or infection. If the placenta is not removed from the stall after it is passed, a mare will often eat it, an instinct from the wild, where blood would attract predators.
Foals develop rapidly, and within a few hours a wild foal can travel with the herd. In domestic breeding, the foal and dam are usually separated from the herd for a while, but within a few weeks are typically pastured with the other horses. A foal will begin to eat hay, grass and grain alongside the mare at about 4 weeks old; by 10–12 weeks the foal requires more nutrition than the mare's milk can supply. Foals are typically weaned at 4–8 months of age, although in the wild a foal may nurse for a year.
Beyond the appearance and conformation of a specific type of horse, breeders aspire to improve physical performance abilities. This concept, known as matching "form to function," has led to the development of not only different breeds, but also families or bloodlines within breeds that are specialists for excelling at specific tasks.
For example, the Arabian horse of the desert naturally developed speed and endurance to travel long distances and survive in a harsh environment, and domestication by humans added a trainable disposition to the animal's natural abilities. In the meantime, in northern Europe, the locally adapted heavy horse with a thick, warm coat was domesticated and put to work as a farm animal that could pull a plow or wagon. This animal was later adapted through selective breeding to create a strong but rideable animal suitable for the heavily armored knight in warfare.
Then, centuries later, when people in Europe wanted faster horses than could be produced from local horses through simple selective breeding, they imported Arabians and other oriental horses to breed as an outcross to the heavier, local animals. This led to the development of breeds such as the Thoroughbred, a horse taller than the Arabian and faster over the distances of a few miles required of a European race horse or light cavalry horse. Another cross between oriental and European horses produced the Andalusian, a horse developed in Spain that was powerfully built, but extremely nimble and capable of the quick bursts of speed over short distances necessary for certain types of combat as well as for tasks such as bullfighting.
Later, the people who settled America needed a hardy horse that was capable of working with cattle. Thus, Arabians and Thoroughbreds were crossed on Spanish horses, both domesticated animals descended from those brought over by the Conquistadors, and feral horses such as the Mustangs, descended from the Spanish horse, but adapted by natural selection to the ecology and climate of the west. These crosses ultimately produced new breeds such as the American Quarter Horse and the Criollo of Argentina. In Canada, the Canadian Horse descended from the French stock Louis XIV sent to Canada in the late 17th century.[6] The initial shipment, in 1665, consisted of two stallions and twenty mares from the Royal Stables in Normandy and Brittany, the centre of French horse breeding.[7] Only 12 of the 20 mares survived the trip. Two more shipments followed, one in 1667 of 14 horses (mostly mares, but with at least one stallion), and one in 1670 of 11 mares and a stallion. The shipments included a mix of draft horses and light horses, the latter of which included both pacing and trotting horses.[1] The exact origins of all the horses are unknown, although the shipments probably included Bretons, Normans, Arabians, Andalusians and Barbs.
In modern times, these breeds themselves have since been selectively bred to further specialize at certain tasks. One example of this is the American Quarter Horse. Once a general-purpose working ranch horse, different bloodlines now specialize in different events. For example, larger, heavier animals with a very steady attitude are bred to give competitors an advantage in events such as team roping, where a horse has to start and stop quickly, but also must calmly hold a full-grown steer at the end of a rope. On the other hand, for an event known as cutting, where the horse must separate a cow from a herd and prevent it from rejoining the group, the best horses are smaller, quick, alert, athletic and highly trainable. They must learn quickly, have conformation that allows quick stops and fast, low turns, and the best competitors have a certain amount of independent mental ability to anticipate and counter the movement of a cow, popularly known as "cow sense."
Another example is the Thoroughbred. While most representatives of this breed are bred for horse racing, there are also specialized bloodlines suitable as show hunters or show jumpers. The hunter must have a tall, smooth build that allows it to trot and canter smoothly and efficiently. Instead of speed, value is placed on appearance and upon giving the equestrian a comfortable ride, with natural jumping ability that shows bascule and good form.
A show jumper, however, is bred less for overall form and more for power over tall fences, along with speed, scope, and agility. This favors a horse with a good galloping stride, powerful hindquarters that can change speed or direction easily, plus a good shoulder angle and length of neck. A jumper has a more powerful build than either the hunter or the racehorse.
The history of horse breeding goes back millennia. Though the precise date is in dispute, humans could have domesticated the horse as far back as approximately 4500 BCE. However, evidence of planned breeding has a more blurry history. It is well known, for example, that the Romans did breed horses and valued them in their armies, but little is known regarding their breeding and husbandry practices: all that remains are statues and artwork. Mankind has plenty of equestrian statues of Roman emperors, horses are mentioned in the Odyssey by Homer, and hieroglyphics and paintings left behind by Egyptians tell stories of pharaohs hunting elephants from chariots. Nearly nothing is known of what became of the horses they bred for hippodromes, for warfare, or even for farming.
One of the earliest people known to document the breedings of their horses were the Bedouin of the Middle East, the breeders of the Arabian horse. While it is difficult to determine how far back the Bedouin passed on pedigree information via an oral tradition, there were written pedigrees of Arabian horses by CE 1330. The Akhal-Teke of West-Central Asia is another breed with roots in ancient times that was also bred specifically for war and racing. The nomads of the Mongolian steppes bred horses for several thousand years as well, and the Caspian horse is believed to be a very close relative of Ottoman horses from the earliest origins of the Turks in Central Asia.
The types of horse bred varied with culture and with the times. The uses to which a horse was put also determined its qualities, including smooth amblers for riding, fast horses for carrying messengers, heavy horses for plowing and pulling heavy wagons, ponies for hauling cars of ore from mines, packhorses, carriage horses and many others.
Medieval Europe bred large horses specifically for war, called destriers. These horses were the ancestors of the great heavy horses of today, and their size was preferred not simply because of the weight of the armor, but also because a large horse provided more power for the knight's lance. Weighing almost twice as much as a normal riding horse, the destrier was a powerful weapon in battle meant to act like a giant battering ram that could quite literally run down men on an enemy line.
On the other hand, during this same time, lighter horses were bred in northern Africa and the Middle East, where a faster, more agile horse was preferred. The lighter horse suited the raids and battles of desert people, allowing them to outmaneuver rather than overpower the enemy. When Middle Eastern warriors and European knights collided in warfare, the heavy knights were frequently outmaneuvered. The Europeans, however, responded by crossing their native breeds with "oriental" type horses such as the Arabian, Barb, and Turkoman horse This cross-breeding led both to a nimbler war horse, such as today's Andalusian horse, but also created a type of horse known as a Courser, a predecessor to the Thoroughbred, which was used as a message horse.
During the Renaissance, horses were bred not only for war, but for haute ecole riding, derived from the most athletic movements required of a war horse, and popular among the elite nobility of the time. Breeds such as the Lipizzan and the now extinct Neapolitan horse were developed from Spanish-bred horses for this purpose, and also became the preferred mounts of cavalry officers, who were derived mostly from the ranks of the nobility. It was during this time that firearms were developed, and so the light cavalry horse, a faster and quicker war horse, was bred for "shoot and run" tactics rather than the shock action as in the Middle Ages. Fine horses usually had a well muscled, curved neck, slender body, and sweeping mane, as the nobility liked to show off their wealth and breeding in paintings of the era.
After Charles II retook the British throne in 1660, horse racing, which had been banned by Cromwell, was revived. The Thoroughbred was developed 40 years later, bred to be the ultimate racehorse, through the lines of three foundation Arabian stallions and one Turkish horse.
In the 18th century, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo noted the importance of selecting appropriate parentage to achieve desired outcomes of successive generations. Monboddo worked more broadly in the abstract thought of species relationships and evolution of species. The Thoroughbred breeding hub in Lexington, Kentucky was developed in the late 18th century, and became a mainstay in American racehorse breeding.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw more of a need for fine carriage horses in Europe, bringing in the dawn of the warmblood. The warmblood breeds have been exceptionally good at adapting to changing times, and from their carriage horse beginnings they easily transitioned during the 20th century into a sport horse type. Today's warmblood breeds, although still used for competitive driving, are more often seen competing in show jumping or dressage.
The Thoroughbred continues to dominate the horse racing world, although its lines have been more recently used to improve warmblood breeds and to develop sport horses. The French saddle horse is an excellent example as is the Irish Sport Horse, the latter being an unusual combination between a Thoroughbred and a draft breed.
The American Quarter Horse was developed early in the 18th century, mainly for quarter racing (racing ¼ of a mile). Colonists did not have racetracks or any of the trappings of Europe that the earliest Thoroughbreds had at their disposal, so instead the owners of Quarter Horses would run their horses on roads that lead through town as a form of local entertainment. As the USA expanded West, the breed went with settlers as a farm and ranch animal, and "cow sense" was particularly valued: their use for herding cattle increased on rough, dry terrain that often involved sitting in the saddle for long hours.
However, this did not mean that the original ¼-mile races that colonists held ever went out of fashion, so today there are three types: the stock horse type, the racer, and the more recently evolving sport type. The racing type most resembles the finer-boned ancestors of the first racing Quarter Horses, and the type is still used for ¼-mile races. The stock horse type, used in western events and as a farm and patrol animal is bred for a shorter stride, an ability to stop and turn quickly, and an unflappable attitude that remains calm and focused even in the face of an angry charging steer. The first two are still to this day bred to have a combination of explosive speed that exceeds the Thoroughbred on short distances clocked as high as 55 mph, but they still retain the gentle, calm, and kindly temperament of their ancestors that makes them easily handled.
The Canadian horse's origin corresponds to shipments of French horses, some of which came from Louis XIV's own stable and most likely were Baroque horses meant to be gentlemen's mounts. These were ill-suited to farm work and to the hardscrabble life of the New World, so like the Americans, early Canadians crossed their horses with natives escapees. In time they evolved along similar lines as the Quarter Horse to the South as both the US and Canada spread westward and needed a calm and tractable horse versatile enough to carry the farmer's son to school but still capable of running fast and running hard as a cavalry horse, a stockhorse, or a horse to pull a conestoga wagon.
Other horses from North America retained a hint of their mustang origins by being either derived from stock that Native Americans bred that came in a rainbow of color, like the Appaloosa and American Paint Horse. with those East of the Mississippi River increasingly bred to impress and mimic the trends of the upper classes of Europe: The Tennessee Walking Horse and Saddlebred were originally plantation horses bred for their gait and comfortable ride in the saddle as a plantation master would survey his vast lands like an English lord.
Horses were needed for heavy draft and carriage work until replaced by the automobile, truck, and tractor. After this time, draft and carriage horse numbers dropped significantly, though light riding horses remained popular for recreational pursuits. Draft horses today are used on a few small farms, but today are seen mainly for pulling and plowing competitions rather than farm work. Heavy harness horses are now used as an outcross with lighter breeds, such as the Thoroughbred, to produce the modern warmblood breeds popular in sport horse disciplines, particularly at the Olympic level.
Breeding a horse is an endeavor where the owner, particularly of the mare, will usually need to invest considerable time and money. For this reason, a horse owner needs to consider several factors, including:
There are value judgements involved in considering whether an animal is suitable breeding stock, hotly debated by breeders. Additional personal beliefs may come into play when considering a suitable level of care for the mare and ensuing foal, the potential market or use for the foal, and other tangible and intangible benefits to the owner.
If the breeding endeavor is intended to make a profit, there are additional market factors to consider, which may vary considerably from year to year, from breed to breed, and by region of the world. In many cases, the low end of the market is saturated with horses, and the law of supply and demand thus allows little or no profit to be made from breeding unregistered animals or animals of poor quality, even if registered.
The minimum cost of breeding for a mare owner includes the stud fee, and the cost of proper nutrition, management and veterinary care of the mare throughout gestation, parturition, and care of both mare and foal up to the time of weaning. Veterinary expenses may be higher if specialized reproductive technologies are used or health complications occur.
Making a profit in horse breeding is often difficult. While some owners of only a few horses may keep a foal for purely personal enjoyment, many individuals breed horses in hopes of making some money in the process.
A rule of thumb is that a foal intended for sale should be worth three times the cost of the stud fee if it were sold at the moment of birth. From birth forward, the costs of care and training are added to the value of the foal, with a sale price going up accordingly. If the foal wins awards in some form of competition, that may also enhance the price.
On the other hand, without careful thought, foals bred without a potential market for them may wind up being sold at a loss, and in a worst-case scenario, sold for "salvage" value—a euphemism for sale to slaughter as horsemeat.
Therefore, a mare owner must consider their reasons for breeding, asking hard questions of themselves as to whether their motivations are based on either emotion or profit and how realistic those motivations may be.
The stallion should be chosen to complement the mare, with the goal of producing a foal that has the best qualities of both animals, yet avoids having the weaker qualities of either parent. Generally, the stallion should have proven himself in the discipline or sport the mare owner wishes for the "career" of the ensuing foal. Mares should also have a competition record showing that they also have suitable traits, though this does not happen as often.
Some breeders consider the quality of the sire to be more important than the quality of the dam. However, other breeders maintain that the mare is the most important parent. Because stallions can produce far more offspring than mares, a single stallion can have a greater overall impact on a breed. Research from Nagoya University supports the belief that the most important factor affecting a thoroughbred's race performance is the quality of its sire, whereas the effect of the age of its broodmare is negligible. However, the mare may have a greater influence on an individual foal because its physical characteristics influence the developing foal in the womb and the foal also learns habits from its dam when young. Foals may also learn the "language of intimidation and submission" from their dam, and this imprinting may affect the foal's status and rank within the herd. Many times, a mature horse will achieve status in a herd similar to that of its dam; the offspring of dominant mares become dominant themselves.
A purebred horse is usually worth more than a horse of mixed breeding, though this matters more in some disciplines than others. The breed of the horse is sometimes secondary when breeding for a sport horse, but some disciplines may prefer a certain breed or a specific phenotype of horse. Sometimes, purebred bloodlines are an absolute requirement: For example, most racehorses in the world must be recorded with a breed registry in order to race.
Bloodlines are often considered, as some bloodlines are known to cross well with others. If the parents have not yet proven themselves by competition or by producing quality offspring, the bloodlines of the horse are often a good indicator of quality and possible strengths and weaknesses. Some bloodlines are known not only for their athletic ability, but could also carry a conformational or genetic defect, poor temperament, or for a medical problem. Some bloodlines are also fashionable or otherwise marketable, which is an important consideration should the mare owner wish to sell the foal.
Horse breeders also consider conformation, size and temperament. All of these traits are heritable, and will determine if the foal will be a success in its chosen discipline. The offspring, or "get", of a stallion are often excellent indicators of his ability to pass on his characteristics, and the particular traits he actually passes on. Some stallions are fantastic performers but never produce offspring of comparable quality. Others sire fillies of great abilities but not colts. At times, a horse of mediocre ability sires foals of outstanding quality.
Mare owners also look into the question of if the stallion is fertile and has successfully "settled" (i.e. impregnated) mares. A stallion may not be able to breed naturally, or old age may decrease his performance. Mare care boarding fees and semen collection fees can be a major cost.
Breeding a horse can be an expensive endeavor, whether breeding a backyard competition horse or the next Olympic medalist. Costs may include:
Stud fees are determined by the quality of the stallion, his performance record, the performance record of his get (offspring), as well as the sport and general market that the animal is standing for.
The highest stud fees are generally for racing Thoroughbreds, which may charge from two to three thousand dollars for a breeding to a new or unproven stallion, to several hundred thousand dollars for a breeding to a proven producer of stakes winners. Stallions in other disciplines often have stud fees that begin in the range of $1,000 to $3,000, with top contenders who produce champions in certain disciplines able to command as much as $20,000 for one breeding. The lowest stud fees to breed to a grade horse or an animal of low-quality pedigree may only be $100–$200, but there are trade-offs: the horse will probably be unproven, and likely to produce lower-quality offspring than a horse with a stud fee that is in the typical range for quality breeding stock.
As a stallion's career, either performance or breeding, improves, his stud fee tends to increase in proportion. If one or two offspring are especially successful, winning several stakes races or an Olympic medal, the stud fee will generally greatly increase. Younger, unproven stallions will generally have a lower stud fee earlier on in their careers.
To help decrease the risk of financial loss should the mare die or abort the foal while pregnant, many studs have a live foal guarantee (LFG) – also known as "no foal, free return" or "NFFR" - allowing the owner to have a free breeding to their stallion the next year. However, this is not offered for every breeding.
There are two general ways to "cover" or breed the mare:
After the mare is bred or artificially inseminated, she is checked using ultrasound 14–16 days later to see if she "took", and is pregnant. A second check is usually performed at 28 days. If the mare is not pregnant, she may be bred again during her next cycle.
It is considered safe to breed a mare to a stallion of much larger size. Because of the mare's type of placenta and its attachment and blood supply, the foal will be limited in its growth within the uterus to the size of the mare's uterus, but will grow to its genetic potential after it is born. Test breedings have been done with draft horse stallions bred to small mares with no increase in the number of difficult births.
When breeding live cover, the mare is usually boarded at the stud. She may be "teased" several times with a stallion that will not breed to her, usually with the stallion being presented to the mare over a barrier. Her reaction to the teaser, whether hostile or passive, is noted. A mare that is in heat will generally tolerate a teaser (although this is not always the case), and may present herself to him, holding her tail to the side. A veterinarian may also determine if the mare is ready to be bred, by ultrasound or palpating daily to determine if ovulation has occurred. Live cover can also be done in liberty on a paddock or on pasture, although due to safety and efficacy concerns, it is not common at professional breeding farms.
When it has been determined that the mare is ready, both the mare and intended stud will be cleaned. The mare will then be presented to the stallion, usually with one handler controlling the mare and one or more handlers in charge of the stallion. Multiple handlers are preferred, as the mare and stallion can be easily separated should there be any trouble.
The Jockey Club, the organization that oversees the Thoroughbred industry in the United States, requires all registered foals to be bred through live cover. Artificial insemination, listed below, is not permitted. Similar rules apply in other countries, such as Australia.
By contrast, the U.S. standardbred industry allows registered foals to be bred by live cover, or by artificial insemination (AI) with fresh or frozen (not dried) semen. No other artificial fertility treatment is allowed. In addition, foals bred via AI of frozen semen may only be registered if the stallion's sperm was collected during his lifetime, and used no later than the calendar year of his death or castration.
Whereas the various national Thoroughbred associations typically require live cover, by 2009 most horse breeds allowed for the artificial insemination of mares with cooled, frozen or even fresh semen.
Artificial insemination (AI) has several advantages over live cover, and has a very similar conception rate:
A stallion is usually trained to mount a phantom (or dummy) mare, although a live mare may be used, and he is most commonly collected using an artificial vagina (AV) which is heated to simulate the vagina of the mare. The AV has a filter and collection area at one end to capture the semen, which can then be processed in a lab. The semen may be chilled or frozen and shipped to the mare owner or used to breed mares "on-farm". When the mare is in heat, the person inseminating introduces the semen directly into her uterus using a syringe and pipette.
Often an owner does not want to take a valuable competition mare out of training to carry a foal. This presents a problem, as the mare will usually be quite old by the time she is retired from her competitive career, at which time it is more difficult to impregnate her. Other times, a mare may have physical problems that prevent or discourage breeding. However, there are now several options for breeding these mares. These options also allow a mare to produce multiple foals each breeding season, instead of the usual one. Therefore, mares may have an even greater value for breeding.
The world's first cloned horse, Prometea, was born in 2003. Other notable instances of horse cloning are: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Horse breeding is reproduction in horses, and particularly the human-directed process of selective breeding of animals, particularly purebred horses of a given breed. Planned matings can be used to produce specifically desired characteristics in domesticated horses. Furthermore, modern breeding management and technologies can increase the rate of conception, a healthy pregnancy, and successful foaling.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The male parent of a horse, a stallion, is commonly known as the sire and the female parent, the mare, is called the dam. Both are genetically important, as each parent genes can be existent with a 50% probability in the foal. Contrary to popular misuse, \"colt\" refers to a young male horse only; \"filly\" is a young female. Though many horse owners may simply breed a family mare to a local stallion in order to produce a companion animal, most professional breeders use selective breeding to produce individuals of a given phenotype, or breed. Alternatively, a breeder could, using individuals of differing phenotypes, create a new breed with specific characteristics.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A horse is \"bred\" where it is foaled (born). Thus a colt conceived in England but foaled in the United States is regarded as being bred in the US. In some cases, most notably in the Thoroughbred breeding industry, American- and Canadian-bred horses may also be described by the state or province in which they are foaled. Some breeds denote the country, or state, where conception took place as the origin of the foal.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Similarly, the \"breeder\", is the person who owned or leased the mare at the time of foaling. That individual may not have had anything to do with the mating of the mare. It is important to review each breed registry's rules to determine which applies to any specific foal.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the horse breeding industry, the term \"half-brother\" or \"half-sister\" only describes horses which have the same dam, but different sires. Horses with the same sire but different dams are simply said to be \"by the same sire\", and no sibling relationship is implied. \"Full\" (or \"own\") siblings have both the same dam and the same sire. The terms paternal half-sibling, and maternal half-sibling are also often used. Three-quarter siblings are horses out of the same dam, and are by sires that are either half-brothers (i.e. same dam) or who are by the same sire.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Thoroughbreds and Arabians are also classified through the \"distaff\" or direct female line, known as their \"family\" or \"tail female\" line, tracing back to their taproot foundation bloodstock or the beginning of their respective stud books. The female line of descent always appears at the bottom of a tabulated pedigree and is therefore often known as the bottom line. In addition, the maternal grandfather of a horse has a special term: damsire.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "\"Linebreeding\" technically is the duplication of fourth-generation or more distant ancestors. However, the term is often used more loosely, describing horses with duplication of ancestors closer than the fourth generation. It also is sometimes used as a euphemism for the practice of inbreeding, a practice that is generally frowned upon by horse breeders, though used by some in an attempt to fix certain traits.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The estrous cycle (also spelled oestrous) controls when a mare is sexually receptive toward a stallion, and helps to physically prepare the mare for conception. It generally occurs during the spring and summer months, although some mares may be sexually receptive into the late fall, and is controlled by the photoperiod (length of the day), the cycle first triggered when the days begin to lengthen. The estrous cycle lasts about 19–22 days, with the average being 21 days. As the days shorten, the mare returns to a period when she is not sexually receptive, known as anestrus. Anestrus – occurring in the majority of, but not all, mares – prevents the mare from conceiving in the winter months, as that would result in her foaling during the harshest part of the year, a time when it would be most difficult for the foal to survive.",
"title": "Estrous cycle of the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "This cycle contains 2 phases:",
"title": "Estrous cycle of the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Depending on breed, on average, 16% of mares have double ovulations, allowing them to twin, though this does not affect the length of time of estrus or diestrus.",
"title": "Estrous cycle of the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Changes in hormone levels can have great effects on the physical characteristics of the reproductive organs of the mare, thereby preparing, or preventing, her from conceiving.",
"title": "Estrous cycle of the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The cycle is controlled by several hormones which regulate the estrous cycle, the mare's behavior, and the reproductive system of the mare. The cycle begins when the increased day length causes the pineal gland to reduce the levels of melatonin, thereby allowing the hypothalamus to secrete GnRH.",
"title": "Estrous cycle of the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "While horses in the wild mate and foal in mid to late spring, in the case of horses domestically bred for competitive purposes, especially horse racing, it is desirable that they be born as close to January 1 in the northern hemisphere or August 1 in the southern hemisphere as possible, so as to be at an advantage in size and maturity when competing against other horses in the same age group. When an early foal is desired, barn managers will put the mare \"under lights\" by keeping the barn lights on in the winter to simulate a longer day, thus bringing the mare into estrus sooner than she would in nature. Mares signal estrus and ovulation by urination in the presence of a stallion, raising the tail and revealing the vulva. A stallion, approaching with a high head, will usually nicker, nip and nudge the mare, as well as sniff her urine to determine her readiness for mating.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Once fertilized, the oocyte (egg) remains in the oviduct for approximately 5.5 more days, and then descends into the uterus. The initial single cell combination is already dividing and by the time of entry into the uterus, the egg might have already reached the blastocyst stage.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The gestation period lasts for about eleven months, or about 340 days (normal average range 320–370 days). During the early days of pregnancy, the conceptus is mobile, moving about in the uterus until about day 16 when \"fixation\" occurs. Shortly after fixation, the embryo proper (so called up to about 35 days) will become visible on trans-rectal ultrasound (about day 21) and a heartbeat should be visible by about day 23. After the formation of the endometrial cups and early placentation is initiated (35–40 days of gestation) the terminology changes, and the embryo is referred to as a fetus. True implantation – invasion into the endometrium of any sort – does not occur until about day 35 of pregnancy with the formation of the endometrial cups, and true placentation (formation of the placenta) is not initiated until about day 40-45 and not completed until about 140 days of pregnancy. The fetus's sex can be determined by day 70 of the gestation using ultrasound. Halfway through gestation the fetus is the size of between a rabbit and a beagle. The most dramatic fetal development occurs in the last 3 months of pregnancy when 60% of fetal growth occurs.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Colts are carried on average about 4 days longer than fillies.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Domestic mares receive specific care and nutrition to ensure that they and their foals are healthy. Mares are given vaccinations against diseases such as the Rhinopneumonitis (EHV-1) virus (which can cause miscarriage) as well as vaccines for other conditions that may occur in a given region of the world. Pre-foaling vaccines are recommended 4–6 weeks prior to foaling to maximize the immunoglobulin content of the colostrum in the first milk. Mares are dewormed a few weeks prior to foaling, as the mare is the primary source of parasites for the foal.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Mares can be used for riding or driving during most of their pregnancy. Exercise is healthy, though should be moderated when a mare is heavily in foal. Exercise in excessively high temperatures has been suggested as being detrimental to pregnancy maintenance during the embryonic period; however ambient temperatures encountered during the research were in the region of 100 degrees F and the same results may not be encountered in regions with lower ambient temperatures.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "During the first several months of pregnancy, the nutritional requirements do not increase significantly since the rate of growth of the fetus is very slow. However, during this time, the mare may be provided supplemental vitamins and minerals, particularly if forage quality is questionable. During the last 3–4 months of gestation, rapid growth of the fetus increases the mare's nutritional requirements. Energy requirements during these last few months, and during the first few months of lactation are similar to those of a horse in full training. Trace minerals such as copper are extremely important, particularly during the tenth month of pregnancy, for proper skeletal formation. Many feeds designed for pregnant and lactating mares provide the careful balance required of increased protein, increased calories through extra fat as well as vitamins and minerals. Overfeeding the pregnant mare, particularly during early gestation, should be avoided, as excess weight may contribute to difficulties foaling or fetal/foal related problems.",
"title": "Breeding and gestation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mares due to foal are usually separated from other horses, both for the benefit of the mare and the safety of the soon-to-be-delivered foal. In addition, separation allows the mare to be monitored more closely by humans for any problems that may occur while giving birth. In the northern hemisphere, a special foaling stall that is large and clutter free is frequently used, particularly by major breeding farms. Originally, this was due in part to a need for protection from the harsh winter climate present when mares foal early in the year, but even in moderate climates, such as Florida, foaling stalls are still common because they allow closer monitoring of mares. Smaller breeders often use a small pen with a large shed for foaling, or they may remove a wall between two box stalls in a small barn to make a large stall. In the milder climates seen in much of the southern hemisphere, most mares foal outside, often in a paddock built specifically for foaling, especially on the larger stud farms. Many stud farms worldwide employ technology to alert human managers when the mare is about to foal, including webcams, closed-circuit television, or assorted types of devices that alert a handler via a remote alarm when a mare lies down in a position to foal.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On the other hand, some breeders, particularly those in remote areas or with extremely large numbers of horses, may allow mares to foal out in a field amongst a herd, but may also see higher rates of foal and mare mortality in doing so.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Most mares foal at night or early in the morning, and prefer to give birth alone when possible. Labor is rapid, often no more than 30 minutes, and from the time the feet of the foal appear to full delivery is often only about 15 to 20 minutes. Once the foal is born, the mare will lick the newborn foal to clean it and help blood circulation. In a very short time, the foal will attempt to stand and get milk from its mother. A foal should stand and nurse within the first hour of life.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "To create a bond with her foal, the mare licks and nuzzles the foal, enabling her to distinguish the foal from others. Some mares are aggressive when protecting their foals, and may attack other horses or unfamiliar humans that come near their newborns.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After birth, a foal's navel is dipped in antiseptic to prevent infection. The foal is sometimes given an enema to help clear the meconium from its digestive tract. The newborn is monitored to ensure that it stands and nurses without difficulty. While most horse births happen without complications, many owners have first aid supplies prepared and a veterinarian on call in case of a birthing emergency. People who supervise foaling should also watch the mare to be sure that she passes the placenta in a timely fashion, and that it is complete with no fragments remaining in the uterus. Retained fetal membranes can cause a serious inflammatory condition (endometritis) and/or infection. If the placenta is not removed from the stall after it is passed, a mare will often eat it, an instinct from the wild, where blood would attract predators.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Foals develop rapidly, and within a few hours a wild foal can travel with the herd. In domestic breeding, the foal and dam are usually separated from the herd for a while, but within a few weeks are typically pastured with the other horses. A foal will begin to eat hay, grass and grain alongside the mare at about 4 weeks old; by 10–12 weeks the foal requires more nutrition than the mare's milk can supply. Foals are typically weaned at 4–8 months of age, although in the wild a foal may nurse for a year.",
"title": "Foaling"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Beyond the appearance and conformation of a specific type of horse, breeders aspire to improve physical performance abilities. This concept, known as matching \"form to function,\" has led to the development of not only different breeds, but also families or bloodlines within breeds that are specialists for excelling at specific tasks.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "For example, the Arabian horse of the desert naturally developed speed and endurance to travel long distances and survive in a harsh environment, and domestication by humans added a trainable disposition to the animal's natural abilities. In the meantime, in northern Europe, the locally adapted heavy horse with a thick, warm coat was domesticated and put to work as a farm animal that could pull a plow or wagon. This animal was later adapted through selective breeding to create a strong but rideable animal suitable for the heavily armored knight in warfare.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Then, centuries later, when people in Europe wanted faster horses than could be produced from local horses through simple selective breeding, they imported Arabians and other oriental horses to breed as an outcross to the heavier, local animals. This led to the development of breeds such as the Thoroughbred, a horse taller than the Arabian and faster over the distances of a few miles required of a European race horse or light cavalry horse. Another cross between oriental and European horses produced the Andalusian, a horse developed in Spain that was powerfully built, but extremely nimble and capable of the quick bursts of speed over short distances necessary for certain types of combat as well as for tasks such as bullfighting.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Later, the people who settled America needed a hardy horse that was capable of working with cattle. Thus, Arabians and Thoroughbreds were crossed on Spanish horses, both domesticated animals descended from those brought over by the Conquistadors, and feral horses such as the Mustangs, descended from the Spanish horse, but adapted by natural selection to the ecology and climate of the west. These crosses ultimately produced new breeds such as the American Quarter Horse and the Criollo of Argentina. In Canada, the Canadian Horse descended from the French stock Louis XIV sent to Canada in the late 17th century.[6] The initial shipment, in 1665, consisted of two stallions and twenty mares from the Royal Stables in Normandy and Brittany, the centre of French horse breeding.[7] Only 12 of the 20 mares survived the trip. Two more shipments followed, one in 1667 of 14 horses (mostly mares, but with at least one stallion), and one in 1670 of 11 mares and a stallion. The shipments included a mix of draft horses and light horses, the latter of which included both pacing and trotting horses.[1] The exact origins of all the horses are unknown, although the shipments probably included Bretons, Normans, Arabians, Andalusians and Barbs.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In modern times, these breeds themselves have since been selectively bred to further specialize at certain tasks. One example of this is the American Quarter Horse. Once a general-purpose working ranch horse, different bloodlines now specialize in different events. For example, larger, heavier animals with a very steady attitude are bred to give competitors an advantage in events such as team roping, where a horse has to start and stop quickly, but also must calmly hold a full-grown steer at the end of a rope. On the other hand, for an event known as cutting, where the horse must separate a cow from a herd and prevent it from rejoining the group, the best horses are smaller, quick, alert, athletic and highly trainable. They must learn quickly, have conformation that allows quick stops and fast, low turns, and the best competitors have a certain amount of independent mental ability to anticipate and counter the movement of a cow, popularly known as \"cow sense.\"",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Another example is the Thoroughbred. While most representatives of this breed are bred for horse racing, there are also specialized bloodlines suitable as show hunters or show jumpers. The hunter must have a tall, smooth build that allows it to trot and canter smoothly and efficiently. Instead of speed, value is placed on appearance and upon giving the equestrian a comfortable ride, with natural jumping ability that shows bascule and good form.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A show jumper, however, is bred less for overall form and more for power over tall fences, along with speed, scope, and agility. This favors a horse with a good galloping stride, powerful hindquarters that can change speed or direction easily, plus a good shoulder angle and length of neck. A jumper has a more powerful build than either the hunter or the racehorse.",
"title": "How breeds develop"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The history of horse breeding goes back millennia. Though the precise date is in dispute, humans could have domesticated the horse as far back as approximately 4500 BCE. However, evidence of planned breeding has a more blurry history. It is well known, for example, that the Romans did breed horses and valued them in their armies, but little is known regarding their breeding and husbandry practices: all that remains are statues and artwork. Mankind has plenty of equestrian statues of Roman emperors, horses are mentioned in the Odyssey by Homer, and hieroglyphics and paintings left behind by Egyptians tell stories of pharaohs hunting elephants from chariots. Nearly nothing is known of what became of the horses they bred for hippodromes, for warfare, or even for farming.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "One of the earliest people known to document the breedings of their horses were the Bedouin of the Middle East, the breeders of the Arabian horse. While it is difficult to determine how far back the Bedouin passed on pedigree information via an oral tradition, there were written pedigrees of Arabian horses by CE 1330. The Akhal-Teke of West-Central Asia is another breed with roots in ancient times that was also bred specifically for war and racing. The nomads of the Mongolian steppes bred horses for several thousand years as well, and the Caspian horse is believed to be a very close relative of Ottoman horses from the earliest origins of the Turks in Central Asia.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The types of horse bred varied with culture and with the times. The uses to which a horse was put also determined its qualities, including smooth amblers for riding, fast horses for carrying messengers, heavy horses for plowing and pulling heavy wagons, ponies for hauling cars of ore from mines, packhorses, carriage horses and many others.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Medieval Europe bred large horses specifically for war, called destriers. These horses were the ancestors of the great heavy horses of today, and their size was preferred not simply because of the weight of the armor, but also because a large horse provided more power for the knight's lance. Weighing almost twice as much as a normal riding horse, the destrier was a powerful weapon in battle meant to act like a giant battering ram that could quite literally run down men on an enemy line.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On the other hand, during this same time, lighter horses were bred in northern Africa and the Middle East, where a faster, more agile horse was preferred. The lighter horse suited the raids and battles of desert people, allowing them to outmaneuver rather than overpower the enemy. When Middle Eastern warriors and European knights collided in warfare, the heavy knights were frequently outmaneuvered. The Europeans, however, responded by crossing their native breeds with \"oriental\" type horses such as the Arabian, Barb, and Turkoman horse This cross-breeding led both to a nimbler war horse, such as today's Andalusian horse, but also created a type of horse known as a Courser, a predecessor to the Thoroughbred, which was used as a message horse.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "During the Renaissance, horses were bred not only for war, but for haute ecole riding, derived from the most athletic movements required of a war horse, and popular among the elite nobility of the time. Breeds such as the Lipizzan and the now extinct Neapolitan horse were developed from Spanish-bred horses for this purpose, and also became the preferred mounts of cavalry officers, who were derived mostly from the ranks of the nobility. It was during this time that firearms were developed, and so the light cavalry horse, a faster and quicker war horse, was bred for \"shoot and run\" tactics rather than the shock action as in the Middle Ages. Fine horses usually had a well muscled, curved neck, slender body, and sweeping mane, as the nobility liked to show off their wealth and breeding in paintings of the era.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After Charles II retook the British throne in 1660, horse racing, which had been banned by Cromwell, was revived. The Thoroughbred was developed 40 years later, bred to be the ultimate racehorse, through the lines of three foundation Arabian stallions and one Turkish horse.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the 18th century, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo noted the importance of selecting appropriate parentage to achieve desired outcomes of successive generations. Monboddo worked more broadly in the abstract thought of species relationships and evolution of species. The Thoroughbred breeding hub in Lexington, Kentucky was developed in the late 18th century, and became a mainstay in American racehorse breeding.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The 17th and 18th centuries saw more of a need for fine carriage horses in Europe, bringing in the dawn of the warmblood. The warmblood breeds have been exceptionally good at adapting to changing times, and from their carriage horse beginnings they easily transitioned during the 20th century into a sport horse type. Today's warmblood breeds, although still used for competitive driving, are more often seen competing in show jumping or dressage.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Thoroughbred continues to dominate the horse racing world, although its lines have been more recently used to improve warmblood breeds and to develop sport horses. The French saddle horse is an excellent example as is the Irish Sport Horse, the latter being an unusual combination between a Thoroughbred and a draft breed.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The American Quarter Horse was developed early in the 18th century, mainly for quarter racing (racing ¼ of a mile). Colonists did not have racetracks or any of the trappings of Europe that the earliest Thoroughbreds had at their disposal, so instead the owners of Quarter Horses would run their horses on roads that lead through town as a form of local entertainment. As the USA expanded West, the breed went with settlers as a farm and ranch animal, and \"cow sense\" was particularly valued: their use for herding cattle increased on rough, dry terrain that often involved sitting in the saddle for long hours.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "However, this did not mean that the original ¼-mile races that colonists held ever went out of fashion, so today there are three types: the stock horse type, the racer, and the more recently evolving sport type. The racing type most resembles the finer-boned ancestors of the first racing Quarter Horses, and the type is still used for ¼-mile races. The stock horse type, used in western events and as a farm and patrol animal is bred for a shorter stride, an ability to stop and turn quickly, and an unflappable attitude that remains calm and focused even in the face of an angry charging steer. The first two are still to this day bred to have a combination of explosive speed that exceeds the Thoroughbred on short distances clocked as high as 55 mph, but they still retain the gentle, calm, and kindly temperament of their ancestors that makes them easily handled.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Canadian horse's origin corresponds to shipments of French horses, some of which came from Louis XIV's own stable and most likely were Baroque horses meant to be gentlemen's mounts. These were ill-suited to farm work and to the hardscrabble life of the New World, so like the Americans, early Canadians crossed their horses with natives escapees. In time they evolved along similar lines as the Quarter Horse to the South as both the US and Canada spread westward and needed a calm and tractable horse versatile enough to carry the farmer's son to school but still capable of running fast and running hard as a cavalry horse, a stockhorse, or a horse to pull a conestoga wagon.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Other horses from North America retained a hint of their mustang origins by being either derived from stock that Native Americans bred that came in a rainbow of color, like the Appaloosa and American Paint Horse. with those East of the Mississippi River increasingly bred to impress and mimic the trends of the upper classes of Europe: The Tennessee Walking Horse and Saddlebred were originally plantation horses bred for their gait and comfortable ride in the saddle as a plantation master would survey his vast lands like an English lord.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Horses were needed for heavy draft and carriage work until replaced by the automobile, truck, and tractor. After this time, draft and carriage horse numbers dropped significantly, though light riding horses remained popular for recreational pursuits. Draft horses today are used on a few small farms, but today are seen mainly for pulling and plowing competitions rather than farm work. Heavy harness horses are now used as an outcross with lighter breeds, such as the Thoroughbred, to produce the modern warmblood breeds popular in sport horse disciplines, particularly at the Olympic level.",
"title": "History of horse breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Breeding a horse is an endeavor where the owner, particularly of the mare, will usually need to invest considerable time and money. For this reason, a horse owner needs to consider several factors, including:",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "There are value judgements involved in considering whether an animal is suitable breeding stock, hotly debated by breeders. Additional personal beliefs may come into play when considering a suitable level of care for the mare and ensuing foal, the potential market or use for the foal, and other tangible and intangible benefits to the owner.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "If the breeding endeavor is intended to make a profit, there are additional market factors to consider, which may vary considerably from year to year, from breed to breed, and by region of the world. In many cases, the low end of the market is saturated with horses, and the law of supply and demand thus allows little or no profit to be made from breeding unregistered animals or animals of poor quality, even if registered.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The minimum cost of breeding for a mare owner includes the stud fee, and the cost of proper nutrition, management and veterinary care of the mare throughout gestation, parturition, and care of both mare and foal up to the time of weaning. Veterinary expenses may be higher if specialized reproductive technologies are used or health complications occur.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Making a profit in horse breeding is often difficult. While some owners of only a few horses may keep a foal for purely personal enjoyment, many individuals breed horses in hopes of making some money in the process.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "A rule of thumb is that a foal intended for sale should be worth three times the cost of the stud fee if it were sold at the moment of birth. From birth forward, the costs of care and training are added to the value of the foal, with a sale price going up accordingly. If the foal wins awards in some form of competition, that may also enhance the price.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On the other hand, without careful thought, foals bred without a potential market for them may wind up being sold at a loss, and in a worst-case scenario, sold for \"salvage\" value—a euphemism for sale to slaughter as horsemeat.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Therefore, a mare owner must consider their reasons for breeding, asking hard questions of themselves as to whether their motivations are based on either emotion or profit and how realistic those motivations may be.",
"title": "Deciding to breed a horse"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The stallion should be chosen to complement the mare, with the goal of producing a foal that has the best qualities of both animals, yet avoids having the weaker qualities of either parent. Generally, the stallion should have proven himself in the discipline or sport the mare owner wishes for the \"career\" of the ensuing foal. Mares should also have a competition record showing that they also have suitable traits, though this does not happen as often.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Some breeders consider the quality of the sire to be more important than the quality of the dam. However, other breeders maintain that the mare is the most important parent. Because stallions can produce far more offspring than mares, a single stallion can have a greater overall impact on a breed. Research from Nagoya University supports the belief that the most important factor affecting a thoroughbred's race performance is the quality of its sire, whereas the effect of the age of its broodmare is negligible. However, the mare may have a greater influence on an individual foal because its physical characteristics influence the developing foal in the womb and the foal also learns habits from its dam when young. Foals may also learn the \"language of intimidation and submission\" from their dam, and this imprinting may affect the foal's status and rank within the herd. Many times, a mature horse will achieve status in a herd similar to that of its dam; the offspring of dominant mares become dominant themselves.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A purebred horse is usually worth more than a horse of mixed breeding, though this matters more in some disciplines than others. The breed of the horse is sometimes secondary when breeding for a sport horse, but some disciplines may prefer a certain breed or a specific phenotype of horse. Sometimes, purebred bloodlines are an absolute requirement: For example, most racehorses in the world must be recorded with a breed registry in order to race.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Bloodlines are often considered, as some bloodlines are known to cross well with others. If the parents have not yet proven themselves by competition or by producing quality offspring, the bloodlines of the horse are often a good indicator of quality and possible strengths and weaknesses. Some bloodlines are known not only for their athletic ability, but could also carry a conformational or genetic defect, poor temperament, or for a medical problem. Some bloodlines are also fashionable or otherwise marketable, which is an important consideration should the mare owner wish to sell the foal.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Horse breeders also consider conformation, size and temperament. All of these traits are heritable, and will determine if the foal will be a success in its chosen discipline. The offspring, or \"get\", of a stallion are often excellent indicators of his ability to pass on his characteristics, and the particular traits he actually passes on. Some stallions are fantastic performers but never produce offspring of comparable quality. Others sire fillies of great abilities but not colts. At times, a horse of mediocre ability sires foals of outstanding quality.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Mare owners also look into the question of if the stallion is fertile and has successfully \"settled\" (i.e. impregnated) mares. A stallion may not be able to breed naturally, or old age may decrease his performance. Mare care boarding fees and semen collection fees can be a major cost.",
"title": "Choosing breeding stock"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Breeding a horse can be an expensive endeavor, whether breeding a backyard competition horse or the next Olympic medalist. Costs may include:",
"title": "Costs related to breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Stud fees are determined by the quality of the stallion, his performance record, the performance record of his get (offspring), as well as the sport and general market that the animal is standing for.",
"title": "Costs related to breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The highest stud fees are generally for racing Thoroughbreds, which may charge from two to three thousand dollars for a breeding to a new or unproven stallion, to several hundred thousand dollars for a breeding to a proven producer of stakes winners. Stallions in other disciplines often have stud fees that begin in the range of $1,000 to $3,000, with top contenders who produce champions in certain disciplines able to command as much as $20,000 for one breeding. The lowest stud fees to breed to a grade horse or an animal of low-quality pedigree may only be $100–$200, but there are trade-offs: the horse will probably be unproven, and likely to produce lower-quality offspring than a horse with a stud fee that is in the typical range for quality breeding stock.",
"title": "Costs related to breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "As a stallion's career, either performance or breeding, improves, his stud fee tends to increase in proportion. If one or two offspring are especially successful, winning several stakes races or an Olympic medal, the stud fee will generally greatly increase. Younger, unproven stallions will generally have a lower stud fee earlier on in their careers.",
"title": "Costs related to breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "To help decrease the risk of financial loss should the mare die or abort the foal while pregnant, many studs have a live foal guarantee (LFG) – also known as \"no foal, free return\" or \"NFFR\" - allowing the owner to have a free breeding to their stallion the next year. However, this is not offered for every breeding.",
"title": "Costs related to breeding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "There are two general ways to \"cover\" or breed the mare:",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "After the mare is bred or artificially inseminated, she is checked using ultrasound 14–16 days later to see if she \"took\", and is pregnant. A second check is usually performed at 28 days. If the mare is not pregnant, she may be bred again during her next cycle.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "It is considered safe to breed a mare to a stallion of much larger size. Because of the mare's type of placenta and its attachment and blood supply, the foal will be limited in its growth within the uterus to the size of the mare's uterus, but will grow to its genetic potential after it is born. Test breedings have been done with draft horse stallions bred to small mares with no increase in the number of difficult births.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "When breeding live cover, the mare is usually boarded at the stud. She may be \"teased\" several times with a stallion that will not breed to her, usually with the stallion being presented to the mare over a barrier. Her reaction to the teaser, whether hostile or passive, is noted. A mare that is in heat will generally tolerate a teaser (although this is not always the case), and may present herself to him, holding her tail to the side. A veterinarian may also determine if the mare is ready to be bred, by ultrasound or palpating daily to determine if ovulation has occurred. Live cover can also be done in liberty on a paddock or on pasture, although due to safety and efficacy concerns, it is not common at professional breeding farms.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "When it has been determined that the mare is ready, both the mare and intended stud will be cleaned. The mare will then be presented to the stallion, usually with one handler controlling the mare and one or more handlers in charge of the stallion. Multiple handlers are preferred, as the mare and stallion can be easily separated should there be any trouble.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Jockey Club, the organization that oversees the Thoroughbred industry in the United States, requires all registered foals to be bred through live cover. Artificial insemination, listed below, is not permitted. Similar rules apply in other countries, such as Australia.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "By contrast, the U.S. standardbred industry allows registered foals to be bred by live cover, or by artificial insemination (AI) with fresh or frozen (not dried) semen. No other artificial fertility treatment is allowed. In addition, foals bred via AI of frozen semen may only be registered if the stallion's sperm was collected during his lifetime, and used no later than the calendar year of his death or castration.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Whereas the various national Thoroughbred associations typically require live cover, by 2009 most horse breeds allowed for the artificial insemination of mares with cooled, frozen or even fresh semen.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Artificial insemination (AI) has several advantages over live cover, and has a very similar conception rate:",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "A stallion is usually trained to mount a phantom (or dummy) mare, although a live mare may be used, and he is most commonly collected using an artificial vagina (AV) which is heated to simulate the vagina of the mare. The AV has a filter and collection area at one end to capture the semen, which can then be processed in a lab. The semen may be chilled or frozen and shipped to the mare owner or used to breed mares \"on-farm\". When the mare is in heat, the person inseminating introduces the semen directly into her uterus using a syringe and pipette.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Often an owner does not want to take a valuable competition mare out of training to carry a foal. This presents a problem, as the mare will usually be quite old by the time she is retired from her competitive career, at which time it is more difficult to impregnate her. Other times, a mare may have physical problems that prevent or discourage breeding. However, there are now several options for breeding these mares. These options also allow a mare to produce multiple foals each breeding season, instead of the usual one. Therefore, mares may have an even greater value for breeding.",
"title": "Covering the mare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The world's first cloned horse, Prometea, was born in 2003. Other notable instances of horse cloning are:",
"title": "Covering the mare"
}
]
| Horse breeding is reproduction in horses, and particularly the human-directed process of selective breeding of animals, particularly purebred horses of a given breed. Planned matings can be used to produce specifically desired characteristics in domesticated horses. Furthermore, modern breeding management and technologies can increase the rate of conception, a healthy pregnancy, and successful foaling. | 2001-11-05T19:45:01Z | 2023-11-28T06:30:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_breeding |
14,084 | Heterosexuality | Heterosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between people of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to people of the opposite sex; it "also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions." Someone who is heterosexual is commonly referred to as straight.
Along with bisexuality and homosexuality, heterosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation within the heterosexual–homosexual continuum. Across cultures, most people are heterosexual, and heterosexual activity is by far the most common type of sexual activity.
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is caused by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, and do not view it as a choice. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, scientists favor biologically-based theories. There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males.
The term heterosexual or heterosexuality is usually applied to humans, but heterosexual behavior is observed in all other mammals and in other animals, as it is necessary for sexual reproduction.
Hetero- comes from the Greek word ἕτερος [héteros], meaning "other party" or "another", used in science as a prefix meaning "different"; and the Latin word for sex (that is, characteristic sex or sexual differentiation).
The current use of the term heterosexual has its roots in the broader 19th century tradition of personality taxonomy. The term heterosexual was coined alongside the word homosexual by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869. The terms were not in current use during the late nineteenth century, but were reintroduced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll around 1890. The noun came into wider use from the early 1920s, but did not enter common use until the 1960s. The colloquial shortening "hetero" is attested from 1933. The abstract noun "heterosexuality" is first recorded in 1900. The word "heterosexual" was listed in Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary in 1923 as a medical term for "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex"; however, in 1934 in their Second Edition Unabridged it is defined as a "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality".
In LGBT slang, the term breeder has been used as a denigrating phrase to deride heterosexuals. Hyponyms of heterosexual include heteroflexible.
The word can be informally shortened to "hetero". The term straight originated as a mid-20th century gay slang term for heterosexuals, ultimately coming from the phrase "to go straight" (as in "straight and narrow"), or stop engaging in homosexual sex. One of the first uses of the word in this way was in 1941 by author G. W. Henry. Henry's book concerned conversations with homosexual males and used this term in connection with people who are identified as ex-gays. It is now simply a colloquial term for "heterosexual", having changed in primary meaning over time. Some object to usage of the term straight because it implies that non-heterosexual people are crooked.
In their 2016 literature review, Bailey et al. stated that they "expect that in all cultures the vast majority of individuals are sexually predisposed exclusively to the other sex (i.e., heterosexual)" and that there is no persuasive evidence that the demographics of sexual orientation have varied much across time or place. Heterosexual activity between only one male and one female is by far the most common type of sociosexual activity.
According to several major studies, 89% to 98% of people have had only heterosexual contact within their lifetime; but this percentage falls to 79–84% when either or both same-sex attraction and behavior are reported.
A 1992 study reported that 93.9% of males in Britain have only had heterosexual experience, while in France the number was reported at 95.9%. According to a 2008 poll, 85% of Britons have only opposite-sex sexual contact while 94% of Britons identify themselves as heterosexual. Similarly, a survey by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2010 found that 95% of Britons identified as heterosexual, 1.5% of Britons identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and the last 3.5% gave more vague answers such as "don't know", "other", or did not respond to the question. In the United States, according to a Williams Institute report in April 2011, 96% or approximately 250 million of the adult population are heterosexual.
An October 2012 Gallup poll provided unprecedented demographic information about those who identify as heterosexual, arriving at the conclusion that 96.6%, with a margin of error of ±1%, of all U.S. adults identify as heterosexual. The Gallup results show:
In a 2015 YouGov survey of 1,000 adults of the United States, 89% of the sample identified as heterosexual, 4% as homosexual (2% as homosexual male and 2% as homosexual female) and 4% as bisexual (of either sex).
Bailey et al., in their 2016 review, stated that in recent Western surveys, about 93% of men and 87% of women identify as completely heterosexual, and about 4% of men and 10% of women as mostly heterosexual.
No simple and singular determinant for sexual orientation has been conclusively demonstrated, but scientists believe that a combination of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors determine sexual orientation. They favor biological theories for explaining the causes of sexual orientation, as there is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes than social ones, especially for males.
Factors related to the development of a heterosexual orientation include genes, prenatal hormones, and brain structure, and their interaction with the environment.
The neurobiology of the masculinization of the brain is fairly well understood. Estradiol and testosterone, which is catalyzed by the enzyme 5α-reductase into dihydrotestosterone, act upon androgen receptors in the brain to masculinize it. If there are few androgen receptors (people with androgen insensitivity syndrome) or too much androgen (females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia), there can be physical and psychological effects. It has been suggested that both male and female heterosexuality are the results of this process. In these studies heterosexuality in females is linked to a lower amount of masculinization than is found in lesbian females, though when dealing with male heterosexuality there are results supporting both higher and lower degrees of masculinization than homosexual males.
Sexual reproduction in the animal world is facilitated through opposite-sex sexual activity, although there are also animals that reproduce asexually, including protozoa and lower invertebrates.
Reproductive sex does not require a heterosexual orientation, since sexual orientation typically refers to a long-term enduring pattern of sexual and emotional attraction leading often to long-term social bonding, while reproduction requires as little as a single act of copulation to fertilize the ovum by sperm.
Often, sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity are not distinguished, which can impact accurately assessing sexual identity and whether or not sexual orientation is able to change; sexual orientation identity can change throughout an individual's life, and may or may not align with biological sex, sexual behavior or actual sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is stable and unlikely to change for the vast majority of people, but some research indicates that some people may experience change in their sexual orientation, and this is more likely for women than for men. The American Psychological Association distinguishes between sexual orientation (an innate attraction) and sexual orientation identity (which may change at any point in a person's life).
A 2012 study found that 2% of a sample of 2,560 adult participants reported a change of sexual orientation identity after a 10-year period. For men, a change occurred in 0.78% of those who had identified as heterosexual, 9.52% of homosexuals, and 47% of bisexuals. For women, a change occurred in 1.36% of heterosexuals, 63.6% of lesbians, and 64.7% of bisexuals.
A 2-year study by Lisa M. Diamond on a sample of 80 non-heterosexual female adolescents (age 16-23) reported that half of the participants had changed sexual-minority identities more than once, one third of them during the 2-year follow-up. Diamond concluded that "although sexual attractions appear fairly stable, sexual identities and behaviors are more fluid."
Heteroflexibility is a form of sexual orientation or situational sexual behavior characterized by minimal homosexual activity in an otherwise primarily heterosexual orientation that is considered to distinguish it from bisexuality. It has been characterized as "mostly straight".
Sexual orientation change efforts are methods that aim to change sexual orientation, used to try to convert homosexual and bisexual people to heterosexuality. Scientists and mental health professionals generally do not believe that sexual orientation is a choice. There are no studies of adequate scientific rigor that conclude that sexual orientation change efforts are effective.
A heterosexual couple, a man and woman in an intimate relationship, form the core of a nuclear family. Many societies throughout history have insisted that a marriage take place before the couple settle down, but enforcement of this rule or compliance with it has varied considerably.
Heterosexual symbolism dates back to the earliest artifacts of humanity, with gender symbols, ritual fertility carvings, and primitive art. This was later expressed in the symbolism of fertility rites and polytheistic worship, which often included images of human reproductive organs, such as lingam in Hinduism. Modern symbols of heterosexuality in societies derived from European traditions still reference symbols used in these ancient beliefs. One such image is a combination of the symbol for Mars, the Roman god of war, as the definitive male symbol of masculinity, and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, as the definitive female symbol of femininity. The unicode character for this combined symbol is ⚤ (U+26A4).
There was no need to coin a term such as heterosexual until there was something else to contrast and compare it with. Jonathan Ned Katz dates the definition of heterosexuality, as it is used today, to the late 19th century. According to Katz, in the Victorian era, sex was seen as a means to achieve reproduction, and relations between the sexes were not believed to be overtly sexual. The body was thought of as a tool for procreation – "Human energy, thought of as a closed and severely limited system, was to be used in producing children and in work, not wasted in libidinous pleasures."
Katz argues that modern ideas of sexuality and eroticism began to develop in America and Germany in the later 19th century. The changing economy and the "transformation of the family from producer to consumer" resulted in shifting values. The Victorian work ethic had changed, pleasure became more highly valued and this allowed ideas of human sexuality to change. Consumer culture had created a market for the erotic, pleasure became commoditized. At the same time medical doctors began to acquire more power and influence. They developed the medical model of "normal love", in which healthy men and women enjoyed sex as part of a "new ideal of male-female relationships that included.. an essential, necessary, normal eroticism." This model also had a counterpart, "the Victorian Sex Pervert", anyone who failed to meet the norm. The basic oppositeness of the sexes was the basis for normal, healthy sexual attraction. "The attention paid the sexual abnormal created a need to name the sexual normal, the better to distinguish the average him and her from the deviant it." The creation of the term heterosexual consolidated the social existence of the pre-existing heterosexual experience and created a sense of ensured and validated normalcy within it.
The Judeo-Christian tradition has several scriptures related to heterosexuality. The Book of Genesis states that God created women because "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,", and that "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh"
For the most part, religious traditions in the world reserve marriage to heterosexual unions, but there are exceptions including certain Buddhist and Hindu traditions, Unitarian Universalists, Metropolitan Community Church, some Anglican dioceses, and some Quaker, United Church of Canada, and Reform and Conservative Jewish congregations.
Almost all religions believe that sex between a man and a woman within marriage is allowed, but there are a few that believe that it is a sin, such as The Shakers, The Harmony Society, and The Ephrata Cloister. These religions tend to view all sexual relations as sinful, and promote celibacy. Some religions require celibacy for certain roles, such as Catholic priests; however, the Catholic Church also views heterosexual marriage as sacred and necessary.
Heteronormativity denotes or relates to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation for people to have. It can assign strict gender roles to males and females. The term was popularized by Michael Warner in 1991. Feminist Adrienne Rich argues that compulsory heterosexuality, a continual and repeating reassertion of heterosexual norms, is a facet of heterosexism. Compulsory heterosexuality is the idea that female heterosexuality is both assumed and enforced by a patriarchal society. Heterosexuality is then viewed as the natural inclination or obligation by both sexes. Consequently, anyone who differs from the normalcy of heterosexuality is deemed deviant or abhorrent.
Heterosexism is a form of bias or discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It may include an assumption that everyone is heterosexual and may involve various kinds of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, heteroflexible people, or transgender or non-binary individuals.
Straight pride is a slogan that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has been used primarily by social conservative groups as a political stance and strategy. The term is described as a response to gay pride adopted by various LGBT groups in the early 1970s or to the accommodations provided to gay pride initiatives. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Heterosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between people of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality is \"an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions\" to people of the opposite sex; it \"also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions.\" Someone who is heterosexual is commonly referred to as straight.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Along with bisexuality and homosexuality, heterosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation within the heterosexual–homosexual continuum. Across cultures, most people are heterosexual, and heterosexual activity is by far the most common type of sexual activity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is caused by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, and do not view it as a choice. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, scientists favor biologically-based theories. There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The term heterosexual or heterosexuality is usually applied to humans, but heterosexual behavior is observed in all other mammals and in other animals, as it is necessary for sexual reproduction.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Hetero- comes from the Greek word ἕτερος [héteros], meaning \"other party\" or \"another\", used in science as a prefix meaning \"different\"; and the Latin word for sex (that is, characteristic sex or sexual differentiation).",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The current use of the term heterosexual has its roots in the broader 19th century tradition of personality taxonomy. The term heterosexual was coined alongside the word homosexual by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869. The terms were not in current use during the late nineteenth century, but were reintroduced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll around 1890. The noun came into wider use from the early 1920s, but did not enter common use until the 1960s. The colloquial shortening \"hetero\" is attested from 1933. The abstract noun \"heterosexuality\" is first recorded in 1900. The word \"heterosexual\" was listed in Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary in 1923 as a medical term for \"morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex\"; however, in 1934 in their Second Edition Unabridged it is defined as a \"manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality\".",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In LGBT slang, the term breeder has been used as a denigrating phrase to deride heterosexuals. Hyponyms of heterosexual include heteroflexible.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The word can be informally shortened to \"hetero\". The term straight originated as a mid-20th century gay slang term for heterosexuals, ultimately coming from the phrase \"to go straight\" (as in \"straight and narrow\"), or stop engaging in homosexual sex. One of the first uses of the word in this way was in 1941 by author G. W. Henry. Henry's book concerned conversations with homosexual males and used this term in connection with people who are identified as ex-gays. It is now simply a colloquial term for \"heterosexual\", having changed in primary meaning over time. Some object to usage of the term straight because it implies that non-heterosexual people are crooked.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In their 2016 literature review, Bailey et al. stated that they \"expect that in all cultures the vast majority of individuals are sexually predisposed exclusively to the other sex (i.e., heterosexual)\" and that there is no persuasive evidence that the demographics of sexual orientation have varied much across time or place. Heterosexual activity between only one male and one female is by far the most common type of sociosexual activity.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "According to several major studies, 89% to 98% of people have had only heterosexual contact within their lifetime; but this percentage falls to 79–84% when either or both same-sex attraction and behavior are reported.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A 1992 study reported that 93.9% of males in Britain have only had heterosexual experience, while in France the number was reported at 95.9%. According to a 2008 poll, 85% of Britons have only opposite-sex sexual contact while 94% of Britons identify themselves as heterosexual. Similarly, a survey by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2010 found that 95% of Britons identified as heterosexual, 1.5% of Britons identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and the last 3.5% gave more vague answers such as \"don't know\", \"other\", or did not respond to the question. In the United States, according to a Williams Institute report in April 2011, 96% or approximately 250 million of the adult population are heterosexual.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "An October 2012 Gallup poll provided unprecedented demographic information about those who identify as heterosexual, arriving at the conclusion that 96.6%, with a margin of error of ±1%, of all U.S. adults identify as heterosexual. The Gallup results show:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In a 2015 YouGov survey of 1,000 adults of the United States, 89% of the sample identified as heterosexual, 4% as homosexual (2% as homosexual male and 2% as homosexual female) and 4% as bisexual (of either sex).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Bailey et al., in their 2016 review, stated that in recent Western surveys, about 93% of men and 87% of women identify as completely heterosexual, and about 4% of men and 10% of women as mostly heterosexual.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "No simple and singular determinant for sexual orientation has been conclusively demonstrated, but scientists believe that a combination of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors determine sexual orientation. They favor biological theories for explaining the causes of sexual orientation, as there is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes than social ones, especially for males.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Factors related to the development of a heterosexual orientation include genes, prenatal hormones, and brain structure, and their interaction with the environment.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The neurobiology of the masculinization of the brain is fairly well understood. Estradiol and testosterone, which is catalyzed by the enzyme 5α-reductase into dihydrotestosterone, act upon androgen receptors in the brain to masculinize it. If there are few androgen receptors (people with androgen insensitivity syndrome) or too much androgen (females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia), there can be physical and psychological effects. It has been suggested that both male and female heterosexuality are the results of this process. In these studies heterosexuality in females is linked to a lower amount of masculinization than is found in lesbian females, though when dealing with male heterosexuality there are results supporting both higher and lower degrees of masculinization than homosexual males.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Sexual reproduction in the animal world is facilitated through opposite-sex sexual activity, although there are also animals that reproduce asexually, including protozoa and lower invertebrates.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Reproductive sex does not require a heterosexual orientation, since sexual orientation typically refers to a long-term enduring pattern of sexual and emotional attraction leading often to long-term social bonding, while reproduction requires as little as a single act of copulation to fertilize the ovum by sperm.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Often, sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity are not distinguished, which can impact accurately assessing sexual identity and whether or not sexual orientation is able to change; sexual orientation identity can change throughout an individual's life, and may or may not align with biological sex, sexual behavior or actual sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is stable and unlikely to change for the vast majority of people, but some research indicates that some people may experience change in their sexual orientation, and this is more likely for women than for men. The American Psychological Association distinguishes between sexual orientation (an innate attraction) and sexual orientation identity (which may change at any point in a person's life).",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A 2012 study found that 2% of a sample of 2,560 adult participants reported a change of sexual orientation identity after a 10-year period. For men, a change occurred in 0.78% of those who had identified as heterosexual, 9.52% of homosexuals, and 47% of bisexuals. For women, a change occurred in 1.36% of heterosexuals, 63.6% of lesbians, and 64.7% of bisexuals.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A 2-year study by Lisa M. Diamond on a sample of 80 non-heterosexual female adolescents (age 16-23) reported that half of the participants had changed sexual-minority identities more than once, one third of them during the 2-year follow-up. Diamond concluded that \"although sexual attractions appear fairly stable, sexual identities and behaviors are more fluid.\"",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Heteroflexibility is a form of sexual orientation or situational sexual behavior characterized by minimal homosexual activity in an otherwise primarily heterosexual orientation that is considered to distinguish it from bisexuality. It has been characterized as \"mostly straight\".",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Sexual orientation change efforts are methods that aim to change sexual orientation, used to try to convert homosexual and bisexual people to heterosexuality. Scientists and mental health professionals generally do not believe that sexual orientation is a choice. There are no studies of adequate scientific rigor that conclude that sexual orientation change efforts are effective.",
"title": "Academic study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A heterosexual couple, a man and woman in an intimate relationship, form the core of a nuclear family. Many societies throughout history have insisted that a marriage take place before the couple settle down, but enforcement of this rule or compliance with it has varied considerably.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Heterosexual symbolism dates back to the earliest artifacts of humanity, with gender symbols, ritual fertility carvings, and primitive art. This was later expressed in the symbolism of fertility rites and polytheistic worship, which often included images of human reproductive organs, such as lingam in Hinduism. Modern symbols of heterosexuality in societies derived from European traditions still reference symbols used in these ancient beliefs. One such image is a combination of the symbol for Mars, the Roman god of war, as the definitive male symbol of masculinity, and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, as the definitive female symbol of femininity. The unicode character for this combined symbol is ⚤ (U+26A4).",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There was no need to coin a term such as heterosexual until there was something else to contrast and compare it with. Jonathan Ned Katz dates the definition of heterosexuality, as it is used today, to the late 19th century. According to Katz, in the Victorian era, sex was seen as a means to achieve reproduction, and relations between the sexes were not believed to be overtly sexual. The body was thought of as a tool for procreation – \"Human energy, thought of as a closed and severely limited system, was to be used in producing children and in work, not wasted in libidinous pleasures.\"",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Katz argues that modern ideas of sexuality and eroticism began to develop in America and Germany in the later 19th century. The changing economy and the \"transformation of the family from producer to consumer\" resulted in shifting values. The Victorian work ethic had changed, pleasure became more highly valued and this allowed ideas of human sexuality to change. Consumer culture had created a market for the erotic, pleasure became commoditized. At the same time medical doctors began to acquire more power and influence. They developed the medical model of \"normal love\", in which healthy men and women enjoyed sex as part of a \"new ideal of male-female relationships that included.. an essential, necessary, normal eroticism.\" This model also had a counterpart, \"the Victorian Sex Pervert\", anyone who failed to meet the norm. The basic oppositeness of the sexes was the basis for normal, healthy sexual attraction. \"The attention paid the sexual abnormal created a need to name the sexual normal, the better to distinguish the average him and her from the deviant it.\" The creation of the term heterosexual consolidated the social existence of the pre-existing heterosexual experience and created a sense of ensured and validated normalcy within it.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Judeo-Christian tradition has several scriptures related to heterosexuality. The Book of Genesis states that God created women because \"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,\", and that \"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh\"",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "For the most part, religious traditions in the world reserve marriage to heterosexual unions, but there are exceptions including certain Buddhist and Hindu traditions, Unitarian Universalists, Metropolitan Community Church, some Anglican dioceses, and some Quaker, United Church of Canada, and Reform and Conservative Jewish congregations.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Almost all religions believe that sex between a man and a woman within marriage is allowed, but there are a few that believe that it is a sin, such as The Shakers, The Harmony Society, and The Ephrata Cloister. These religions tend to view all sexual relations as sinful, and promote celibacy. Some religions require celibacy for certain roles, such as Catholic priests; however, the Catholic Church also views heterosexual marriage as sacred and necessary.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Heteronormativity denotes or relates to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation for people to have. It can assign strict gender roles to males and females. The term was popularized by Michael Warner in 1991. Feminist Adrienne Rich argues that compulsory heterosexuality, a continual and repeating reassertion of heterosexual norms, is a facet of heterosexism. Compulsory heterosexuality is the idea that female heterosexuality is both assumed and enforced by a patriarchal society. Heterosexuality is then viewed as the natural inclination or obligation by both sexes. Consequently, anyone who differs from the normalcy of heterosexuality is deemed deviant or abhorrent.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Heterosexism is a form of bias or discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It may include an assumption that everyone is heterosexual and may involve various kinds of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, heteroflexible people, or transgender or non-binary individuals.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Straight pride is a slogan that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has been used primarily by social conservative groups as a political stance and strategy. The term is described as a response to gay pride adopted by various LGBT groups in the early 1970s or to the accommodations provided to gay pride initiatives.",
"title": "Society and culture"
}
]
| Heterosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between people of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to people of the opposite sex; it "also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions." Someone who is heterosexual is commonly referred to as straight. Along with bisexuality and homosexuality, heterosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation within the heterosexual–homosexual continuum. Across cultures, most people are heterosexual, and heterosexual activity is by far the most common type of sexual activity. Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is caused by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, and do not view it as a choice. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, scientists favor biologically-based theories. There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males. The term heterosexual or heterosexuality is usually applied to humans, but heterosexual behavior is observed in all other mammals and in other animals, as it is necessary for sexual reproduction. | 2001-11-12T12:23:49Z | 2023-11-20T22:37:12Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexuality |
14,086 | Hopewell Centre (Hong Kong) | Hopewell Centre is a 222-metre (728-foot), 64-storey skyscraper at 183 Queen's Road East, in Wan Chai, Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong. The tower is the first circular skyscraper in Hong Kong. It is named after Hong Kong–listed property firm Hopewell Holdings Limited, which constructed the building. Hopewell Holdings Limited's headquarters are in the building and its chief executive officer, Gordon Wu, has his office on the top floor.
Construction started in 1977 and was completed in 1980. Upon completion, Hopewell Centre surpassed Jardine House as Hong Kong's tallest building. It was also the second tallest building in Asia at the time. It kept its title in Hong Kong until 1989, when the Bank of China Tower was completed. The building is now the 20th tallest building in Hong Kong.
The building has a circular floor plan. Although the front entrance is on the 'ground floor', commuters are taken through a set of escalators to the 3rd floor lift lobby. Hopewell Centre stands on the slope of a hill so steep that the building has its back entrance on the 17th floor towards Kennedy Road. There is a circular private swimming pool on the roof of the building built for feng shui reasons because people thought the building resembled a cigarette.
A revolving restaurant located on the 62nd floor, called "Revolving 66", overlooks other tall buildings below and the harbour. It was originally called Revolving 62, but soon changed its name as locals kept calling it Revolving 66. It completes a 360-degree rotation each hour. Passengers take either office lifts (faster) or the scenic lifts (with a view) to the 56/F, where they transfer to smaller lifts up to the 62/F. The restaurant is now named The Grand Buffet.
The building comprises several groups of lifts. Lobbies are on the 3rd and 17th floor, and are connected to Queen's Road East and Kennedy Road respectively. A mini-skylobby is on the 56th floor and serves as a transfer floor for diners heading to the 60/F and 62/F restaurants. The building's white 'bumps' between the windows have built in window-washer guide rails.
This skyscraper was the filming location for R&B group Dru Hill's music video for "How Deep Is Your Love," directed by Brett Ratner, who also directed the movie Rush Hour, whose soundtrack features the song. The circular private swimming pool is well visible in this music video. This swimming pool has also featured in an Australian television advertisement by one of that country's major gaming companies, Tattersall's Limited, promoting a weekly lottery competition.
The skyscraper was also featured on the cover of post-hardcore band Fugazi's 1998 album End Hits.
Hopewell shares shot up 31 per cent at one point, after the developer unveiled a privatisation plan worth HK$21.26 billion. The company was privatised in 2019 and its stock ticker 54 was removed from the exchange. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hopewell Centre is a 222-metre (728-foot), 64-storey skyscraper at 183 Queen's Road East, in Wan Chai, Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong. The tower is the first circular skyscraper in Hong Kong. It is named after Hong Kong–listed property firm Hopewell Holdings Limited, which constructed the building. Hopewell Holdings Limited's headquarters are in the building and its chief executive officer, Gordon Wu, has his office on the top floor.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Construction started in 1977 and was completed in 1980. Upon completion, Hopewell Centre surpassed Jardine House as Hong Kong's tallest building. It was also the second tallest building in Asia at the time. It kept its title in Hong Kong until 1989, when the Bank of China Tower was completed. The building is now the 20th tallest building in Hong Kong.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The building has a circular floor plan. Although the front entrance is on the 'ground floor', commuters are taken through a set of escalators to the 3rd floor lift lobby. Hopewell Centre stands on the slope of a hill so steep that the building has its back entrance on the 17th floor towards Kennedy Road. There is a circular private swimming pool on the roof of the building built for feng shui reasons because people thought the building resembled a cigarette.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A revolving restaurant located on the 62nd floor, called \"Revolving 66\", overlooks other tall buildings below and the harbour. It was originally called Revolving 62, but soon changed its name as locals kept calling it Revolving 66. It completes a 360-degree rotation each hour. Passengers take either office lifts (faster) or the scenic lifts (with a view) to the 56/F, where they transfer to smaller lifts up to the 62/F. The restaurant is now named The Grand Buffet.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The building comprises several groups of lifts. Lobbies are on the 3rd and 17th floor, and are connected to Queen's Road East and Kennedy Road respectively. A mini-skylobby is on the 56th floor and serves as a transfer floor for diners heading to the 60/F and 62/F restaurants. The building's white 'bumps' between the windows have built in window-washer guide rails.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "This skyscraper was the filming location for R&B group Dru Hill's music video for \"How Deep Is Your Love,\" directed by Brett Ratner, who also directed the movie Rush Hour, whose soundtrack features the song. The circular private swimming pool is well visible in this music video. This swimming pool has also featured in an Australian television advertisement by one of that country's major gaming companies, Tattersall's Limited, promoting a weekly lottery competition.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The skyscraper was also featured on the cover of post-hardcore band Fugazi's 1998 album End Hits.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "",
"title": "Gallery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hopewell shares shot up 31 per cent at one point, after the developer unveiled a privatisation plan worth HK$21.26 billion. The company was privatised in 2019 and its stock ticker 54 was removed from the exchange.",
"title": "Privatisation"
}
]
| Hopewell Centre is a 222-metre (728-foot), 64-storey skyscraper at 183 Queen's Road East, in Wan Chai, Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong. The tower is the first circular skyscraper in Hong Kong. It is named after Hong Kong–listed property firm Hopewell Holdings Limited, which constructed the building. Hopewell Holdings Limited's headquarters are in the building and its chief executive officer, Gordon Wu, has his office on the top floor. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-09-04T18:56:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_Centre_(Hong_Kong) |
14,089 | Harwich, Massachusetts | Harwich (/ˈhɑːrwɪtʃ/ HAR-witch) is a New England town on Cape Cod, in Barnstable County in the state of Massachusetts in the United States. At the 2020 census it had a population of 13,440. Harwich experiences a seasonal increase to roughly 37,000. The town is a popular vacation spot, located near the Cape Cod National Seashore. Harwich's beaches are on the Nantucket Sound side of Cape Cod. Harwich has three active harbors. Saquatucket, Wychmere and Allen Harbors are all in Harwich Port. The town of Harwich includes the villages of Pleasant Lake, West Harwich, East Harwich, Harwich Port, Harwich Center, North Harwich and South Harwich.
Harwich was first settled by Europeans in 1670 as part of Yarmouth. The town was officially incorporated in 1694, and originally included the lands of the current town of Brewster. Early industry involved fishing and farming. The town is considered by some to be the birthplace of the cranberry industry, with the first commercial operation opened in 1846. There are still many bogs in the town, although the economy is now more centered on tourism and as a residential community. The town is also the site of the start/finish line of the "Sail Around the Cape", which rounds the Cape counter-clockwise, returning via the Cape Cod Canal.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 33.1 square miles (85.8 km), of which 20.9 square miles (54.1 km) is land and 12.2 square miles (31.7 km), or 36.97%, is water. The seven villages of Harwich are West Harwich, North Harwich, East Harwich, South Harwich, Harwich Center, Harwich Port and Pleasant Lake. These are also referred to as the Harwiches.
Harwich is on the southern side of Cape Cod, just west of the southeastern corner. It is bordered by Dennis to the west, Brewster to the north, Orleans to the northeast, Chatham to the east, and Nantucket Sound to the south. Harwich is approximately 12 miles (19 km) east of Barnstable, 28 miles (45 km) east of the Cape Cod Canal, 35 miles (56 km) south of Provincetown, and 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Boston.
The town shares the largest lake on the Cape, called Long Pond, with the town of Brewster. Long Pond serves as a private airport for planes with the ability to land on water. The village of Pleasant Lake is at the southwest corner of the lake. Numerous other smaller bodies of water dot the town. Sand Pond, a public beach and swimming area, is located off Great Western Road in North Harwich.
The shore is home to several harbors and rivers, including the Herring River, Allens Harbor, Wychmere Harbor, Saquatucket Harbor, and the Andrews River. The town is also the home to the Hawksnest State Park, as well as a marina and several beaches, including two on Long Pond. There are also many beaches in West Harwich and South Harwich.
According to the Köppen climate classification system, Harwich, Massachusetts, has a warm-summer, wet all year, humid continental climate (Dfb). Dfb climates are characterized by at least one month having an average mean temperature ≤ 32.0 °F (≤ 0.0 °C), at least four months with an average mean temperature ≥ 50.0 °F (≥ 10.0 °C), all months with an average mean temperature ≤ 71.6 °F (≤ 22.0 °C), and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. The average seasonal (Nov–Apr) snowfall total is around 30 in (76 cm). The average snowiest month is February which corresponds with the annual peak in nor'easter activity. The plant hardiness zone is 7a with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of 4.0 °F (−15.6 °C).
According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, Harwich, Massachusetts, would primarily contain a Northeastern oak/pine (110) vegetation type with a Southern mixed forest (26) vegetation form.
As of the census of 2000, there were 12,386 people, 5,471 households, and 3,545 families residing in the town. The population density was 588.6 inhabitants per square mile (227.3/km). There were 9,450 housing units at an average density of 449.1 per square mile (173.4/km). The racial makeup of the town was 95.41% White, 0.71% Black or African American, 0.19% Native American, 0.22% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 2.03% from other races, and 1.40% from two or more races. 0.96% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 5,471 households, out of which 21.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.4% were married couples living together, 9.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 35.2% were non-families. 29.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 16.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.20 and the average family size was 2.72.
In the town, the population was spread out, with 18.3% under the age of 18, 4.2% from 18 to 24, 22.1% from 25 to 44, 25.8% from 45 to 64, and 29.6% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 49 years. For every 100 females, there were 84.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 79.7 males.
The median income for a household in the town was $41,552, and the median income for a family was $51,070. Males had a median income of $38,948 versus $27,439 for females. The per capita income for the town was $23,063. About 2.9% of families and 15.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 8.4% of those under age 18 and 8.1% of those age 65 or over.
The town of Harwich contains several smaller census-designated places (CDPs) for which the U.S. Census reports more focused geographic and demographic information. The CDPs in Harwich are Harwich Center, Harwich Port (including South Harwich), East Harwich and Northwest Harwich (including West Harwich, North Harwich, and Pleasant Lake).
Harwich is represented in the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a part of the Fourth Barnstable district, which includes (with the exception of Brewster) all the towns east and north of Harwich on the Cape. The town is represented in the Massachusetts Senate as a part of the Cape and Islands District, which includes all of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket except the towns of Bourne, Falmouth, Sandwich and a portion of Barnstable. The town is patrolled by the Second (Yarmouth) Barracks of Troop D of the Massachusetts State Police.
After results from the 2020 census, Massachusetts decreased from 10 to 9 congressional districts due to decreased growth in population. These new boundaries now put Harwich in the 9th congressional district as the 10th no longer exists. Harwich is currently represented by William R. Keating. The state's senior member of the United States Senate is Elizabeth Warren, elected in 2012. The junior senator is Ed Markey, elected in 2013.
Harwich is governed by the open town meeting form of government, led by a town administrator and a board of selectmen.
There are three libraries in the town. The municipal library, the Brooks Free Library in Harwich Center, is the largest and is a member of the Cape Libraries Automated Materials Sharing (CLAMS) library network. There are two smaller non-municipal libraries – the Chase Library on Route 28 in West Harwich at the Dennis town line, and the Harwich Port Library on Lower Bank Street in Harwich Port.
Harwich is the site of the Long Pond Medical Center, which serves the southeastern Cape region.
Harwich has police and fire departments, with one fire and police station headquarters, and Station 2 in East Harwich.
There are post offices in Harwich Port, South Harwich, West Harwich, and East Harwich.
Harwich's schools are part of the Monomoy Regional School District. Harwich Elementary School serves students from pre-school through fourth grade, Monomoy Regional Middle School which serves both Harwich and its joining town, Chatham. This middle school serves grades 5–7, and Monomoy Regional High School serves grades 8–12 for both Harwich and Chatham. Monomoy's teams are known as the Sharks. Harwich is known for its excellent boys basketball, girls basketball, girls field hockey, softball and baseball teams.
The Lighthouse Charter School recently moved into where the Harwich Cinema building was located.
Harwich is the site of Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, a grades 9–12 high school which serves most of Cape Cod. The town is also home to Holy Trinity PreSchool, a Catholic pre-school which serves pre-kindergarten in West Harwich.
Harwich is home to the Harwich Mariners, an amateur collegiate summer baseball team in the Cape Cod Baseball League. The team plays at B.F.C. Whitehouse Field and has featured dozens of players who went on to careers in Major League Baseball such as Kevin Millar, Josh Donaldson, and DJ LeMahieu.
Since 1976, the town has hosted the annual Harwich Cranberry Festival, noted for its fireworks display, in September.
Harwich Port is a popular destination in the summer. The most popular beach in Harwich Port is Bank Street Beach. Harwich has 18 beaches and ponds.
Two of Massachusetts major routes, U.S. Route 6 and Massachusetts Route 28, cross the town. The town has the southern termini of Routes 39 and 124, and a portion of Route 137 passes through the town. Route 39 leads east through East Harwich to Orleans. Route 28 passes through West Harwich and Harwich Port, connecting the towns of Dennis and Chatham. Route 124 leads from Harwich Center to Brewster, and Route 137 cuts through East Harwich leading from Chatham to Brewster.
A portion of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, as well as several other bicycle routes, are in town. There is no rail service in town, but the Cape Cod Rail Trail rotary is located in North Harwich near Main Street.
Other than the occasional sea plane landing on the pond, the nearest airport is in neighboring Chatham; the nearest regional service is at Barnstable Municipal Airport; and the nearest national and international air service is at Logan International Airport in Boston.
In recent years parts of Cape Cod have introduced bus service, especially during the summer to help cut down on traffic. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harwich (/ˈhɑːrwɪtʃ/ HAR-witch) is a New England town on Cape Cod, in Barnstable County in the state of Massachusetts in the United States. At the 2020 census it had a population of 13,440. Harwich experiences a seasonal increase to roughly 37,000. The town is a popular vacation spot, located near the Cape Cod National Seashore. Harwich's beaches are on the Nantucket Sound side of Cape Cod. Harwich has three active harbors. Saquatucket, Wychmere and Allen Harbors are all in Harwich Port. The town of Harwich includes the villages of Pleasant Lake, West Harwich, East Harwich, Harwich Port, Harwich Center, North Harwich and South Harwich.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Harwich was first settled by Europeans in 1670 as part of Yarmouth. The town was officially incorporated in 1694, and originally included the lands of the current town of Brewster. Early industry involved fishing and farming. The town is considered by some to be the birthplace of the cranberry industry, with the first commercial operation opened in 1846. There are still many bogs in the town, although the economy is now more centered on tourism and as a residential community. The town is also the site of the start/finish line of the \"Sail Around the Cape\", which rounds the Cape counter-clockwise, returning via the Cape Cod Canal.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 33.1 square miles (85.8 km), of which 20.9 square miles (54.1 km) is land and 12.2 square miles (31.7 km), or 36.97%, is water. The seven villages of Harwich are West Harwich, North Harwich, East Harwich, South Harwich, Harwich Center, Harwich Port and Pleasant Lake. These are also referred to as the Harwiches.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Harwich is on the southern side of Cape Cod, just west of the southeastern corner. It is bordered by Dennis to the west, Brewster to the north, Orleans to the northeast, Chatham to the east, and Nantucket Sound to the south. Harwich is approximately 12 miles (19 km) east of Barnstable, 28 miles (45 km) east of the Cape Cod Canal, 35 miles (56 km) south of Provincetown, and 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Boston.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The town shares the largest lake on the Cape, called Long Pond, with the town of Brewster. Long Pond serves as a private airport for planes with the ability to land on water. The village of Pleasant Lake is at the southwest corner of the lake. Numerous other smaller bodies of water dot the town. Sand Pond, a public beach and swimming area, is located off Great Western Road in North Harwich.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The shore is home to several harbors and rivers, including the Herring River, Allens Harbor, Wychmere Harbor, Saquatucket Harbor, and the Andrews River. The town is also the home to the Hawksnest State Park, as well as a marina and several beaches, including two on Long Pond. There are also many beaches in West Harwich and South Harwich.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to the Köppen climate classification system, Harwich, Massachusetts, has a warm-summer, wet all year, humid continental climate (Dfb). Dfb climates are characterized by at least one month having an average mean temperature ≤ 32.0 °F (≤ 0.0 °C), at least four months with an average mean temperature ≥ 50.0 °F (≥ 10.0 °C), all months with an average mean temperature ≤ 71.6 °F (≤ 22.0 °C), and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. The average seasonal (Nov–Apr) snowfall total is around 30 in (76 cm). The average snowiest month is February which corresponds with the annual peak in nor'easter activity. The plant hardiness zone is 7a with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of 4.0 °F (−15.6 °C).",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, Harwich, Massachusetts, would primarily contain a Northeastern oak/pine (110) vegetation type with a Southern mixed forest (26) vegetation form.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "As of the census of 2000, there were 12,386 people, 5,471 households, and 3,545 families residing in the town. The population density was 588.6 inhabitants per square mile (227.3/km). There were 9,450 housing units at an average density of 449.1 per square mile (173.4/km). The racial makeup of the town was 95.41% White, 0.71% Black or African American, 0.19% Native American, 0.22% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 2.03% from other races, and 1.40% from two or more races. 0.96% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "There were 5,471 households, out of which 21.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.4% were married couples living together, 9.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 35.2% were non-families. 29.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 16.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.20 and the average family size was 2.72.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the town, the population was spread out, with 18.3% under the age of 18, 4.2% from 18 to 24, 22.1% from 25 to 44, 25.8% from 45 to 64, and 29.6% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 49 years. For every 100 females, there were 84.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 79.7 males.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The median income for a household in the town was $41,552, and the median income for a family was $51,070. Males had a median income of $38,948 versus $27,439 for females. The per capita income for the town was $23,063. About 2.9% of families and 15.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 8.4% of those under age 18 and 8.1% of those age 65 or over.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The town of Harwich contains several smaller census-designated places (CDPs) for which the U.S. Census reports more focused geographic and demographic information. The CDPs in Harwich are Harwich Center, Harwich Port (including South Harwich), East Harwich and Northwest Harwich (including West Harwich, North Harwich, and Pleasant Lake).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Harwich is represented in the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a part of the Fourth Barnstable district, which includes (with the exception of Brewster) all the towns east and north of Harwich on the Cape. The town is represented in the Massachusetts Senate as a part of the Cape and Islands District, which includes all of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket except the towns of Bourne, Falmouth, Sandwich and a portion of Barnstable. The town is patrolled by the Second (Yarmouth) Barracks of Troop D of the Massachusetts State Police.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After results from the 2020 census, Massachusetts decreased from 10 to 9 congressional districts due to decreased growth in population. These new boundaries now put Harwich in the 9th congressional district as the 10th no longer exists. Harwich is currently represented by William R. Keating. The state's senior member of the United States Senate is Elizabeth Warren, elected in 2012. The junior senator is Ed Markey, elected in 2013.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Harwich is governed by the open town meeting form of government, led by a town administrator and a board of selectmen.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "There are three libraries in the town. The municipal library, the Brooks Free Library in Harwich Center, is the largest and is a member of the Cape Libraries Automated Materials Sharing (CLAMS) library network. There are two smaller non-municipal libraries – the Chase Library on Route 28 in West Harwich at the Dennis town line, and the Harwich Port Library on Lower Bank Street in Harwich Port.",
"title": "Public and health services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Harwich is the site of the Long Pond Medical Center, which serves the southeastern Cape region.",
"title": "Public and health services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Harwich has police and fire departments, with one fire and police station headquarters, and Station 2 in East Harwich.",
"title": "Public and health services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "There are post offices in Harwich Port, South Harwich, West Harwich, and East Harwich.",
"title": "Public and health services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Harwich's schools are part of the Monomoy Regional School District. Harwich Elementary School serves students from pre-school through fourth grade, Monomoy Regional Middle School which serves both Harwich and its joining town, Chatham. This middle school serves grades 5–7, and Monomoy Regional High School serves grades 8–12 for both Harwich and Chatham. Monomoy's teams are known as the Sharks. Harwich is known for its excellent boys basketball, girls basketball, girls field hockey, softball and baseball teams.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Lighthouse Charter School recently moved into where the Harwich Cinema building was located.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Harwich is the site of Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, a grades 9–12 high school which serves most of Cape Cod. The town is also home to Holy Trinity PreSchool, a Catholic pre-school which serves pre-kindergarten in West Harwich.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Harwich is home to the Harwich Mariners, an amateur collegiate summer baseball team in the Cape Cod Baseball League. The team plays at B.F.C. Whitehouse Field and has featured dozens of players who went on to careers in Major League Baseball such as Kevin Millar, Josh Donaldson, and DJ LeMahieu.",
"title": "Sports and recreation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Since 1976, the town has hosted the annual Harwich Cranberry Festival, noted for its fireworks display, in September.",
"title": "Sports and recreation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Harwich Port is a popular destination in the summer. The most popular beach in Harwich Port is Bank Street Beach. Harwich has 18 beaches and ponds.",
"title": "Sports and recreation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Two of Massachusetts major routes, U.S. Route 6 and Massachusetts Route 28, cross the town. The town has the southern termini of Routes 39 and 124, and a portion of Route 137 passes through the town. Route 39 leads east through East Harwich to Orleans. Route 28 passes through West Harwich and Harwich Port, connecting the towns of Dennis and Chatham. Route 124 leads from Harwich Center to Brewster, and Route 137 cuts through East Harwich leading from Chatham to Brewster.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "A portion of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, as well as several other bicycle routes, are in town. There is no rail service in town, but the Cape Cod Rail Trail rotary is located in North Harwich near Main Street.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Other than the occasional sea plane landing on the pond, the nearest airport is in neighboring Chatham; the nearest regional service is at Barnstable Municipal Airport; and the nearest national and international air service is at Logan International Airport in Boston.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In recent years parts of Cape Cod have introduced bus service, especially during the summer to help cut down on traffic.",
"title": "Transportation"
}
]
| Harwich is a New England town on Cape Cod, in Barnstable County in the state of Massachusetts in the United States. At the 2020 census it had a population of 13,440. Harwich experiences a seasonal increase to roughly 37,000. The town is a popular vacation spot, located near the Cape Cod National Seashore. Harwich's beaches are on the Nantucket Sound side of Cape Cod. Harwich has three active harbors. Saquatucket, Wychmere and Allen Harbors are all in Harwich Port. The town of Harwich includes the villages of Pleasant Lake, West Harwich, East Harwich, Harwich Port, Harwich Center, North Harwich and South Harwich. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-24T01:04:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwich,_Massachusetts |
14,090 | Hull classification symbol | The United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, and United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use a hull classification symbol (sometimes called hull code or hull number) to identify their ships by type and by individual ship within a type. The system is analogous to the pennant number system that the Royal Navy and other European and Commonwealth navies use.
The U.S. Navy began to assign unique Naval Registry Identification Numbers to its ships in the 1890s. The system was a simple one in which each ship received a number which was appended to its ship type, fully spelled out, and added parenthetically after the ship's name when deemed necessary to avoid confusion between ships. Under this system, for example, the battleship Indiana was USS Indiana (Battleship No. 1), the cruiser Olympia was USS Olympia (Cruiser No. 6), and so on. Beginning in 1907, some ships also were referred to alternatively by single-letter or three-letter codes—for example, USS Indiana (Battleship No. 1) could be referred to as USS Indiana (B-1) and USS Olympia (Cruiser No. 6) could also be referred to as USS Olympia (C-6), while USS Pennsylvania (Armored Cruiser No. 4) could be referred to as USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4). However, rather than replacing it, these codes coexisted and were used interchangeably with the older system until the modern system was instituted on 17 July 1920.
During World War I, the U.S. Navy acquired large numbers of privately owned and commercial ships and craft for use as patrol vessels, mine warfare vessels, and various types of naval auxiliary ships, some of them with identical names. To keep track of them all, the Navy assigned unique identifying numbers to them. Those deemed appropriate for patrol work received section patrol numbers (SP), while those intended for other purposes received "identification numbers", generally abbreviated "Id. No." or "ID;" some ships and craft changed from an SP to an ID number or vice versa during their careers, without their unique numbers themselves changing, and some ships and craft assigned numbers in anticipation of naval service were never acquired by the Navy. The SP/ID numbering sequence was unified and continuous, with no SP number repeated in the ID series or vice versa so that there could not be, for example, both an "SP-435" and an "Id. No. 435". The SP and ID numbers were used parenthetically after each boat's or ship's name to identify it; although this system pre-dated the modern hull classification system and its numbers were not referred to at the time as "hull codes" or "hull numbers," it was used in a similar manner to today's system and can be considered its precursor.
The United States Revenue Cutter Service, which merged with the United States Lifesaving Service in January 1915 to form the modern United States Coast Guard, began following the Navy's lead in the 1890s, with its cutters having parenthetical numbers called Naval Registry Identification Numbers following their names, such as (Cutter No. 1), etc. This persisted until the Navy's modern hull classification system's introduction in 1920, which included Coast Guard ships and craft.
Like the U.S. Navy, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey – a uniformed seagoing service of the United States Government and a predecessor of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – adopted a hull number system for its fleet in the 20th century. Its largest vessels, "Category I" oceanographic survey ships, were classified as "ocean survey ships" and given the designation "OSS". Intermediate-sized "Category II" oceanographic survey ships received the designation "MSS" for "medium survey ship," and smaller "Category III" oceanographic survey ships were given the classification "CSS" for "coastal survey ship." A fourth designation, "ASV" for "auxiliary survey vessel," included even smaller vessels. In each case, a particular ship received a unique designation based on its classification and a unique hull number separated by a space rather than a hyphen; for example, the third Coast and Geodetic Survey ship named Pioneer was an ocean survey ship officially known as USC&GS Pioneer (OSS 31). The Coast and Geodetic Survey's system persisted after the creation of NOAA in 1970, when NOAA took control of the Survey's fleet, but NOAA later changed to its modern hull classification system.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, created in 1940 and reorganized as the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in 1956, adopted a hull number system for its fisheries research ships and patrol vessels. It consisted of "FWS" followed by a unique identifying number. In 1970, NOAA took control of the seagoing ships of the USFWS's Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and as part of the NOAA fleet they were assigned new hull numbers beginning with "FRV," for Fisheries Research Vessel, followed by a unique identifying number. They eventually were renumbered under the modern NOAA hull number system.
The U.S. Navy instituted its modern hull classification system on 17 July 1920, doing away with section patrol numbers, "identification numbers", and the other numbering systems described above. In the new system, all hull classification symbols are at least two letters; for basic types the symbol is the first letter of the type name, doubled, except for aircraft carriers.
The combination of symbol and hull number identifies a modern Navy ship uniquely. A heavily modified or re-purposed ship may receive a new symbol, and either retain the hull number or receive a new one. For example, the heavy gun cruiser USS Boston (CA-69) was converted to a gun/missile cruiser, changing the hull number to CAG-1. Also, the system of symbols has changed a number of times both since it was introduced in 1907 and since the modern system was instituted in 1920, so ships' symbols sometimes change without anything being done to the physical ship.
Hull numbers are assigned by classification. Duplication between, but not within, classifications is permitted. Hence, CV-1 was the aircraft carrier USS Langley and BB-1 was the battleship USS Indiana.
Ship types and classifications have come and gone over the years, and many of the symbols listed below are not presently in use. The Naval Vessel Register maintains an online database of U.S. Navy ships showing which symbols are presently in use.
After World War II until 1975, the U.S. Navy defined a "frigate" as a type of surface warship larger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser. In other navies, such a ship generally was referred to as a "flotilla leader", or "destroyer leader". Hence the U.S. Navy's use of "DL" for "frigate" prior to 1975, while "frigates" in other navies were smaller than destroyers and more like what the U.S. Navy termed a "destroyer escort", "ocean escort", or "DE". The United States Navy 1975 ship reclassification of cruisers, frigates, and ocean escorts brought U.S. Navy classifications into line with other nations' classifications, at least cosmetically in terms of terminology, and eliminated the perceived "cruiser gap" with the Soviet Navy by redesignating the former "frigates" as "cruisers".
If a U.S. Navy ship's hull classification symbol begins with "T-", it is part of the Military Sealift Command, has a primarily civilian crew, and is a United States Naval Ship (USNS) in non-commissioned service – as opposed to a commissioned United States Ship (USS) with an all-military crew.
If a ship's hull classification symbol begins with "W", it is a commissioned cutter of the United States Coast Guard. Until 1965, the Coast Guard used U.S. Navy hull classification codes, prepending a "W" to their beginning. In 1965, it retired some of the less mission-appropriate Navy-based classifications and developed new ones of its own, most notably WHEC for "high endurance cutter" and WMEC for "medium endurance cutter".
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a component of the United States Department of Commerce, includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps (or "NOAA Corps"), one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, and operates a fleet of seagoing research and survey ships. The NOAA fleet also uses a hull classification symbol system, which it also calls "hull numbers," for its ships.
After NOAA took over the former fleets of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in 1970, it initially retained the Coast and Geodetic Survey's hull-number dresignations for its survey ships and adopted hull numbers beginning with "FRV," for "Fisheries Research Vessel," for its fisheries research ships. It later adopted a new system of ship classification, which it still uses today. In its modern system, the NOAA fleet is divided into two broad categories, research ships and survey ships. The research ships, which include oceanographic and fisheries research vessels, are given hull numbers beginning with "R", while the survey ships, generally hydrographic survey vessels, receive hull numbers beginning with "S". The letter is followed by a three-digit number; the first digit indicates the NOAA "class" (i.e., size) of the vessel, which NOAA assigns based on the ship's gross tonnage and horsepower, while the next two digits combine with the first digit to create a unique three-digit identifying number for the ship.
Generally, each NOAA hull number is written with a space between the letter and the three-digit number, as in, for example, NOAAS Nancy Foster (R 352) or NOAAS Thomas Jefferson (S 222).
Unlike in the U.S. Navy system, once an older NOAA ship leaves service, a newer one can be given the same hull number; for example, "S 222" was assigned to NOAAS Mount Mitchell (S 222), then assigned to NOAAS Thomas Jefferson (S 222), which entered NOAA service after Mount Mitchell was stricken.
The U.S. Navy's system of alpha-numeric ship designators, and its associated hull numbers, have been for several decades a unique method of categorizing ships of all types: combatants, auxiliaries and district craft. Although considerably changed in detail and expanded over the years, this system remains essentially the same as when formally implemented in 1920. It is a very useful tool for organizing and keeping track of naval vessels, and also provides the basis for the identification numbers painted on the bows (and frequently the sterns) of most U.S. Navy ships.
The ship designator and hull number system's roots extend back to the late 1880s when ship type serial numbers were assigned to most of the new-construction warships of the emerging "Steel Navy". During the course of the next thirty years, these same numbers were combined with filing codes used by the Navy's clerks to create an informal version of the system that was put in place in 1920. Limited usage of ship numbers goes back even earlier, most notably to the "Jeffersonian Gunboats" of the early 1800s and the "Tinclad" river gunboats of the Civil War Mississippi Squadron.
It is important to understand that hull number-letter prefixes are not acronyms, and should not be carelessly treated as abbreviations of ship type classifications. Thus, "DD" does not stand for anything more than "Destroyer". "SS" simply means "Submarine". And "FF" is the post-1975 type code for "Frigate."
The hull classification codes for ships in active duty in the United States Navy are governed under Secretary of the Navy Instruction 5030.8B.
Warships are designed to participate in combat operations.
The origin of the two-letter code derives from the need to distinguish various cruiser subtypes.
Aircraft carriers are ships designed primarily for the purpose of conducting combat operations by aircraft which engage in attacks against airborne, surface, sub-surface and shore targets. Contrary to popular belief, the "CV" hull classification symbol does not stand for "carrier vessel". "CV" derives from the cruiser designation, with one popular theory that the V comes from French voler, "to fly", but this has never been definitively proven. The V has long been used by the U.S. Navy for heavier-than-air craft and possibly comes from the French volplane. Aircraft carriers are designated in two sequences: the first sequence runs from CV-1 USS Langley to the very latest ships, and the second sequence, "CVE" for escort carriers, ran from CVE-1 Long Island to CVE-127 Okinawa before being discontinued.
Surface combatants are ships which are designed primarily to engage enemy forces on the high seas. The primary surface combatants are battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Battleships are very heavily armed and armored; cruisers moderately so; destroyers and smaller warships, less so. Before 1920, ships were called "<type> no. X", with the type fully pronounced. The types were commonly abbreviated in ship lists to "B-X", "C-X", "D-X" et cetera—for example, before 1920, USS Minnesota (BB-22) would have been called "USS Minnesota, Battleship number 22" orally and "USS Minnesota, B-22" in writing. After 1920, the ship's name would have been both written and pronounced "USS Minnesota (BB-22)". In generally decreasing size, the types are:
Submarines are all self-propelled submersible types (usually started with SS) regardless of whether employed as combatant, auxiliary, or research and development vehicles which have at least a residual combat capability. While some classes, including all diesel-electric submarines, are retired from USN service, non-U.S. navies continue to employ SS, SSA, SSAN, SSB, SSC, SSG, SSM, and SST types. With the advent of new Air Independent Propulsion/Power (AIP) systems, both SSI and SSP are used to distinguish the types within the USN, but SSP has been declared the preferred term. SSK, retired by the USN, continues to be used colloquially and interchangeably with SS for diesel-electric attack/patrol submarines within the USN, and, more formally, by the Royal Navy and British firms such as Jane's Information Group.
Patrol combatants are ships whose mission may extend beyond coastal duties and whose characteristics include adequate endurance and seakeeping, providing a capability for operations exceeding 48 hours on the high seas without support. This notably included Brown Water Navy/Riverine Forces during the Vietnam War. Few of these ships are in service today.
Amphibious warfare vessels include all ships having an organic capability for amphibious warfare and which have characteristics enabling long duration operations on the high seas. There are two classifications of craft: amphibious warfare ships, which are built to cross oceans, and landing craft, which are designed to take troops from ship to shore in an invasion.
The U.S. Navy hull classification symbol for a ship with a well deck depends on its facilities for aircraft:
Ships
Landing Craft
Operated by Military Sealift Command, have ship prefix "USNS", hull code begins with "T-".
Mine warfare ships are those ships whose primary function is mine warfare on the high seas.
In 1955 all mine warfare vessels except for degaussing vessels had their hull codes changed to begin with "M".
Coastal defense ships are those whose primary function is coastal patrol and interdiction.
An auxiliary ship is designed to operate in any number of roles supporting combatant ships and other naval operations.
Ships which have the capability to provide underway replenishment (UNREP) to fleet units.
Mobile logistics ships have the capability to provide direct material support to other deployed units operating far from home ports.
Support ships are not designed to participate in combat and are generally not armed. For ships with civilian crews (owned by and/or operated for Military Sealift Command and the Maritime Administration), the prefix T- is placed at the front of the hull classification.
Support ships are designed to operate in the open ocean in a variety of sea states to provide general support to either combatant forces or shore-based establishments. They include smaller auxiliaries which, by the nature of their duties, leave inshore waters.
Service craft are navy-subordinated craft (including non-self-propelled) designed to provide general support to either combatant forces or shore-based establishments. The suffix "N" refers to non-self-propelled variants.
Although aircraft, pre-World War II rigid airships were commissioned (no different from surface warships and submarines), flew the U.S. ensign from their stern and carried a United States Ship (USS) designation.
Rigid airships:
Lighter-than-air aircraft (e.g., blimps) continued to fly the U.S. ensign from their stern but were registered as aircraft:
United States Navy Designations (Temporary) are a form of U.S. Navy ship designation, intended for temporary identification use. Such designations usually occur during periods of sudden mobilization, such as that which occurred prior to, and during, World War II or the Korean War, when it was determined that a sudden temporary need arose for a ship for which there was no official Navy designation.
During World War II, for example, a number of commercial vessels were requisitioned, or acquired, by the U.S. Navy to meet the sudden requirements of war. A yacht acquired by the U.S. Navy during the start of World War II might seem desirable to the Navy whose use for the vessel might not be fully developed or explored at the time of acquisition.
On the other hand, a U.S. Navy vessel, such as the yacht in the example above, already in commission or service, might be desired, or found useful, for another need or purpose for which there is no official designation.
Numerous other U.S. Navy vessels were launched with a temporary, or nominal, designation, such as YMS or PC, since it could not be determined, at the time of construction, what they should be used for. Many of these were vessels in the 150 to 200 feet length class with powerful engines, whose function could be that of a minesweeper, patrol craft, submarine chaser, seaplane tender, tugboat, or other. Once their destiny, or capability, was found or determined, such vessels were reclassified with their actual designation.
Prior to 1965, U.S. Coast Guard cutters used the same designation as naval ships but preceded by a "W" to indicate Coast Guard commission. The U.S. Coast Guard considers any ship over 65 feet in length with a permanently assigned crew, a cutter.
The letter is paired with a three-digit number. The first digit of the number is determined by the ship's "power tonnage," defined as the sum of its shaft horsepower and gross international tonnage, as follows:
The second and third digits are assigned to create a unique three-digit hull number. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, and United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use a hull classification symbol (sometimes called hull code or hull number) to identify their ships by type and by individual ship within a type. The system is analogous to the pennant number system that the Royal Navy and other European and Commonwealth navies use.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The U.S. Navy began to assign unique Naval Registry Identification Numbers to its ships in the 1890s. The system was a simple one in which each ship received a number which was appended to its ship type, fully spelled out, and added parenthetically after the ship's name when deemed necessary to avoid confusion between ships. Under this system, for example, the battleship Indiana was USS Indiana (Battleship No. 1), the cruiser Olympia was USS Olympia (Cruiser No. 6), and so on. Beginning in 1907, some ships also were referred to alternatively by single-letter or three-letter codes—for example, USS Indiana (Battleship No. 1) could be referred to as USS Indiana (B-1) and USS Olympia (Cruiser No. 6) could also be referred to as USS Olympia (C-6), while USS Pennsylvania (Armored Cruiser No. 4) could be referred to as USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4). However, rather than replacing it, these codes coexisted and were used interchangeably with the older system until the modern system was instituted on 17 July 1920.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "During World War I, the U.S. Navy acquired large numbers of privately owned and commercial ships and craft for use as patrol vessels, mine warfare vessels, and various types of naval auxiliary ships, some of them with identical names. To keep track of them all, the Navy assigned unique identifying numbers to them. Those deemed appropriate for patrol work received section patrol numbers (SP), while those intended for other purposes received \"identification numbers\", generally abbreviated \"Id. No.\" or \"ID;\" some ships and craft changed from an SP to an ID number or vice versa during their careers, without their unique numbers themselves changing, and some ships and craft assigned numbers in anticipation of naval service were never acquired by the Navy. The SP/ID numbering sequence was unified and continuous, with no SP number repeated in the ID series or vice versa so that there could not be, for example, both an \"SP-435\" and an \"Id. No. 435\". The SP and ID numbers were used parenthetically after each boat's or ship's name to identify it; although this system pre-dated the modern hull classification system and its numbers were not referred to at the time as \"hull codes\" or \"hull numbers,\" it was used in a similar manner to today's system and can be considered its precursor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The United States Revenue Cutter Service, which merged with the United States Lifesaving Service in January 1915 to form the modern United States Coast Guard, began following the Navy's lead in the 1890s, with its cutters having parenthetical numbers called Naval Registry Identification Numbers following their names, such as (Cutter No. 1), etc. This persisted until the Navy's modern hull classification system's introduction in 1920, which included Coast Guard ships and craft.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Like the U.S. Navy, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey – a uniformed seagoing service of the United States Government and a predecessor of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – adopted a hull number system for its fleet in the 20th century. Its largest vessels, \"Category I\" oceanographic survey ships, were classified as \"ocean survey ships\" and given the designation \"OSS\". Intermediate-sized \"Category II\" oceanographic survey ships received the designation \"MSS\" for \"medium survey ship,\" and smaller \"Category III\" oceanographic survey ships were given the classification \"CSS\" for \"coastal survey ship.\" A fourth designation, \"ASV\" for \"auxiliary survey vessel,\" included even smaller vessels. In each case, a particular ship received a unique designation based on its classification and a unique hull number separated by a space rather than a hyphen; for example, the third Coast and Geodetic Survey ship named Pioneer was an ocean survey ship officially known as USC&GS Pioneer (OSS 31). The Coast and Geodetic Survey's system persisted after the creation of NOAA in 1970, when NOAA took control of the Survey's fleet, but NOAA later changed to its modern hull classification system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Fish and Wildlife Service, created in 1940 and reorganized as the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in 1956, adopted a hull number system for its fisheries research ships and patrol vessels. It consisted of \"FWS\" followed by a unique identifying number. In 1970, NOAA took control of the seagoing ships of the USFWS's Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and as part of the NOAA fleet they were assigned new hull numbers beginning with \"FRV,\" for Fisheries Research Vessel, followed by a unique identifying number. They eventually were renumbered under the modern NOAA hull number system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The U.S. Navy instituted its modern hull classification system on 17 July 1920, doing away with section patrol numbers, \"identification numbers\", and the other numbering systems described above. In the new system, all hull classification symbols are at least two letters; for basic types the symbol is the first letter of the type name, doubled, except for aircraft carriers.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The combination of symbol and hull number identifies a modern Navy ship uniquely. A heavily modified or re-purposed ship may receive a new symbol, and either retain the hull number or receive a new one. For example, the heavy gun cruiser USS Boston (CA-69) was converted to a gun/missile cruiser, changing the hull number to CAG-1. Also, the system of symbols has changed a number of times both since it was introduced in 1907 and since the modern system was instituted in 1920, so ships' symbols sometimes change without anything being done to the physical ship.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hull numbers are assigned by classification. Duplication between, but not within, classifications is permitted. Hence, CV-1 was the aircraft carrier USS Langley and BB-1 was the battleship USS Indiana.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ship types and classifications have come and gone over the years, and many of the symbols listed below are not presently in use. The Naval Vessel Register maintains an online database of U.S. Navy ships showing which symbols are presently in use.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After World War II until 1975, the U.S. Navy defined a \"frigate\" as a type of surface warship larger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser. In other navies, such a ship generally was referred to as a \"flotilla leader\", or \"destroyer leader\". Hence the U.S. Navy's use of \"DL\" for \"frigate\" prior to 1975, while \"frigates\" in other navies were smaller than destroyers and more like what the U.S. Navy termed a \"destroyer escort\", \"ocean escort\", or \"DE\". The United States Navy 1975 ship reclassification of cruisers, frigates, and ocean escorts brought U.S. Navy classifications into line with other nations' classifications, at least cosmetically in terms of terminology, and eliminated the perceived \"cruiser gap\" with the Soviet Navy by redesignating the former \"frigates\" as \"cruisers\".",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "If a U.S. Navy ship's hull classification symbol begins with \"T-\", it is part of the Military Sealift Command, has a primarily civilian crew, and is a United States Naval Ship (USNS) in non-commissioned service – as opposed to a commissioned United States Ship (USS) with an all-military crew.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "If a ship's hull classification symbol begins with \"W\", it is a commissioned cutter of the United States Coast Guard. Until 1965, the Coast Guard used U.S. Navy hull classification codes, prepending a \"W\" to their beginning. In 1965, it retired some of the less mission-appropriate Navy-based classifications and developed new ones of its own, most notably WHEC for \"high endurance cutter\" and WMEC for \"medium endurance cutter\".",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a component of the United States Department of Commerce, includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps (or \"NOAA Corps\"), one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, and operates a fleet of seagoing research and survey ships. The NOAA fleet also uses a hull classification symbol system, which it also calls \"hull numbers,\" for its ships.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After NOAA took over the former fleets of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in 1970, it initially retained the Coast and Geodetic Survey's hull-number dresignations for its survey ships and adopted hull numbers beginning with \"FRV,\" for \"Fisheries Research Vessel,\" for its fisheries research ships. It later adopted a new system of ship classification, which it still uses today. In its modern system, the NOAA fleet is divided into two broad categories, research ships and survey ships. The research ships, which include oceanographic and fisheries research vessels, are given hull numbers beginning with \"R\", while the survey ships, generally hydrographic survey vessels, receive hull numbers beginning with \"S\". The letter is followed by a three-digit number; the first digit indicates the NOAA \"class\" (i.e., size) of the vessel, which NOAA assigns based on the ship's gross tonnage and horsepower, while the next two digits combine with the first digit to create a unique three-digit identifying number for the ship.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Generally, each NOAA hull number is written with a space between the letter and the three-digit number, as in, for example, NOAAS Nancy Foster (R 352) or NOAAS Thomas Jefferson (S 222).",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Unlike in the U.S. Navy system, once an older NOAA ship leaves service, a newer one can be given the same hull number; for example, \"S 222\" was assigned to NOAAS Mount Mitchell (S 222), then assigned to NOAAS Thomas Jefferson (S 222), which entered NOAA service after Mount Mitchell was stricken.",
"title": "The modern hull classification system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The U.S. Navy's system of alpha-numeric ship designators, and its associated hull numbers, have been for several decades a unique method of categorizing ships of all types: combatants, auxiliaries and district craft. Although considerably changed in detail and expanded over the years, this system remains essentially the same as when formally implemented in 1920. It is a very useful tool for organizing and keeping track of naval vessels, and also provides the basis for the identification numbers painted on the bows (and frequently the sterns) of most U.S. Navy ships.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The ship designator and hull number system's roots extend back to the late 1880s when ship type serial numbers were assigned to most of the new-construction warships of the emerging \"Steel Navy\". During the course of the next thirty years, these same numbers were combined with filing codes used by the Navy's clerks to create an informal version of the system that was put in place in 1920. Limited usage of ship numbers goes back even earlier, most notably to the \"Jeffersonian Gunboats\" of the early 1800s and the \"Tinclad\" river gunboats of the Civil War Mississippi Squadron.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "It is important to understand that hull number-letter prefixes are not acronyms, and should not be carelessly treated as abbreviations of ship type classifications. Thus, \"DD\" does not stand for anything more than \"Destroyer\". \"SS\" simply means \"Submarine\". And \"FF\" is the post-1975 type code for \"Frigate.\"",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The hull classification codes for ships in active duty in the United States Navy are governed under Secretary of the Navy Instruction 5030.8B.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Warships are designed to participate in combat operations.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The origin of the two-letter code derives from the need to distinguish various cruiser subtypes.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Aircraft carriers are ships designed primarily for the purpose of conducting combat operations by aircraft which engage in attacks against airborne, surface, sub-surface and shore targets. Contrary to popular belief, the \"CV\" hull classification symbol does not stand for \"carrier vessel\". \"CV\" derives from the cruiser designation, with one popular theory that the V comes from French voler, \"to fly\", but this has never been definitively proven. The V has long been used by the U.S. Navy for heavier-than-air craft and possibly comes from the French volplane. Aircraft carriers are designated in two sequences: the first sequence runs from CV-1 USS Langley to the very latest ships, and the second sequence, \"CVE\" for escort carriers, ran from CVE-1 Long Island to CVE-127 Okinawa before being discontinued.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Surface combatants are ships which are designed primarily to engage enemy forces on the high seas. The primary surface combatants are battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Battleships are very heavily armed and armored; cruisers moderately so; destroyers and smaller warships, less so. Before 1920, ships were called \"<type> no. X\", with the type fully pronounced. The types were commonly abbreviated in ship lists to \"B-X\", \"C-X\", \"D-X\" et cetera—for example, before 1920, USS Minnesota (BB-22) would have been called \"USS Minnesota, Battleship number 22\" orally and \"USS Minnesota, B-22\" in writing. After 1920, the ship's name would have been both written and pronounced \"USS Minnesota (BB-22)\". In generally decreasing size, the types are:",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Submarines are all self-propelled submersible types (usually started with SS) regardless of whether employed as combatant, auxiliary, or research and development vehicles which have at least a residual combat capability. While some classes, including all diesel-electric submarines, are retired from USN service, non-U.S. navies continue to employ SS, SSA, SSAN, SSB, SSC, SSG, SSM, and SST types. With the advent of new Air Independent Propulsion/Power (AIP) systems, both SSI and SSP are used to distinguish the types within the USN, but SSP has been declared the preferred term. SSK, retired by the USN, continues to be used colloquially and interchangeably with SS for diesel-electric attack/patrol submarines within the USN, and, more formally, by the Royal Navy and British firms such as Jane's Information Group.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Patrol combatants are ships whose mission may extend beyond coastal duties and whose characteristics include adequate endurance and seakeeping, providing a capability for operations exceeding 48 hours on the high seas without support. This notably included Brown Water Navy/Riverine Forces during the Vietnam War. Few of these ships are in service today.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Amphibious warfare vessels include all ships having an organic capability for amphibious warfare and which have characteristics enabling long duration operations on the high seas. There are two classifications of craft: amphibious warfare ships, which are built to cross oceans, and landing craft, which are designed to take troops from ship to shore in an invasion.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The U.S. Navy hull classification symbol for a ship with a well deck depends on its facilities for aircraft:",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Ships",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Landing Craft",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Operated by Military Sealift Command, have ship prefix \"USNS\", hull code begins with \"T-\".",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Mine warfare ships are those ships whose primary function is mine warfare on the high seas.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1955 all mine warfare vessels except for degaussing vessels had their hull codes changed to begin with \"M\".",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Coastal defense ships are those whose primary function is coastal patrol and interdiction.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "An auxiliary ship is designed to operate in any number of roles supporting combatant ships and other naval operations.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Ships which have the capability to provide underway replenishment (UNREP) to fleet units.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Mobile logistics ships have the capability to provide direct material support to other deployed units operating far from home ports.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Support ships are not designed to participate in combat and are generally not armed. For ships with civilian crews (owned by and/or operated for Military Sealift Command and the Maritime Administration), the prefix T- is placed at the front of the hull classification.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Support ships are designed to operate in the open ocean in a variety of sea states to provide general support to either combatant forces or shore-based establishments. They include smaller auxiliaries which, by the nature of their duties, leave inshore waters.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Service craft are navy-subordinated craft (including non-self-propelled) designed to provide general support to either combatant forces or shore-based establishments. The suffix \"N\" refers to non-self-propelled variants.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Although aircraft, pre-World War II rigid airships were commissioned (no different from surface warships and submarines), flew the U.S. ensign from their stern and carried a United States Ship (USS) designation.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Rigid airships:",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Lighter-than-air aircraft (e.g., blimps) continued to fly the U.S. ensign from their stern but were registered as aircraft:",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "United States Navy Designations (Temporary) are a form of U.S. Navy ship designation, intended for temporary identification use. Such designations usually occur during periods of sudden mobilization, such as that which occurred prior to, and during, World War II or the Korean War, when it was determined that a sudden temporary need arose for a ship for which there was no official Navy designation.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "During World War II, for example, a number of commercial vessels were requisitioned, or acquired, by the U.S. Navy to meet the sudden requirements of war. A yacht acquired by the U.S. Navy during the start of World War II might seem desirable to the Navy whose use for the vessel might not be fully developed or explored at the time of acquisition.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On the other hand, a U.S. Navy vessel, such as the yacht in the example above, already in commission or service, might be desired, or found useful, for another need or purpose for which there is no official designation.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Numerous other U.S. Navy vessels were launched with a temporary, or nominal, designation, such as YMS or PC, since it could not be determined, at the time of construction, what they should be used for. Many of these were vessels in the 150 to 200 feet length class with powerful engines, whose function could be that of a minesweeper, patrol craft, submarine chaser, seaplane tender, tugboat, or other. Once their destiny, or capability, was found or determined, such vessels were reclassified with their actual designation.",
"title": "United States Navy hull classification codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Prior to 1965, U.S. Coast Guard cutters used the same designation as naval ships but preceded by a \"W\" to indicate Coast Guard commission. The U.S. Coast Guard considers any ship over 65 feet in length with a permanently assigned crew, a cutter.",
"title": "United States Coast Guard vessels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The letter is paired with a three-digit number. The first digit of the number is determined by the ship's \"power tonnage,\" defined as the sum of its shaft horsepower and gross international tonnage, as follows:",
"title": "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hull codes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The second and third digits are assigned to create a unique three-digit hull number.",
"title": "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hull codes"
}
]
| The United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, and United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use a hull classification symbol to identify their ships by type and by individual ship within a type. The system is analogous to the pennant number system that the Royal Navy and other European and Commonwealth navies use. | 2001-11-06T22:41:18Z | 2023-12-23T11:17:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_classification_symbol |
14,091 | Habeas corpus | Habeas corpus (/ˈheɪbiəs ˈkɔːrpəs/ ; from Medieval Latin, lit. 'that you have the body') is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful.
The writ of habeas corpus was described in the eighteenth century by William Blackstone as a "great and efficacious writ in all manner of illegal confinement". It is a summons with the force of a court order; it is addressed to the custodian (a prison official, for example) and demands that a prisoner be brought before the court, and that the custodian present proof of authority, allowing the court to determine whether the custodian has lawful authority to detain the prisoner. If the custodian is acting beyond their authority, then the prisoner must be released. Any prisoner, or another person acting on their behalf, may petition the court, or a judge, for a writ of habeas corpus. One reason for the writ to be sought by a person other than the prisoner is that the detainee might be held incommunicado. Most civil law jurisdictions provide a similar remedy for those unlawfully detained, but this is not always called habeas corpus. For example, in some Spanish-speaking nations, the equivalent remedy for unlawful imprisonment is the amparo de libertad ("protection of freedom").
Habeas corpus has certain limitations. The petitioner must present a prima facie case that a person has been unlawfully restrained. As a procedural remedy, it applies when detention results from neglect of legal process, but not when the lawfulness of the process itself is in question. In some countries, the writ has been temporarily or permanently suspended on the basis of a war or state of emergency, for example with the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act 1794 in Britain and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1863) in the United States. The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has nonetheless long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. The jurist Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the British Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty".
The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the "extraordinary", "common law", or "prerogative writs", which were historically issued by the English courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The most common of the other such prerogative writs are quo warranto, prohibito, mandamus, procedendo, and certiorari. The due process for such petitions is not simply civil or criminal, because they incorporate the presumption of non-authority. The official who is the respondent must prove their authority to do or not do something. Failing this, the court must decide for the petitioner, who may be any person, not just an interested party. This differs from a motion in a civil process in which the movant must have standing, and bears the burden of proof.
The phrase is from the Latin habeās, 2nd person singular present subjunctive active of habēre, "to have", "to hold"; and corpus, accusative singular of corpus, "body". In reference to more than one person, the phrase is habeas corpora.
Literally, the phrase means "[we command] that you should have the [detainee's] body [brought to court]"; that is, that the detainee be brought to court in person. The complete phrase habeas corpus [coram nobis] ad subjiciendum means "that you have the person [before us] for the purpose of subjecting (the case to examination)". These are words of writs included in a 14th-century Anglo-French document requiring a person to be brought before a court or judge, especially to determine if that person is being legally detained.
Praecipimus tibi quod corpus A.B. in prisona nostra sub custodia tua detentum, ut dicitur, una cum die et causa captionis et detentionis suae, quocumque nomine praedictus A.B. censeatur in eadem, habeas coram nobis ... ad subjiciendum et recipiendum ea quae curia nostra de eo adtunc et ibidem ordinare contigerit in hac parte. Et hoc nullatenus omittatis periculo incumbente. Et habeas ibi hoc breve.
We command you, that the body of A.B. in our prison under your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his taking and detention, by whatever name the said A.B. may be known therein, you have at our Court ... to undergo and to receive that which our Court shall then and there consider and order in that behalf. Hereof in no way fail, at your peril. And have you then there this writ.
Victoria by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith,
To J.K., Keeper of our Gaol, in the Island of Jersey, and to J.C. Viscount of said Island, Greeting.
We command you that you have the body of C.C.W. detained in our prison under your custody, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his being taken and detained, by whatsoever name he may be called or known, in our Court before us, at Westminster, on the 18th day of January next, to undergo and receive all and singular such matters and things which our said Court shall then and there consider of in this behalf; and have there then this Writ.
United States of America, Second Judicial Circuit, Southern District of New York, ss.: We command you that the body of Charles L. Craig, in your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his caption and detention, you safely have before Honorable Martin T. Manton, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Judicial Circuit, within the circuit and district aforesaid, to do and receive all and singular those things which the said judge shall then and there consider of him in this behalf; and have you then and there this writ.
The full name of the writ is often used to distinguish it from similar ancient writs, also named habeas corpus. These include:
Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a re-issuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century. The foundations for habeas corpus are "wrongly thought" to have originated in Magna Carta, but in fact predates it. This charter declared that:
No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.
However the preceding article of Magna Carta, nr 38, declares:
No legal officer shall start proceedings against anyone [not just freemen, this was even then a universal human right] on his own mere say-so, without reliable witnesses having been brought for the purpose.- in the original Latin:Nullus balivus ponat aliquem ad legem, simplici sua loquela, sine testibus fidelibus ad hoc aductis
Pursuant to that language, a person may not be subjected to any legal proceeding, such as arrest and imprisonment, without sufficient evidence having already been collected to show that there is a prima facie case to answer. This evidence must be collected beforehand, because it must be available to be exhibited in a public hearing within hours, or at the most days, after arrest. Any charge levelled at the hearing thus must be based on evidence already collected, and an arrest and incarceration order is not lawful if not supported by sufficient evidence.
William Blackstone cites the first recorded usage of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum in 1305, during the reign of King Edward I. However, other writs were issued with the same effect as early as the reign of Henry II in the 12th century. Blackstone explained the basis of the writ, saying "[t]he king is at all times entitled to have an account, why the liberty of any of his subjects is restrained, wherever that restraint may be inflicted." The procedure for issuing a writ of habeas corpus was first codified by the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, following judicial rulings which had restricted the effectiveness of the writ. A previous law (the Habeas Corpus Act 1640) had been passed forty years earlier to overturn a ruling that the command of the king was a sufficient answer to a petition of habeas corpus. The cornerstone purpose of the writ of habeas corpus was to limit the king's Chancery's ability to undermine the surety of law by allowing courts of justice decisions to be overturned in favor and application of equity, a process managed by the Chancellor (a bishop) with the king's authority.
The 1679 codification of habeas corpus took place in the context of a sharp confrontation between King Charles II and Parliament, which was dominated by the then sharply oppositional, nascent Whig Party. The Whig leaders had good reasons to fear the king moving against them through the courts (as indeed happened in 1681) and regarded habeas corpus as safeguarding their own persons. The short-lived parliament which made this enactment came to be known as the Habeas Corpus Parliament – being dissolved by the king immediately afterwards.
Then, as now, the writ of habeas corpus was issued by a superior court in the name of the sovereign, and commanded the addressee (a lower court, sheriff, or private subject) to produce the prisoner before the royal courts of law. A habeas corpus petition could be made by the prisoner him or herself or by a third party on his or her behalf and, as a result of the Habeas Corpus Acts, could be made regardless of whether the court was in session, by presenting the petition to a judge. Since the 18th century the writ has also been used in cases of unlawful detention by private individuals, most famously in Somersett's Case (1772), where the black slave, Somersett, was ordered to be freed. During that case, these famous words are said to have been uttered: "... that the air of England was too pure for slavery" (although it was the lawyers in argument who expressly used this phrase – referenced from a much earlier argument heard in the Star Chamber – and not Lord Mansfield himself). During the Seven Years' War and later conflicts, the writ was used on behalf of soldiers and sailors pressed into military and naval service. The Habeas Corpus Act 1816 introduced some changes and expanded the territoriality of the legislation.
The privilege of habeas corpus has been suspended or restricted several times during English history, most recently during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although internment without trial has been authorised by statute since that time, for example during the two World Wars and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the habeas corpus procedure has in modern times always technically remained available to such internees. However, as habeas corpus is only a procedural device to examine the lawfulness of a prisoner's detention, so long as the detention is in accordance with an Act of Parliament, the petition for habeas corpus is unsuccessful. Since the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, the courts have been able to declare an Act of Parliament to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, but such a declaration of incompatibility has no legal effect unless and until it is acted upon by the government.
The wording of the writ of habeas corpus implies that the prisoner is brought to the court for the legality of the imprisonment to be examined. However, rather than issuing the writ immediately and waiting for the return of the writ by the custodian, modern practice in England is for the original application to be followed by a hearing with both parties present to decide the legality of the detention, without any writ being issued. If the detention is held to be unlawful, the prisoner can usually then be released or bailed by order of the court without having to be produced before it. With the development of modern public law, applications for habeas corpus have been to some extent discouraged, in favour of applications for judicial review. The writ, however, maintains its vigour, and was held by the UK Supreme Court in 2012 to be available in respect of a prisoner captured by British forces in Afghanistan, albeit that the Secretary of State made a valid return to the writ justifying the detention of the claimant.
Although the first recorded historical references come from Anglo-Saxon law in the 12th century and one of the first documents referring to this right is a law of the English Parliament (1679), in Catalonia there are references from 1428 in the recurs de manifestació de persones (appeal of people's manifestation) collected in the Furs de les Corts of the Crown of Aragon and some references to this term in the Law of the Lordship of Biscay (1527).
The writ of habeas corpus as a procedural remedy is part of Australia's English law inheritance. In 2005, the Australian parliament passed the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2005. Some legal experts questioned the constitutionality of the act, due in part to limitations it placed on habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus rights are part of the British legal tradition inherited by Canada. The rights exist in the common law and have been enshrined in section 10(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that "[e]veryone has the right on arrest or detention ... to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful". The test for habeas corpus in Canada was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in Mission Institution v Khela, as follows:
To be successful, an application for habeas corpus must satisfy the following criteria. First, the applicant [i.e., the person seeking habeas corpus review] must establish that he or she has been deprived of liberty. Once a deprivation of liberty is proven, the applicant must raise a legitimate ground upon which to question its legality. If the applicant has raised such a ground, the onus shifts to the respondent authorities [i.e., the person or institution detaining the applicant] to show that the deprivation of liberty was lawful.
Suspension of the writ in Canadian history occurred at multiple times. During the October Crisis in 1970, the War Measures Act was invoked by the Governor General of Canada on the constitutional advice of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who had received a request from the Quebec Cabinet. The Act was also used to justify German, Slavic, and Ukrainian Canadian internment during the First World War, and the internment of German-Canadians, Italian-Canadians and Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. The writ was suspended for several years following the Battle of Fort Erie (1866) during the Fenian Rising, though the suspension was only ever applied to suspects in the Thomas D'Arcy McGee assassination.
The writ is available where there is no other adequate remedy. However, a superior court always has the discretion to grant the writ even in the face of an alternative remedy (see May v Ferndale Institution). Under the Criminal Code the writ is largely unavailable if a statutory right of appeal exists, whether or not this right has been exercised.
As a fundamental human right in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen drafted by Lafayette in cooperation with Thomas Jefferson, safeguards against arbitrary detention are enshrined in the French Constitution and regulated by the Penal Code. These safeguards are equivalent to those found under the Habeas-Corpus provisions found in Germany, the United States and several Commonwealth countries. The French system of accountability prescribes severe penalties for ministers, police officers and civil and judiciary authorities who either violate or fail to enforce the law.
Article 7 of [1789] Declaration also provides that "No individual may be accused, arrested, or detained except where the law so prescribes, and in accordance with the procedure it has laid down." ... The Constitution further states that "No one may be arbitrarily detained. The judicial authority, guardian of individual liberty, ensures the observance of this principle under the condition specified by law." Its article 5 provides that everyone has the right to liberty and sets forth permissible circumstances under which people may be deprived of their liberty and procedural safeguards in case of detention. In particular, it states that "anyone deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful".
France and the United States played a synergistic role in the international team, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, which crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The French judge and Nobel Peace Laureate René Cassin produced the first draft and argued against arbitrary detentions. René Cassin and the French team subsequently championed the habeas corpus provisions enshrined in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Germany has constitutional guarantees against improper detention and these have been implemented in statutory law in a manner that can be considered as equivalent to writs of habeas corpus.
Article 104, paragraph 1 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany provides that deprivations of liberty may be imposed only on the basis of a specific enabling statute that also must include procedural rules. Article 104, paragraph 2 requires that any arrested individual be brought before a judge by the end of the day following the day of the arrest. For those detained as criminal suspects, article 104, paragraph 3 specifically requires that the judge must grant a hearing to the suspect in order to rule on the detention.
Restrictions on the power of the authorities to arrest and detain individuals also emanate from article 2 paragraph 2 of the Basic Law which guarantees liberty and requires a statutory authorization for any deprivation of liberty. In addition, several other articles of the Basic Law have a bearing on the issue. The most important of these are article 19, which generally requires a statutory basis for any infringements of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Basic Law while also guaranteeing judicial review; article 20, paragraph 3, which guarantees the rule of law; and article 3 which guarantees equality.
In particular, a constitutional obligation to grant remedies for improper detention is required by article 19, paragraph 4 of the Basic Law, which provides as follows: "Should any person's right be violated by public authority, he may have recourse to the courts. If no other jurisdiction has been established, recourse shall be to the ordinary courts."
In the Republic of India, the Supreme Court and High Courts possess the authority to issue a writ of habeas corpus, as granted by Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution of India, respectively.
(1) The right to move the Supreme Court by appropriate proceedings for the enforcement of the rights conferred by (Part III) is guaranteed.
(2) The Supreme Court shall have power to issue directions or orders or writs, including writs in the nature of habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari, whichever may be appropriate, for the enforcement of any of the rights conferred by (Part III).
(1) Notwithstanding anything in article 32, every High Court shall have power, throughout the territories in relation to which it exercises jurisdiction, to issue to any person or authority, including in appropriate cases, any Government, within those territories directions, orders or writs, including writs in the nature of habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari, or any of them, for the enforcement of any of the rights conferred by Part III and for any other purpose.
On December 9, 1948, during a session of the Constituent Assembly, H.V. Kamath, a member, suggested the removal of specific references to writs in Article 32, expressing concern that such references could restrict judges from establishing new types of writs in the future, while Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Chairperson of the Drafting Committee, emphasized the significance of retaining references to the writs. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted that writs, including habeas corpus, are already part of the Indian legal framework, but the existing writs are vulnerable to modifications through legislative changes, whereby the legislature, particularly with a strong majority, can amend the relevant laws, potentially leading to the suspension of writs like habeas corpus. However, following the Constitution's enactment, which includes explicit references to writs, these writs cannot be easily nullified by any legislative body because the Constitution grants the Supreme Court the authority to issue them.
The Indian judiciary, in a catena of cases, has effectively resorted to the writ of habeas corpus to secure release of a person from illegal detention. The Indian judiciary has dispensed with the traditional doctrine of locus standi, so that if a detained person is not in a position to file a petition, it can be moved on his behalf by any other person. The scope of habeas relief has expanded in recent times by actions of the Indian judiciary.
Usually, in most other jurisdictions, the writ is directed at police authorities. The extension to non-state authorities has its grounds in two cases: the 1898 Queen's Bench case of Ex Parte Daisy Hopkins, wherein the Proctor of Cambridge University did detain and arrest Hopkins without his jurisdiction, and Hopkins was released, and that of Somerset v Stewart, in which an African slave whose master had moved to London was freed by action of the writ. For example, in October 2009, the Karnataka High Court heard a habeas corpus petition filed by the parents of a girl who married a Muslim boy from Kannur district and was allegedly confined in a madrasa in Malapuram town. In 1976, the habeas writ was used in the Rajan case, a student victim of torture in local police custody during the nationwide Emergency in India. On 12 March 2014, Subrata Roy's counsel approached the Chief Justice moving a habeas corpus petition. It was also filed by the Panthers Party to protest the imprisonment of Anna Hazare, a social activist.
In the Republic of Ireland, the writ of habeas corpus is available at common law and under the Habeas Corpus Acts of 1782 and 1816.
A remedy equivalent to habeas corpus is also guaranteed by Article 40 of the 1937 constitution. The article guarantees that "no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law" and outlines a specific procedure for the High Court to enquire into the lawfulness of any person's detention. It does not mention the Latin term habeas corpus, but includes the English phrase "produce the body".
Article 40.4.2° provides that a prisoner, or anyone acting on his behalf, may make a complaint to the High Court (or to any High Court judge) of unlawful detention. The court must then investigate the matter "forthwith" and may order that the defendant bring the prisoner before the court and give reasons for his detention. The court must immediately release the detainee unless it is satisfied that he is being held lawfully. The remedy is available not only to prisoners of the state, but also to persons unlawfully detained by any private party. However, the constitution provides that the procedure is not binding on the Defence Forces during a state of war or armed rebellion.
The full text of Article 40.4.2° is as follows:
Upon complaint being made by or on behalf of any person to the High Court or any judge thereof alleging that such person is being unlawfully detained, the High Court and any and every judge thereof to whom such complaint is made shall forthwith enquire into the said complaint and may order the person in whose custody such person is detained to produce the body of such person before the High Court on a named day and to certify in writing the grounds of his detention, and the High Court shall, upon the body of such person being produced before that Court and after giving the person in whose custody he is detained an opportunity of justifying the detention, order the release of such person from such detention unless satisfied that he is being detained in accordance with the law. [italics added]
The writ of habeas corpus continued as part of the Irish law when the state seceded from the United Kingdom in 1922. A remedy equivalent to habeas corpus was also guaranteed by Article 6 of the Constitution of the Irish Free State, enacted in 1922. That article used similar wording to Article 40.4 of the current constitution, which replaced it 1937.
The relationship between the Article 40 and the Habeas Corpus Acts of 1782 and 1816 is ambiguous, and Forde and Leonard write that "The extent if any to which Article 40.4 has replaced these Acts has yet to be determined". In The State (Ahern) v. Cotter (1982) Walsh J. opined that the ancient writ referred to in the Habeas Corpus Acts remains in existence in Irish law as a separate remedy from that provided for in Article 40.
In 1941, the Article 40 procedure was restricted by the Second Amendment. Prior to the amendment, a prisoner had the constitutional right to apply to any High Court judge for an enquiry into her detention, and to as many High Court judges as she wished. If the prisoner successfully challenged her detention before the High Court she was entitled to immediate, unconditional release.
The Second Amendment provided that a prisoner has only the right to apply to a single judge, and, once a writ has been issued, the President of the High Court has authority to choose the judge or panel of three judges who will decide the case. If the High Court finds that the prisoner's detention is unlawful due to the unconstitutionality of a law the judge must refer the matter to the Supreme Court, and until the Supreme Court's decision is rendered the prisoner may be released only on bail.
The power of the state to detain persons prior to trial was extended by the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1996. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in the O'Callaghan case that the constitution required that an individual charged with a crime could be refused bail only if she was likely to flee or to interfere with witnesses or evidence. Since the Sixteenth Amendment, it has been possible for a court to take into account whether a person has committed serious crimes while on bail in the past.
The right to freedom from arbitrary detention is guaranteed by Article 13 of the Constitution of Italy, which states:
Personal liberty is inviolable. No one may be detained, inspected, or searched nor otherwise subjected to any restriction of personal liberty except by order of the Judiciary stating a reason and only in such cases and in such manner as provided by the law. In exceptional circumstances and under such conditions of necessity and urgency as shall conclusively be defined by the law, the police may take provisional measures that shall be referred within 48 hours to the Judiciary for validation and which, in default of such validation in the following 48 hours, shall be revoked and considered null and void. Any act of physical and moral violence against a person subjected to restriction of personal liberty shall be punished. The law shall establish the maximum duration of preventive detention.
This implies that within 48 hours every arrest made by a police force must be validated by a court.
Furthermore, if subject to a valid detention, an arrested can ask for a review of the detention to another court, called the Review Court (Tribunale del Riesame, also known as the Freedom Court, Tribunale della Libertà).
In Macau, the relevant provision is Article 204 in the Code of Penal Processes, which became law in 1996 under Portuguese rule. Habeas corpus cases are heard before the Tribunal of Ultimate Instance. A notable case is Case 3/2008 in Macau.
In Malaysia, the remedy of habeas corpus is guaranteed by the federal constitution, although not by name. Article 5(2) of the Constitution of Malaysia provides that "Where complaint is made to a High Court or any judge thereof that a person is being unlawfully detained the court shall inquire into the complaint and, unless satisfied that the detention is lawful, shall order him to be produced before the court and release him".
As there are several statutes, for example, the Internal Security Act 1960, that still permit detention without trial, the procedure is usually effective in such cases only if it can be shown that there was a procedural error in the way that the detention was ordered.
In New Zealand, habeas corpus may be invoked against the government or private individuals. In 2006, a child was allegedly kidnapped by his maternal grandfather after a custody dispute. The father began habeas corpus proceedings against the mother, the grandfather, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, and another person alleged to have assisted in the kidnap of the child. The mother did not present the child to the court and so was imprisoned for contempt of court. She was released when the grandfather came forward with the child in late January 2007.
Issuance of a writ is an exercise of an extraordinary jurisdiction of the superior courts in Pakistan. A writ of habeas corpus may be issued by any High Court of a province in Pakistan. Article 199 of the 1973 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, specifically provides for the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus, empowering the courts to exercise this prerogative. Subject to the Article 199 of the Constitution, "A High Court may, if it is satisfied that no other adequate remedy is provided by law, on the application of any person, make an order that a person in custody within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court be brought before it so that the Court may satisfy itself that he is not being held in custody without a lawful authority or in an unlawful manner". The hallmark of extraordinary constitutional jurisdiction is to keep various functionaries of State within the ambit of their authority. Once a High Court has assumed jurisdiction to adjudicate the matter before it, justiciability of the issue raised before it is beyond question. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has stated clearly that the use of words "in an unlawful manner" implies that the court may examine, if a statute has allowed such detention, whether it was a colorable exercise of the power of authority. Thus, the court can examine the malafides of the action taken.
In Portugal, article 31 of the Constitution guarantees citizens against improper arrest, imprisonment or detention.
The full text of Article 31 is as follows:
Article 31 (Habeas corpus)
There are also statutory provisions, most notably the Code of Criminal Procedure, articles 220 and 222 that stipulate the reasons by which a judge may guarantee habeas corpus.
In the Bill of Rights of the Philippine constitution, habeas corpus is guaranteed in terms almost identically to those used in the U.S. Constitution. Article 3, Section 15 of the Constitution of the Philippines states that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except in cases of invasion or rebellion when the public safety requires it".
In 1971, after the Plaza Miranda bombing, the Marcos administration, under Ferdinand Marcos, suspended habeas corpus in an effort to stifle the oncoming insurgency, having blamed the Filipino Communist Party for the events of August 21. Many considered this to be a prelude to martial law. After widespread protests, however, the Marcos administration decided to reintroduce the writ. The writ was again suspended when Marcos declared martial law in 1972.
In December 2009, habeas corpus was suspended in Maguindanao as President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo placed the province under martial law. This occurred in response to the Maguindanao massacre.
In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte said he was planning on suspending habeas corpus.
At 10 pm on 23 May 2017 Philippine time, President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the whole island of Mindanao including Sulu and Tawi-tawi for the period of 60 days due to the series of attacks mounted by the Maute group, an ISIS-linked terrorist organization. The declaration suspended the writ.
The Parliament of Scotland passed a law to have the same effect as habeas corpus in the 18th century. This is now known as the Criminal Procedure Act 1701 c. 6. It was originally called "the Act for preventing wrongful imprisonment and against undue delays in trials". It is still in force although certain parts have been repealed.
The present Constitution of Spain states that "A habeas corpus procedure shall be provided for by law to ensure the immediate handing over to the judicial authorities of any person illegally arrested". The statute which regulates the procedure is the Law of Habeas Corpus of 24 May 1984, which provides that a person imprisoned may, on her or his own or through a third person, allege that she or he is imprisoned unlawfully and request to appear before a judge. The request must specify the grounds on which the detention is considered to be unlawful, which can be, for example, that the custodian holding the prisoner does not have the legal authority, that the prisoner's constitutional rights have been violated, or that he has been subjected to mistreatment. The judge may then request additional information if needed, and may issue a habeas corpus order, at which point the custodian has 24 hours to bring the prisoner before the judge.
Historically, many of the territories of Spain had remedies equivalent to the habeas corpus, such as the privilege of manifestación in the Crown of Aragon or the right of the Tree in Biscay.
Habeas corpus is explicitly stated in article 8 of the Constitution of the Republic of China, in which guarantees that anyone has the right to request a writ of habeas corpus for himself or any other person that is being detained by any organization or individual other than courts. Also, courts shall not reject the request, nor order the detainer to investigate and report before surrendering the detainee; the detainer must bring the person in question to the court within 24 hours without condition, and the detainee shall be released on the spot if the detention is deemed illegal. The article was further enforced by the Habeas Corpus Act.
The United States inherited habeas corpus from the English common law. In England, the writ was issued in the name of the monarch. When the original thirteen American colonies declared independence, and became a republic based on popular sovereignty, any person, in the name of the people, acquired authority to initiate such writs. The U.S. Constitution specifically includes the habeas procedure in the Suspension Clause (Clause 2), located in Article One, Section 9. This states that "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".
The writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum is a civil, not criminal, ex parte proceeding in which a court inquires as to the legitimacy of a prisoner's custody. Typically, habeas corpus proceedings are to determine whether the court that imposed sentence on the defendant had jurisdiction and authority to do so, or whether the defendant's sentence has expired. Habeas corpus is also used as a legal avenue to challenge other types of custody such as pretrial detention or detention by the United States Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pursuant to a deportation proceeding.
Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Reconstruction for some places or types of cases. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended habeas corpus. Following the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush attempted to place Guantanamo Bay detainees outside of the jurisdiction of habeas corpus, but the Supreme Court of the United States overturned this action in Boumediene v. Bush.
In 1526, the Fuero Nuevo of the Señorío de Vizcaya (New Charter of the Lordship of Biscay) established a form of habeas corpus in the territory of the Señorío de Vizcaya, now part of Spain. This revised version of the Fuero Viejo (Old Charter) of 1451 codified the medieval custom whereby no person could be arbitrarily detained without being summoned first to the Oak of Gernika, an ancestral oak tree located in the outskirts of Gernika under which all laws of the Lordship of Biscay were passed.
The New Charter formalised that no one could be detained without a court order (Law 26 of Chapter 9) nor due to debts (Law 3 of Chapter 16). It also established due process and a form of habeas corpus: no one could be arrested without previously having been summoned to the Oak of Gernika and given 30 days to answer the said summons. Upon appearing under the Tree, they had to be provided with accusations and all evidence held against them so that they could defend themselves (Law 7 of Chapter 9).
No one could be sent to prison or deprived of their freedom until being formally trialed. No one could be accused of a different crime until their current court trial was over (Law 5 of Chapter 5). Those fearing they were being arrested illegally could appeal to the Regimiento General that their rights could be upheld. The Regimiento, the executive arm of the Juntas Generales of Biscay, would demand the prisoner be handed over to them, and thereafter the prisoner would be released and placed under the protection of the Regimiento while awaiting trial.
The Crown of Aragon had a remedy equivalent to the habeas corpus called the manifestación de personas, literally, demonstration of persons. According to the right of manifestación, the Justicia de Aragon, lit. Justice of Aragon, an Aragonese judiciary figure similar to an ombudsman, but with far reaching executive powers, could require a judge, a court of justice, or any other official that they handed over to the Justicia, i.e., that they be demonstrated to the Justicia, anyone being prosecuted, so as to guarantee that this person's rights were upheld, and that no violence would befall this person prior to their being sentenced.
The Justicia retained the right to examine the judgement passed, and decide whether it satisfied the conditions of a fair trial. If the Justicia was not satisfied, he could refuse to hand over the accused back to the authorities. The right of manifestación acted like a habeas corpus: knowing that the appeal to the Justicia would immediately follow any unlawful detention, these were effectively illegal. Equally, torture, which had been banned in Aragon since 1325, would never take place.
In some cases, people exerting their right of manifestación were kept under the Justicia's watch in manifestación prisons, famous for their mild and easy conditions, or under house arrest. More generally however, the person was released from confinement and placed under the Justicia's protection, awaiting for trial. The Justicia always granted the right of manifestación by default, but they only really had to act in extreme cases, as for instance famously happened in 1590 when Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Philip II of Spain, fled from Castile to Aragon and used his Aragonese ascendency to appeal to the Justicia for manifestación right, thereby preventing his arrest at the King's behest.
The right of manifestación was codified in 1325 in the Declaratio Privilegii generalis passed by the Aragonese Corts under king James II of Aragon. It had been practised since the inception of the kingdom of Aragon in the 11th century, and therefore predates the English habeas corpus itself.
In 1430, King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland granted the Privilege of Jedlnia, which proclaimed, Neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum ("We will not imprison anyone except if convicted by law"). This revolutionary innovation in civil libertarianism gave Polish citizens due process-style rights that did not exist in any other European country for another 250 years. Originally, the Privilege of Jedlnia was restricted to the nobility, the szlachta. It was extended to cover townsmen in the 1791 Constitution. Importantly, social classifications in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were not as rigid as in other European countries; townspeople and Jews were sometimes ennobled. The Privilege of Jedlnia provided broader coverage than many subsequently enacted habeas corpus laws, because Poland's nobility constituted an unusually large percentage of the country's total population, which was Europe's largest. As a result, by the 16th century, it was protecting the liberty of between five hundred thousand and a million Poles.
In South Africa and other countries whose legal systems are based on Roman-Dutch law, the interdictum de homine libero exhibendo is the equivalent of the writ of habeas corpus. In South Africa, it has been entrenched in the Bill of Rights, which provides in section 35(2)(d) that every detained person has the right to challenge the lawfulness of the detention in person before a court and, if the detention is unlawful, to be released.
In the 1950s, American lawyer Luis Kutner began advocating an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights. In 1952, he filed a petition for a "United Nations Writ of Habeas Corpus" on behalf of William N. Oatis, an American journalist jailed the previous year by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. Alleging that Czechoslovakia had violated Oatis' rights under the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that the United Nations General Assembly had "inherent power" to fashion remedies for human rights violations, the petition was filed with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The commission forwarded the petition to Czechoslovakia, but no other United Nations action was taken. Oatis was released in 1953. Kutner went on to publish numerous articles and books advocating the creation of an "International Court of Habeas Corpus".
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person". Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights goes further and calls for persons detained to have the right to challenge their detention, providing at article 5.4:
Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Habeas corpus (/ˈheɪbiəs ˈkɔːrpəs/ ; from Medieval Latin, lit. 'that you have the body') is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The writ of habeas corpus was described in the eighteenth century by William Blackstone as a \"great and efficacious writ in all manner of illegal confinement\". It is a summons with the force of a court order; it is addressed to the custodian (a prison official, for example) and demands that a prisoner be brought before the court, and that the custodian present proof of authority, allowing the court to determine whether the custodian has lawful authority to detain the prisoner. If the custodian is acting beyond their authority, then the prisoner must be released. Any prisoner, or another person acting on their behalf, may petition the court, or a judge, for a writ of habeas corpus. One reason for the writ to be sought by a person other than the prisoner is that the detainee might be held incommunicado. Most civil law jurisdictions provide a similar remedy for those unlawfully detained, but this is not always called habeas corpus. For example, in some Spanish-speaking nations, the equivalent remedy for unlawful imprisonment is the amparo de libertad (\"protection of freedom\").",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Habeas corpus has certain limitations. The petitioner must present a prima facie case that a person has been unlawfully restrained. As a procedural remedy, it applies when detention results from neglect of legal process, but not when the lawfulness of the process itself is in question. In some countries, the writ has been temporarily or permanently suspended on the basis of a war or state of emergency, for example with the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act 1794 in Britain and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1863) in the United States. The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has nonetheless long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. The jurist Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the British Habeas Corpus Acts \"declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the \"extraordinary\", \"common law\", or \"prerogative writs\", which were historically issued by the English courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The most common of the other such prerogative writs are quo warranto, prohibito, mandamus, procedendo, and certiorari. The due process for such petitions is not simply civil or criminal, because they incorporate the presumption of non-authority. The official who is the respondent must prove their authority to do or not do something. Failing this, the court must decide for the petitioner, who may be any person, not just an interested party. This differs from a motion in a civil process in which the movant must have standing, and bears the burden of proof.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The phrase is from the Latin habeās, 2nd person singular present subjunctive active of habēre, \"to have\", \"to hold\"; and corpus, accusative singular of corpus, \"body\". In reference to more than one person, the phrase is habeas corpora.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Literally, the phrase means \"[we command] that you should have the [detainee's] body [brought to court]\"; that is, that the detainee be brought to court in person. The complete phrase habeas corpus [coram nobis] ad subjiciendum means \"that you have the person [before us] for the purpose of subjecting (the case to examination)\". These are words of writs included in a 14th-century Anglo-French document requiring a person to be brought before a court or judge, especially to determine if that person is being legally detained.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Praecipimus tibi quod corpus A.B. in prisona nostra sub custodia tua detentum, ut dicitur, una cum die et causa captionis et detentionis suae, quocumque nomine praedictus A.B. censeatur in eadem, habeas coram nobis ... ad subjiciendum et recipiendum ea quae curia nostra de eo adtunc et ibidem ordinare contigerit in hac parte. Et hoc nullatenus omittatis periculo incumbente. Et habeas ibi hoc breve.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "We command you, that the body of A.B. in our prison under your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his taking and detention, by whatever name the said A.B. may be known therein, you have at our Court ... to undergo and to receive that which our Court shall then and there consider and order in that behalf. Hereof in no way fail, at your peril. And have you then there this writ.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Victoria by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith,",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "To J.K., Keeper of our Gaol, in the Island of Jersey, and to J.C. Viscount of said Island, Greeting.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "We command you that you have the body of C.C.W. detained in our prison under your custody, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his being taken and detained, by whatsoever name he may be called or known, in our Court before us, at Westminster, on the 18th day of January next, to undergo and receive all and singular such matters and things which our said Court shall then and there consider of in this behalf; and have there then this Writ.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "United States of America, Second Judicial Circuit, Southern District of New York, ss.: We command you that the body of Charles L. Craig, in your custody detained, as it is said, together with the day and cause of his caption and detention, you safely have before Honorable Martin T. Manton, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Judicial Circuit, within the circuit and district aforesaid, to do and receive all and singular those things which the said judge shall then and there consider of him in this behalf; and have you then and there this writ.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The full name of the writ is often used to distinguish it from similar ancient writs, also named habeas corpus. These include:",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a re-issuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century. The foundations for habeas corpus are \"wrongly thought\" to have originated in Magna Carta, but in fact predates it. This charter declared that:",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "However the preceding article of Magna Carta, nr 38, declares:",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "No legal officer shall start proceedings against anyone [not just freemen, this was even then a universal human right] on his own mere say-so, without reliable witnesses having been brought for the purpose.- in the original Latin:Nullus balivus ponat aliquem ad legem, simplici sua loquela, sine testibus fidelibus ad hoc aductis",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Pursuant to that language, a person may not be subjected to any legal proceeding, such as arrest and imprisonment, without sufficient evidence having already been collected to show that there is a prima facie case to answer. This evidence must be collected beforehand, because it must be available to be exhibited in a public hearing within hours, or at the most days, after arrest. Any charge levelled at the hearing thus must be based on evidence already collected, and an arrest and incarceration order is not lawful if not supported by sufficient evidence.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "William Blackstone cites the first recorded usage of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum in 1305, during the reign of King Edward I. However, other writs were issued with the same effect as early as the reign of Henry II in the 12th century. Blackstone explained the basis of the writ, saying \"[t]he king is at all times entitled to have an account, why the liberty of any of his subjects is restrained, wherever that restraint may be inflicted.\" The procedure for issuing a writ of habeas corpus was first codified by the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, following judicial rulings which had restricted the effectiveness of the writ. A previous law (the Habeas Corpus Act 1640) had been passed forty years earlier to overturn a ruling that the command of the king was a sufficient answer to a petition of habeas corpus. The cornerstone purpose of the writ of habeas corpus was to limit the king's Chancery's ability to undermine the surety of law by allowing courts of justice decisions to be overturned in favor and application of equity, a process managed by the Chancellor (a bishop) with the king's authority.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The 1679 codification of habeas corpus took place in the context of a sharp confrontation between King Charles II and Parliament, which was dominated by the then sharply oppositional, nascent Whig Party. The Whig leaders had good reasons to fear the king moving against them through the courts (as indeed happened in 1681) and regarded habeas corpus as safeguarding their own persons. The short-lived parliament which made this enactment came to be known as the Habeas Corpus Parliament – being dissolved by the king immediately afterwards.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Then, as now, the writ of habeas corpus was issued by a superior court in the name of the sovereign, and commanded the addressee (a lower court, sheriff, or private subject) to produce the prisoner before the royal courts of law. A habeas corpus petition could be made by the prisoner him or herself or by a third party on his or her behalf and, as a result of the Habeas Corpus Acts, could be made regardless of whether the court was in session, by presenting the petition to a judge. Since the 18th century the writ has also been used in cases of unlawful detention by private individuals, most famously in Somersett's Case (1772), where the black slave, Somersett, was ordered to be freed. During that case, these famous words are said to have been uttered: \"... that the air of England was too pure for slavery\" (although it was the lawyers in argument who expressly used this phrase – referenced from a much earlier argument heard in the Star Chamber – and not Lord Mansfield himself). During the Seven Years' War and later conflicts, the writ was used on behalf of soldiers and sailors pressed into military and naval service. The Habeas Corpus Act 1816 introduced some changes and expanded the territoriality of the legislation.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The privilege of habeas corpus has been suspended or restricted several times during English history, most recently during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although internment without trial has been authorised by statute since that time, for example during the two World Wars and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the habeas corpus procedure has in modern times always technically remained available to such internees. However, as habeas corpus is only a procedural device to examine the lawfulness of a prisoner's detention, so long as the detention is in accordance with an Act of Parliament, the petition for habeas corpus is unsuccessful. Since the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, the courts have been able to declare an Act of Parliament to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, but such a declaration of incompatibility has no legal effect unless and until it is acted upon by the government.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The wording of the writ of habeas corpus implies that the prisoner is brought to the court for the legality of the imprisonment to be examined. However, rather than issuing the writ immediately and waiting for the return of the writ by the custodian, modern practice in England is for the original application to be followed by a hearing with both parties present to decide the legality of the detention, without any writ being issued. If the detention is held to be unlawful, the prisoner can usually then be released or bailed by order of the court without having to be produced before it. With the development of modern public law, applications for habeas corpus have been to some extent discouraged, in favour of applications for judicial review. The writ, however, maintains its vigour, and was held by the UK Supreme Court in 2012 to be available in respect of a prisoner captured by British forces in Afghanistan, albeit that the Secretary of State made a valid return to the writ justifying the detention of the claimant.",
"title": "Origins in England"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Although the first recorded historical references come from Anglo-Saxon law in the 12th century and one of the first documents referring to this right is a law of the English Parliament (1679), in Catalonia there are references from 1428 in the recurs de manifestació de persones (appeal of people's manifestation) collected in the Furs de les Corts of the Crown of Aragon and some references to this term in the Law of the Lordship of Biscay (1527).",
"title": "Precedents in medieval Catalonia and Biscay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The writ of habeas corpus as a procedural remedy is part of Australia's English law inheritance. In 2005, the Australian parliament passed the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2005. Some legal experts questioned the constitutionality of the act, due in part to limitations it placed on habeas corpus.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Habeas corpus rights are part of the British legal tradition inherited by Canada. The rights exist in the common law and have been enshrined in section 10(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that \"[e]veryone has the right on arrest or detention ... to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful\". The test for habeas corpus in Canada was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in Mission Institution v Khela, as follows:",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "To be successful, an application for habeas corpus must satisfy the following criteria. First, the applicant [i.e., the person seeking habeas corpus review] must establish that he or she has been deprived of liberty. Once a deprivation of liberty is proven, the applicant must raise a legitimate ground upon which to question its legality. If the applicant has raised such a ground, the onus shifts to the respondent authorities [i.e., the person or institution detaining the applicant] to show that the deprivation of liberty was lawful.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Suspension of the writ in Canadian history occurred at multiple times. During the October Crisis in 1970, the War Measures Act was invoked by the Governor General of Canada on the constitutional advice of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who had received a request from the Quebec Cabinet. The Act was also used to justify German, Slavic, and Ukrainian Canadian internment during the First World War, and the internment of German-Canadians, Italian-Canadians and Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. The writ was suspended for several years following the Battle of Fort Erie (1866) during the Fenian Rising, though the suspension was only ever applied to suspects in the Thomas D'Arcy McGee assassination.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The writ is available where there is no other adequate remedy. However, a superior court always has the discretion to grant the writ even in the face of an alternative remedy (see May v Ferndale Institution). Under the Criminal Code the writ is largely unavailable if a statutory right of appeal exists, whether or not this right has been exercised.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As a fundamental human right in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen drafted by Lafayette in cooperation with Thomas Jefferson, safeguards against arbitrary detention are enshrined in the French Constitution and regulated by the Penal Code. These safeguards are equivalent to those found under the Habeas-Corpus provisions found in Germany, the United States and several Commonwealth countries. The French system of accountability prescribes severe penalties for ministers, police officers and civil and judiciary authorities who either violate or fail to enforce the law.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Article 7 of [1789] Declaration also provides that \"No individual may be accused, arrested, or detained except where the law so prescribes, and in accordance with the procedure it has laid down.\" ... The Constitution further states that \"No one may be arbitrarily detained. The judicial authority, guardian of individual liberty, ensures the observance of this principle under the condition specified by law.\" Its article 5 provides that everyone has the right to liberty and sets forth permissible circumstances under which people may be deprived of their liberty and procedural safeguards in case of detention. In particular, it states that \"anyone deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful\".",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "France and the United States played a synergistic role in the international team, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, which crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The French judge and Nobel Peace Laureate René Cassin produced the first draft and argued against arbitrary detentions. René Cassin and the French team subsequently championed the habeas corpus provisions enshrined in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Germany has constitutional guarantees against improper detention and these have been implemented in statutory law in a manner that can be considered as equivalent to writs of habeas corpus.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Article 104, paragraph 1 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany provides that deprivations of liberty may be imposed only on the basis of a specific enabling statute that also must include procedural rules. Article 104, paragraph 2 requires that any arrested individual be brought before a judge by the end of the day following the day of the arrest. For those detained as criminal suspects, article 104, paragraph 3 specifically requires that the judge must grant a hearing to the suspect in order to rule on the detention.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Restrictions on the power of the authorities to arrest and detain individuals also emanate from article 2 paragraph 2 of the Basic Law which guarantees liberty and requires a statutory authorization for any deprivation of liberty. In addition, several other articles of the Basic Law have a bearing on the issue. The most important of these are article 19, which generally requires a statutory basis for any infringements of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Basic Law while also guaranteeing judicial review; article 20, paragraph 3, which guarantees the rule of law; and article 3 which guarantees equality.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In particular, a constitutional obligation to grant remedies for improper detention is required by article 19, paragraph 4 of the Basic Law, which provides as follows: \"Should any person's right be violated by public authority, he may have recourse to the courts. If no other jurisdiction has been established, recourse shall be to the ordinary courts.\"",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the Republic of India, the Supreme Court and High Courts possess the authority to issue a writ of habeas corpus, as granted by Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution of India, respectively.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "(1) The right to move the Supreme Court by appropriate proceedings for the enforcement of the rights conferred by (Part III) is guaranteed.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "(2) The Supreme Court shall have power to issue directions or orders or writs, including writs in the nature of habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari, whichever may be appropriate, for the enforcement of any of the rights conferred by (Part III).",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "(1) Notwithstanding anything in article 32, every High Court shall have power, throughout the territories in relation to which it exercises jurisdiction, to issue to any person or authority, including in appropriate cases, any Government, within those territories directions, orders or writs, including writs in the nature of habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari, or any of them, for the enforcement of any of the rights conferred by Part III and for any other purpose.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On December 9, 1948, during a session of the Constituent Assembly, H.V. Kamath, a member, suggested the removal of specific references to writs in Article 32, expressing concern that such references could restrict judges from establishing new types of writs in the future, while Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Chairperson of the Drafting Committee, emphasized the significance of retaining references to the writs. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted that writs, including habeas corpus, are already part of the Indian legal framework, but the existing writs are vulnerable to modifications through legislative changes, whereby the legislature, particularly with a strong majority, can amend the relevant laws, potentially leading to the suspension of writs like habeas corpus. However, following the Constitution's enactment, which includes explicit references to writs, these writs cannot be easily nullified by any legislative body because the Constitution grants the Supreme Court the authority to issue them.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Indian judiciary, in a catena of cases, has effectively resorted to the writ of habeas corpus to secure release of a person from illegal detention. The Indian judiciary has dispensed with the traditional doctrine of locus standi, so that if a detained person is not in a position to file a petition, it can be moved on his behalf by any other person. The scope of habeas relief has expanded in recent times by actions of the Indian judiciary.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Usually, in most other jurisdictions, the writ is directed at police authorities. The extension to non-state authorities has its grounds in two cases: the 1898 Queen's Bench case of Ex Parte Daisy Hopkins, wherein the Proctor of Cambridge University did detain and arrest Hopkins without his jurisdiction, and Hopkins was released, and that of Somerset v Stewart, in which an African slave whose master had moved to London was freed by action of the writ. For example, in October 2009, the Karnataka High Court heard a habeas corpus petition filed by the parents of a girl who married a Muslim boy from Kannur district and was allegedly confined in a madrasa in Malapuram town. In 1976, the habeas writ was used in the Rajan case, a student victim of torture in local police custody during the nationwide Emergency in India. On 12 March 2014, Subrata Roy's counsel approached the Chief Justice moving a habeas corpus petition. It was also filed by the Panthers Party to protest the imprisonment of Anna Hazare, a social activist.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the Republic of Ireland, the writ of habeas corpus is available at common law and under the Habeas Corpus Acts of 1782 and 1816.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A remedy equivalent to habeas corpus is also guaranteed by Article 40 of the 1937 constitution. The article guarantees that \"no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law\" and outlines a specific procedure for the High Court to enquire into the lawfulness of any person's detention. It does not mention the Latin term habeas corpus, but includes the English phrase \"produce the body\".",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Article 40.4.2° provides that a prisoner, or anyone acting on his behalf, may make a complaint to the High Court (or to any High Court judge) of unlawful detention. The court must then investigate the matter \"forthwith\" and may order that the defendant bring the prisoner before the court and give reasons for his detention. The court must immediately release the detainee unless it is satisfied that he is being held lawfully. The remedy is available not only to prisoners of the state, but also to persons unlawfully detained by any private party. However, the constitution provides that the procedure is not binding on the Defence Forces during a state of war or armed rebellion.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The full text of Article 40.4.2° is as follows:",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Upon complaint being made by or on behalf of any person to the High Court or any judge thereof alleging that such person is being unlawfully detained, the High Court and any and every judge thereof to whom such complaint is made shall forthwith enquire into the said complaint and may order the person in whose custody such person is detained to produce the body of such person before the High Court on a named day and to certify in writing the grounds of his detention, and the High Court shall, upon the body of such person being produced before that Court and after giving the person in whose custody he is detained an opportunity of justifying the detention, order the release of such person from such detention unless satisfied that he is being detained in accordance with the law. [italics added]",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The writ of habeas corpus continued as part of the Irish law when the state seceded from the United Kingdom in 1922. A remedy equivalent to habeas corpus was also guaranteed by Article 6 of the Constitution of the Irish Free State, enacted in 1922. That article used similar wording to Article 40.4 of the current constitution, which replaced it 1937.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The relationship between the Article 40 and the Habeas Corpus Acts of 1782 and 1816 is ambiguous, and Forde and Leonard write that \"The extent if any to which Article 40.4 has replaced these Acts has yet to be determined\". In The State (Ahern) v. Cotter (1982) Walsh J. opined that the ancient writ referred to in the Habeas Corpus Acts remains in existence in Irish law as a separate remedy from that provided for in Article 40.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 1941, the Article 40 procedure was restricted by the Second Amendment. Prior to the amendment, a prisoner had the constitutional right to apply to any High Court judge for an enquiry into her detention, and to as many High Court judges as she wished. If the prisoner successfully challenged her detention before the High Court she was entitled to immediate, unconditional release.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The Second Amendment provided that a prisoner has only the right to apply to a single judge, and, once a writ has been issued, the President of the High Court has authority to choose the judge or panel of three judges who will decide the case. If the High Court finds that the prisoner's detention is unlawful due to the unconstitutionality of a law the judge must refer the matter to the Supreme Court, and until the Supreme Court's decision is rendered the prisoner may be released only on bail.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The power of the state to detain persons prior to trial was extended by the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1996. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in the O'Callaghan case that the constitution required that an individual charged with a crime could be refused bail only if she was likely to flee or to interfere with witnesses or evidence. Since the Sixteenth Amendment, it has been possible for a court to take into account whether a person has committed serious crimes while on bail in the past.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The right to freedom from arbitrary detention is guaranteed by Article 13 of the Constitution of Italy, which states:",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Personal liberty is inviolable. No one may be detained, inspected, or searched nor otherwise subjected to any restriction of personal liberty except by order of the Judiciary stating a reason and only in such cases and in such manner as provided by the law. In exceptional circumstances and under such conditions of necessity and urgency as shall conclusively be defined by the law, the police may take provisional measures that shall be referred within 48 hours to the Judiciary for validation and which, in default of such validation in the following 48 hours, shall be revoked and considered null and void. Any act of physical and moral violence against a person subjected to restriction of personal liberty shall be punished. The law shall establish the maximum duration of preventive detention.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "This implies that within 48 hours every arrest made by a police force must be validated by a court.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Furthermore, if subject to a valid detention, an arrested can ask for a review of the detention to another court, called the Review Court (Tribunale del Riesame, also known as the Freedom Court, Tribunale della Libertà).",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In Macau, the relevant provision is Article 204 in the Code of Penal Processes, which became law in 1996 under Portuguese rule. Habeas corpus cases are heard before the Tribunal of Ultimate Instance. A notable case is Case 3/2008 in Macau.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In Malaysia, the remedy of habeas corpus is guaranteed by the federal constitution, although not by name. Article 5(2) of the Constitution of Malaysia provides that \"Where complaint is made to a High Court or any judge thereof that a person is being unlawfully detained the court shall inquire into the complaint and, unless satisfied that the detention is lawful, shall order him to be produced before the court and release him\".",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "As there are several statutes, for example, the Internal Security Act 1960, that still permit detention without trial, the procedure is usually effective in such cases only if it can be shown that there was a procedural error in the way that the detention was ordered.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In New Zealand, habeas corpus may be invoked against the government or private individuals. In 2006, a child was allegedly kidnapped by his maternal grandfather after a custody dispute. The father began habeas corpus proceedings against the mother, the grandfather, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, and another person alleged to have assisted in the kidnap of the child. The mother did not present the child to the court and so was imprisoned for contempt of court. She was released when the grandfather came forward with the child in late January 2007.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Issuance of a writ is an exercise of an extraordinary jurisdiction of the superior courts in Pakistan. A writ of habeas corpus may be issued by any High Court of a province in Pakistan. Article 199 of the 1973 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, specifically provides for the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus, empowering the courts to exercise this prerogative. Subject to the Article 199 of the Constitution, \"A High Court may, if it is satisfied that no other adequate remedy is provided by law, on the application of any person, make an order that a person in custody within the territorial jurisdiction of the Court be brought before it so that the Court may satisfy itself that he is not being held in custody without a lawful authority or in an unlawful manner\". The hallmark of extraordinary constitutional jurisdiction is to keep various functionaries of State within the ambit of their authority. Once a High Court has assumed jurisdiction to adjudicate the matter before it, justiciability of the issue raised before it is beyond question. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has stated clearly that the use of words \"in an unlawful manner\" implies that the court may examine, if a statute has allowed such detention, whether it was a colorable exercise of the power of authority. Thus, the court can examine the malafides of the action taken.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In Portugal, article 31 of the Constitution guarantees citizens against improper arrest, imprisonment or detention.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The full text of Article 31 is as follows:",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Article 31 (Habeas corpus)",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "There are also statutory provisions, most notably the Code of Criminal Procedure, articles 220 and 222 that stipulate the reasons by which a judge may guarantee habeas corpus.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In the Bill of Rights of the Philippine constitution, habeas corpus is guaranteed in terms almost identically to those used in the U.S. Constitution. Article 3, Section 15 of the Constitution of the Philippines states that \"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except in cases of invasion or rebellion when the public safety requires it\".",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1971, after the Plaza Miranda bombing, the Marcos administration, under Ferdinand Marcos, suspended habeas corpus in an effort to stifle the oncoming insurgency, having blamed the Filipino Communist Party for the events of August 21. Many considered this to be a prelude to martial law. After widespread protests, however, the Marcos administration decided to reintroduce the writ. The writ was again suspended when Marcos declared martial law in 1972.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In December 2009, habeas corpus was suspended in Maguindanao as President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo placed the province under martial law. This occurred in response to the Maguindanao massacre.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte said he was planning on suspending habeas corpus.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "At 10 pm on 23 May 2017 Philippine time, President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the whole island of Mindanao including Sulu and Tawi-tawi for the period of 60 days due to the series of attacks mounted by the Maute group, an ISIS-linked terrorist organization. The declaration suspended the writ.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Parliament of Scotland passed a law to have the same effect as habeas corpus in the 18th century. This is now known as the Criminal Procedure Act 1701 c. 6. It was originally called \"the Act for preventing wrongful imprisonment and against undue delays in trials\". It is still in force although certain parts have been repealed.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The present Constitution of Spain states that \"A habeas corpus procedure shall be provided for by law to ensure the immediate handing over to the judicial authorities of any person illegally arrested\". The statute which regulates the procedure is the Law of Habeas Corpus of 24 May 1984, which provides that a person imprisoned may, on her or his own or through a third person, allege that she or he is imprisoned unlawfully and request to appear before a judge. The request must specify the grounds on which the detention is considered to be unlawful, which can be, for example, that the custodian holding the prisoner does not have the legal authority, that the prisoner's constitutional rights have been violated, or that he has been subjected to mistreatment. The judge may then request additional information if needed, and may issue a habeas corpus order, at which point the custodian has 24 hours to bring the prisoner before the judge.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Historically, many of the territories of Spain had remedies equivalent to the habeas corpus, such as the privilege of manifestación in the Crown of Aragon or the right of the Tree in Biscay.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Habeas corpus is explicitly stated in article 8 of the Constitution of the Republic of China, in which guarantees that anyone has the right to request a writ of habeas corpus for himself or any other person that is being detained by any organization or individual other than courts. Also, courts shall not reject the request, nor order the detainer to investigate and report before surrendering the detainee; the detainer must bring the person in question to the court within 24 hours without condition, and the detainee shall be released on the spot if the detention is deemed illegal. The article was further enforced by the Habeas Corpus Act.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The United States inherited habeas corpus from the English common law. In England, the writ was issued in the name of the monarch. When the original thirteen American colonies declared independence, and became a republic based on popular sovereignty, any person, in the name of the people, acquired authority to initiate such writs. The U.S. Constitution specifically includes the habeas procedure in the Suspension Clause (Clause 2), located in Article One, Section 9. This states that \"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\".",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum is a civil, not criminal, ex parte proceeding in which a court inquires as to the legitimacy of a prisoner's custody. Typically, habeas corpus proceedings are to determine whether the court that imposed sentence on the defendant had jurisdiction and authority to do so, or whether the defendant's sentence has expired. Habeas corpus is also used as a legal avenue to challenge other types of custody such as pretrial detention or detention by the United States Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pursuant to a deportation proceeding.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Reconstruction for some places or types of cases. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended habeas corpus. Following the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush attempted to place Guantanamo Bay detainees outside of the jurisdiction of habeas corpus, but the Supreme Court of the United States overturned this action in Boumediene v. Bush.",
"title": "Other jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 1526, the Fuero Nuevo of the Señorío de Vizcaya (New Charter of the Lordship of Biscay) established a form of habeas corpus in the territory of the Señorío de Vizcaya, now part of Spain. This revised version of the Fuero Viejo (Old Charter) of 1451 codified the medieval custom whereby no person could be arbitrarily detained without being summoned first to the Oak of Gernika, an ancestral oak tree located in the outskirts of Gernika under which all laws of the Lordship of Biscay were passed.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The New Charter formalised that no one could be detained without a court order (Law 26 of Chapter 9) nor due to debts (Law 3 of Chapter 16). It also established due process and a form of habeas corpus: no one could be arrested without previously having been summoned to the Oak of Gernika and given 30 days to answer the said summons. Upon appearing under the Tree, they had to be provided with accusations and all evidence held against them so that they could defend themselves (Law 7 of Chapter 9).",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "No one could be sent to prison or deprived of their freedom until being formally trialed. No one could be accused of a different crime until their current court trial was over (Law 5 of Chapter 5). Those fearing they were being arrested illegally could appeal to the Regimiento General that their rights could be upheld. The Regimiento, the executive arm of the Juntas Generales of Biscay, would demand the prisoner be handed over to them, and thereafter the prisoner would be released and placed under the protection of the Regimiento while awaiting trial.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The Crown of Aragon had a remedy equivalent to the habeas corpus called the manifestación de personas, literally, demonstration of persons. According to the right of manifestación, the Justicia de Aragon, lit. Justice of Aragon, an Aragonese judiciary figure similar to an ombudsman, but with far reaching executive powers, could require a judge, a court of justice, or any other official that they handed over to the Justicia, i.e., that they be demonstrated to the Justicia, anyone being prosecuted, so as to guarantee that this person's rights were upheld, and that no violence would befall this person prior to their being sentenced.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The Justicia retained the right to examine the judgement passed, and decide whether it satisfied the conditions of a fair trial. If the Justicia was not satisfied, he could refuse to hand over the accused back to the authorities. The right of manifestación acted like a habeas corpus: knowing that the appeal to the Justicia would immediately follow any unlawful detention, these were effectively illegal. Equally, torture, which had been banned in Aragon since 1325, would never take place.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In some cases, people exerting their right of manifestación were kept under the Justicia's watch in manifestación prisons, famous for their mild and easy conditions, or under house arrest. More generally however, the person was released from confinement and placed under the Justicia's protection, awaiting for trial. The Justicia always granted the right of manifestación by default, but they only really had to act in extreme cases, as for instance famously happened in 1590 when Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Philip II of Spain, fled from Castile to Aragon and used his Aragonese ascendency to appeal to the Justicia for manifestación right, thereby preventing his arrest at the King's behest.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The right of manifestación was codified in 1325 in the Declaratio Privilegii generalis passed by the Aragonese Corts under king James II of Aragon. It had been practised since the inception of the kingdom of Aragon in the 11th century, and therefore predates the English habeas corpus itself.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In 1430, King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland granted the Privilege of Jedlnia, which proclaimed, Neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum (\"We will not imprison anyone except if convicted by law\"). This revolutionary innovation in civil libertarianism gave Polish citizens due process-style rights that did not exist in any other European country for another 250 years. Originally, the Privilege of Jedlnia was restricted to the nobility, the szlachta. It was extended to cover townsmen in the 1791 Constitution. Importantly, social classifications in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were not as rigid as in other European countries; townspeople and Jews were sometimes ennobled. The Privilege of Jedlnia provided broader coverage than many subsequently enacted habeas corpus laws, because Poland's nobility constituted an unusually large percentage of the country's total population, which was Europe's largest. As a result, by the 16th century, it was protecting the liberty of between five hundred thousand and a million Poles.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In South Africa and other countries whose legal systems are based on Roman-Dutch law, the interdictum de homine libero exhibendo is the equivalent of the writ of habeas corpus. In South Africa, it has been entrenched in the Bill of Rights, which provides in section 35(2)(d) that every detained person has the right to challenge the lawfulness of the detention in person before a court and, if the detention is unlawful, to be released.",
"title": "Equivalent remedies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In the 1950s, American lawyer Luis Kutner began advocating an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights. In 1952, he filed a petition for a \"United Nations Writ of Habeas Corpus\" on behalf of William N. Oatis, an American journalist jailed the previous year by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. Alleging that Czechoslovakia had violated Oatis' rights under the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that the United Nations General Assembly had \"inherent power\" to fashion remedies for human rights violations, the petition was filed with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The commission forwarded the petition to Czechoslovakia, but no other United Nations action was taken. Oatis was released in 1953. Kutner went on to publish numerous articles and books advocating the creation of an \"International Court of Habeas Corpus\".",
"title": "World habeas corpus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that \"everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person\". Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights goes further and calls for persons detained to have the right to challenge their detention, providing at article 5.4:",
"title": "International human rights standards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful.",
"title": "International human rights standards"
}
]
| Habeas corpus is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful. The writ of habeas corpus was described in the eighteenth century by William Blackstone as a "great and efficacious writ in all manner of illegal confinement". It is a summons with the force of a court order; it is addressed to the custodian and demands that a prisoner be brought before the court, and that the custodian present proof of authority, allowing the court to determine whether the custodian has lawful authority to detain the prisoner. If the custodian is acting beyond their authority, then the prisoner must be released. Any prisoner, or another person acting on their behalf, may petition the court, or a judge, for a writ of habeas corpus. One reason for the writ to be sought by a person other than the prisoner is that the detainee might be held incommunicado. Most civil law jurisdictions provide a similar remedy for those unlawfully detained, but this is not always called habeas corpus. For example, in some Spanish-speaking nations, the equivalent remedy for unlawful imprisonment is the amparo de libertad. Habeas corpus has certain limitations. The petitioner must present a prima facie case that a person has been unlawfully restrained. As a procedural remedy, it applies when detention results from neglect of legal process, but not when the lawfulness of the process itself is in question. In some countries, the writ has been temporarily or permanently suspended on the basis of a war or state of emergency, for example with the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act 1794 in Britain and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1863) in the United States. The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has nonetheless long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. The jurist Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the British Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty". The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the "extraordinary", "common law", or "prerogative writs", which were historically issued by the English courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The most common of the other such prerogative writs are quo warranto, prohibito, mandamus, procedendo, and certiorari. The due process for such petitions is not simply civil or criminal, because they incorporate the presumption of non-authority. The official who is the respondent must prove their authority to do or not do something. Failing this, the court must decide for the petitioner, who may be any person, not just an interested party. This differs from a motion in a civil process in which the movant must have standing, and bears the burden of proof. | 2001-11-07T13:57:56Z | 2023-12-02T18:24:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus |
14,092 | Prince Henry the Navigator | Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegador), was a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and in the 15th-century European maritime discoveries and maritime expansion. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry was the fourth child of King Dom John I of Portugal, who founded the House of Aviz.
After procuring the new caravel ship, Henry was responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes. He encouraged his father to conquer Ceuta (1415), the Muslim port on the North African coast across the Straits of Gibraltar from the Iberian Peninsula. He learned of the opportunity offered by the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general; he was most intrigued by the Christian legend of Prester John and the expansion of Portuguese trade. He is regarded as the patron of Portuguese exploration.
Henry was the third surviving son of King John I and his wife Philippa, sister of King Henry IV of England. He was baptized in Porto, and may have been born there, probably when the royal couple was living in the city's old mint, now called Casa do Infante (Prince's House), or in the region nearby. Another possibility is that he was born at the Monastery of Leça do Balio, in Leça da Palmeira, during the same period of the royal couple's residence in the city of Porto.
Henry was 21 when he, his father and brothers captured the Moorish port of Ceuta in northern Morocco. Ceuta had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave trade. Following this success, Henry began to explore the coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His objectives included finding the source of the West African gold trade and the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast.
At that time, the cargo ships of the Mediterranean were too slow and heavy to undertake such voyages. Under Henry's direction, a new and much lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which could sail farther and faster. Above all, it was highly maneuverable and could sail "into the wind", making it largely independent of the prevailing winds. The caravel used the lateen sail, the prevailing rig in Christian Mediterranean navigation since late antiquity. With this ship, Portuguese mariners freely explored uncharted waters around the Atlantic, from rivers and shallow waters to transoceanic voyages.
In 1419, Henry's father appointed him governor of the province of the Algarve.
On May 25, 1420, Henry gained appointment as the Grand Master of the Military Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Knights Templar, which had its headquarters at Tomar in central Portugal. Henry held this position for the remainder of his life, and the Order was an important source of funds for Henry's ambitious plans, especially his persistent attempts to conquer the Canary Islands, which the Portuguese had claimed to have discovered before the year 1346.
In 1425, his second brother the Infante Peter, Duke of Coimbra, made a diplomatic tour of Europe, with an additional charge from Henry to seek out geographic material. Peter returned with a current world map from Venice.
In 1431, Henry donated houses for the Estudo Geral to teach all the sciences—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, and astronomy—in what would later become the University of Lisbon. For other subjects like medicine or philosophy, he ordered that each room should be decorated according to the subject taught.
Henry also had other resources. When John I died in 1433, Henry's eldest brother Edward of Portugal became king. He granted Henry all profits from trading within the areas he discovered as well as the sole right to authorize expeditions beyond Cape Bojador. Henry also held a monopoly on tuna fishing in the Algarve. When Edward died eight years later, Henry supported his brother Peter, Duke of Coimbra for the regency during the minority of Edward's son Afonso V, and in return received a confirmation of this levy.
Henry functioned as a primary organizer of the disastrous expedition to Tangier in 1437 against Çala Ben Çala, which ended in Henry's younger brother Ferdinand being given as hostage to guarantee Portuguese promises in the peace agreement. The Portuguese Cortes refused to return Ceuta as ransom for Ferdinand, who remained in captivity until his death six years later. Prince Regent Peter supported Portuguese maritime expansion in the Atlantic Ocean and Africa, and Henry promoted the colonization of the Azores during Peter's regency (1439–1448). For most of the latter part of his life, Henry concentrated on his maritime activities and court politics.
According to João de Barros, in Algarve, Prince Henry the Navigator repopulated a village that he called Terçanabal (from terça nabal or tercena nabal). This village was situated in a strategic position for his maritime enterprises and was later called Vila do Infante ("Estate or Town of the Prince").
It is traditionally suggested that Henry gathered at his villa on the Sagres peninsula a school of navigators and map-makers. However modern historians hold this to be a misconception. He did employ some cartographers to chart the coast of Mauritania after the voyages he sent there, but there was no center of navigation science or observatory in the modern sense of the word, nor was there an organized navigational center.
Referring to Sagres, sixteenth-century Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer Pedro Nunes remarked, "from it our sailors went out well taught and provided with instruments and rules which all map makers and navigators should know."
The view that Henry's court rapidly grew into the technological base for exploration, with a naval arsenal and an observatory, etc., although repeated in popular culture, has never been established. Henry did possess geographical curiosity, and employed cartographers. Jehuda Cresques, a noted cartographer, has been said to have accepted an invitation to come to Portugal to make maps for the infante. Prestage makes the argument that the presence of the latter at the Prince's court "probably accounts for the legend of the School of Sagres, which is now discredited."
Henry sponsored voyages, collecting a 20% tax (o quinto) on profits, the usual practice in the Iberian states at the time. The nearby port of Lagos provided a convenient home port for these expeditions. The voyages were made in very small ships, mostly the caravel, a light and maneuverable vessel equipped by lateen sails. Most of the voyages sent out by Henry consisted of one or two ships that navigated by following the coast, stopping at night to tie up along some shore.
During Prince Henry's time and after, the Portuguese navigators discovered and perfected the North Atlantic volta do mar (the "turn of the sea" or "return from the sea"): the dependable pattern of trade winds blowing largely from the east near the equator and the returning westerlies in the mid-Atlantic. This was a major step in the history of navigation, when an understanding of oceanic wind patterns was crucial to Atlantic navigation, from Africa and the open ocean to Europe, and enabled the main route between the New World and Europe in the North Atlantic in future voyages of discovery. Although the lateen sail allowed sailing upwind to some extent, it was worth even major extensions of course to have a faster and calmer following wind for most of a journey. Portuguese mariners who sailed south and southwest towards the Canary Islands and West Africa would afterwards sail far to the northwest—that is, away from continental Portugal, and seemingly in the wrong direction—before turning northeast near the Azores islands and finally east to Europe in order to have largely following winds for their full journey. Christopher Columbus used this on his transatlantic voyages.
The first explorations followed not long after the capture of Ceuta in 1415. Henry was interested in locating the source of the caravans that brought gold to the city. During the reign of his father, John I, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira were sent to explore along the African coast. Zarco, a knight in service to Prince Henry, had commanded the caravels guarding the coast of Algarve from the incursions of the Moors. He had also been at Ceuta.
In 1418, Zarco and Teixeira were blown off-course by a storm while making the volta do mar westward swing to return to Portugal. They found shelter at an island they named Porto Santo. Henry directed that Porto Santo be colonized. The move to claim the Madeiran islands was probably a response to Castile's efforts to claim the Canary Islands. In 1420, settlers then moved to the nearby island of Madeira.
A chart drawn by the Catalan cartographer, Gabriel de Vallseca of Mallorca, has been interpreted to indicate that the Azores were first discovered by Diogo de Silves in 1427. In 1431, Gonçalo Velho was dispatched with orders to determine the location of "islands" first identified by de Silves. Velho apparently got as far as the Formigas, in the eastern archipelago, before having to return to Sagres, probably due to bad weather.
By this time the Portuguese navigators had also reached the Sargasso Sea (western North Atlantic region), naming it after the Sargassum seaweed growing there (sargaço / sargasso in Portuguese).
In 1424 Cape Bojador was the most southerly point known to Europeans on the west coast of Africa. For centuries, superstitious seafarers held that beyond the cape lay sea monsters and the edge of the world. However, Prince Henry was determined to know the truth. He was persistent and sent 15 expeditions over a ten-year period to pass the dreaded Cape. Each returned unsuccessful. The captains gave various excuses for having failed. Finally, in 1434 Gil Eanes, the commander of one of Henry's expeditions, became the first known European to pass Cape Bojador since Hanno almost two millennium before.
Using the new ship type, the expeditions then pushed onwards. Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves reached Cape Blanco in 1441. The Portuguese sighted the Bay of Arguin in 1443 and built an important "forte-feitoria" (a fort protecting a trading post) on the island of Arguin around the year 1448. Dinis Dias soon came across the Senegal River and rounded the peninsula of Cap-Vert in 1444. By this stage the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara Desert, and slaves and gold began arriving in Portugal. This rerouting of trade devastated Algiers and Tunis, but made Portugal rich. By 1452, the influx of gold permitted the minting of Portugal's first gold cruzado coins. A cruzado was equal to 400 reis at the time. From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Lagos on Henry's behalf, and the first private mercantile expeditions began.
Alvise Cadamosto explored the Atlantic coast of Africa and discovered several islands of the Cape Verde archipelago between 1453 and 1456. In his first voyage, which started on 22 March 1455, he visited the Madeira Islands and the Canary Islands. On the second voyage, in 1456, Cadamosto became the first European to reach the Cape Verde Islands. António Noli later claimed the credit. By 1462, the Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa as far as present-day Sierra Leone. Twenty-eight years later, Bartolomeu Dias proved that Africa could be circumnavigated when he reached the southern tip of the continent, now known as the Cape of Good Hope. In 1498, Vasco da Gama became the first European sailor to reach India by sea.
No one used the nickname "Henry the Navigator" to refer to prince Henry during his lifetime or in the following three centuries. The term was coined by two nineteenth-century German historians: Heinrich Schaefer and Gustave de Veer. Later on it was made popular by two British authors who included it in the titles of their biographies of the prince: Henry Major in 1868 and Raymond Beazley in 1895.
Contrary to his brothers, Prince Henry was not praised for his intellectual gifts by his contemporaries. It was only later chroniclers such as João de Barros and Damião de Góis who attributed him a scholarly character and an interest for cosmography. The myth of the "Sagres school" allegedly founded by Prince Henry was created in the 17th century, mainly by Samuel Purchas and Antoine Prévost. In nineteenth-century Portugal, the idealized vision of Prince Henry as a putative pioneer of exploration and science reached its apogee.
Henry is depicted in the Monument of the Discoveries located in Lisbon, featured in the front of the monument.
In 1994, the Prince Henry Society in conjecture with the Portuguese government gifted Prince Henry the Navigator Park in New Bedford, Massachusetts. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegador), was a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and in the 15th-century European maritime discoveries and maritime expansion. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry was the fourth child of King Dom John I of Portugal, who founded the House of Aviz.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "After procuring the new caravel ship, Henry was responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes. He encouraged his father to conquer Ceuta (1415), the Muslim port on the North African coast across the Straits of Gibraltar from the Iberian Peninsula. He learned of the opportunity offered by the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general; he was most intrigued by the Christian legend of Prester John and the expansion of Portuguese trade. He is regarded as the patron of Portuguese exploration.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Henry was the third surviving son of King John I and his wife Philippa, sister of King Henry IV of England. He was baptized in Porto, and may have been born there, probably when the royal couple was living in the city's old mint, now called Casa do Infante (Prince's House), or in the region nearby. Another possibility is that he was born at the Monastery of Leça do Balio, in Leça da Palmeira, during the same period of the royal couple's residence in the city of Porto.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henry was 21 when he, his father and brothers captured the Moorish port of Ceuta in northern Morocco. Ceuta had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave trade. Following this success, Henry began to explore the coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His objectives included finding the source of the West African gold trade and the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "At that time, the cargo ships of the Mediterranean were too slow and heavy to undertake such voyages. Under Henry's direction, a new and much lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which could sail farther and faster. Above all, it was highly maneuverable and could sail \"into the wind\", making it largely independent of the prevailing winds. The caravel used the lateen sail, the prevailing rig in Christian Mediterranean navigation since late antiquity. With this ship, Portuguese mariners freely explored uncharted waters around the Atlantic, from rivers and shallow waters to transoceanic voyages.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1419, Henry's father appointed him governor of the province of the Algarve.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "On May 25, 1420, Henry gained appointment as the Grand Master of the Military Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Knights Templar, which had its headquarters at Tomar in central Portugal. Henry held this position for the remainder of his life, and the Order was an important source of funds for Henry's ambitious plans, especially his persistent attempts to conquer the Canary Islands, which the Portuguese had claimed to have discovered before the year 1346.",
"title": "Resources and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1425, his second brother the Infante Peter, Duke of Coimbra, made a diplomatic tour of Europe, with an additional charge from Henry to seek out geographic material. Peter returned with a current world map from Venice.",
"title": "Resources and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1431, Henry donated houses for the Estudo Geral to teach all the sciences—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, and astronomy—in what would later become the University of Lisbon. For other subjects like medicine or philosophy, he ordered that each room should be decorated according to the subject taught.",
"title": "Resources and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Henry also had other resources. When John I died in 1433, Henry's eldest brother Edward of Portugal became king. He granted Henry all profits from trading within the areas he discovered as well as the sole right to authorize expeditions beyond Cape Bojador. Henry also held a monopoly on tuna fishing in the Algarve. When Edward died eight years later, Henry supported his brother Peter, Duke of Coimbra for the regency during the minority of Edward's son Afonso V, and in return received a confirmation of this levy.",
"title": "Resources and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Henry functioned as a primary organizer of the disastrous expedition to Tangier in 1437 against Çala Ben Çala, which ended in Henry's younger brother Ferdinand being given as hostage to guarantee Portuguese promises in the peace agreement. The Portuguese Cortes refused to return Ceuta as ransom for Ferdinand, who remained in captivity until his death six years later. Prince Regent Peter supported Portuguese maritime expansion in the Atlantic Ocean and Africa, and Henry promoted the colonization of the Azores during Peter's regency (1439–1448). For most of the latter part of his life, Henry concentrated on his maritime activities and court politics.",
"title": "Resources and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to João de Barros, in Algarve, Prince Henry the Navigator repopulated a village that he called Terçanabal (from terça nabal or tercena nabal). This village was situated in a strategic position for his maritime enterprises and was later called Vila do Infante (\"Estate or Town of the Prince\").",
"title": "Vila do Infante and Portuguese exploration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "It is traditionally suggested that Henry gathered at his villa on the Sagres peninsula a school of navigators and map-makers. However modern historians hold this to be a misconception. He did employ some cartographers to chart the coast of Mauritania after the voyages he sent there, but there was no center of navigation science or observatory in the modern sense of the word, nor was there an organized navigational center.",
"title": "Vila do Infante and Portuguese exploration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Referring to Sagres, sixteenth-century Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer Pedro Nunes remarked, \"from it our sailors went out well taught and provided with instruments and rules which all map makers and navigators should know.\"",
"title": "Vila do Infante and Portuguese exploration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The view that Henry's court rapidly grew into the technological base for exploration, with a naval arsenal and an observatory, etc., although repeated in popular culture, has never been established. Henry did possess geographical curiosity, and employed cartographers. Jehuda Cresques, a noted cartographer, has been said to have accepted an invitation to come to Portugal to make maps for the infante. Prestage makes the argument that the presence of the latter at the Prince's court \"probably accounts for the legend of the School of Sagres, which is now discredited.\"",
"title": "Vila do Infante and Portuguese exploration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Henry sponsored voyages, collecting a 20% tax (o quinto) on profits, the usual practice in the Iberian states at the time. The nearby port of Lagos provided a convenient home port for these expeditions. The voyages were made in very small ships, mostly the caravel, a light and maneuverable vessel equipped by lateen sails. Most of the voyages sent out by Henry consisted of one or two ships that navigated by following the coast, stopping at night to tie up along some shore.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During Prince Henry's time and after, the Portuguese navigators discovered and perfected the North Atlantic volta do mar (the \"turn of the sea\" or \"return from the sea\"): the dependable pattern of trade winds blowing largely from the east near the equator and the returning westerlies in the mid-Atlantic. This was a major step in the history of navigation, when an understanding of oceanic wind patterns was crucial to Atlantic navigation, from Africa and the open ocean to Europe, and enabled the main route between the New World and Europe in the North Atlantic in future voyages of discovery. Although the lateen sail allowed sailing upwind to some extent, it was worth even major extensions of course to have a faster and calmer following wind for most of a journey. Portuguese mariners who sailed south and southwest towards the Canary Islands and West Africa would afterwards sail far to the northwest—that is, away from continental Portugal, and seemingly in the wrong direction—before turning northeast near the Azores islands and finally east to Europe in order to have largely following winds for their full journey. Christopher Columbus used this on his transatlantic voyages.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The first explorations followed not long after the capture of Ceuta in 1415. Henry was interested in locating the source of the caravans that brought gold to the city. During the reign of his father, John I, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira were sent to explore along the African coast. Zarco, a knight in service to Prince Henry, had commanded the caravels guarding the coast of Algarve from the incursions of the Moors. He had also been at Ceuta.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1418, Zarco and Teixeira were blown off-course by a storm while making the volta do mar westward swing to return to Portugal. They found shelter at an island they named Porto Santo. Henry directed that Porto Santo be colonized. The move to claim the Madeiran islands was probably a response to Castile's efforts to claim the Canary Islands. In 1420, settlers then moved to the nearby island of Madeira.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "A chart drawn by the Catalan cartographer, Gabriel de Vallseca of Mallorca, has been interpreted to indicate that the Azores were first discovered by Diogo de Silves in 1427. In 1431, Gonçalo Velho was dispatched with orders to determine the location of \"islands\" first identified by de Silves. Velho apparently got as far as the Formigas, in the eastern archipelago, before having to return to Sagres, probably due to bad weather.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "By this time the Portuguese navigators had also reached the Sargasso Sea (western North Atlantic region), naming it after the Sargassum seaweed growing there (sargaço / sargasso in Portuguese).",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1424 Cape Bojador was the most southerly point known to Europeans on the west coast of Africa. For centuries, superstitious seafarers held that beyond the cape lay sea monsters and the edge of the world. However, Prince Henry was determined to know the truth. He was persistent and sent 15 expeditions over a ten-year period to pass the dreaded Cape. Each returned unsuccessful. The captains gave various excuses for having failed. Finally, in 1434 Gil Eanes, the commander of one of Henry's expeditions, became the first known European to pass Cape Bojador since Hanno almost two millennium before.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Using the new ship type, the expeditions then pushed onwards. Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves reached Cape Blanco in 1441. The Portuguese sighted the Bay of Arguin in 1443 and built an important \"forte-feitoria\" (a fort protecting a trading post) on the island of Arguin around the year 1448. Dinis Dias soon came across the Senegal River and rounded the peninsula of Cap-Vert in 1444. By this stage the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara Desert, and slaves and gold began arriving in Portugal. This rerouting of trade devastated Algiers and Tunis, but made Portugal rich. By 1452, the influx of gold permitted the minting of Portugal's first gold cruzado coins. A cruzado was equal to 400 reis at the time. From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Lagos on Henry's behalf, and the first private mercantile expeditions began.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Alvise Cadamosto explored the Atlantic coast of Africa and discovered several islands of the Cape Verde archipelago between 1453 and 1456. In his first voyage, which started on 22 March 1455, he visited the Madeira Islands and the Canary Islands. On the second voyage, in 1456, Cadamosto became the first European to reach the Cape Verde Islands. António Noli later claimed the credit. By 1462, the Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa as far as present-day Sierra Leone. Twenty-eight years later, Bartolomeu Dias proved that Africa could be circumnavigated when he reached the southern tip of the continent, now known as the Cape of Good Hope. In 1498, Vasco da Gama became the first European sailor to reach India by sea.",
"title": "Henry's explorations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "No one used the nickname \"Henry the Navigator\" to refer to prince Henry during his lifetime or in the following three centuries. The term was coined by two nineteenth-century German historians: Heinrich Schaefer and Gustave de Veer. Later on it was made popular by two British authors who included it in the titles of their biographies of the prince: Henry Major in 1868 and Raymond Beazley in 1895.",
"title": "Origin of the \"Navigator\" nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Contrary to his brothers, Prince Henry was not praised for his intellectual gifts by his contemporaries. It was only later chroniclers such as João de Barros and Damião de Góis who attributed him a scholarly character and an interest for cosmography. The myth of the \"Sagres school\" allegedly founded by Prince Henry was created in the 17th century, mainly by Samuel Purchas and Antoine Prévost. In nineteenth-century Portugal, the idealized vision of Prince Henry as a putative pioneer of exploration and science reached its apogee.",
"title": "Origin of the \"Navigator\" nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Henry is depicted in the Monument of the Discoveries located in Lisbon, featured in the front of the monument.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1994, the Prince Henry Society in conjecture with the Portuguese government gifted Prince Henry the Navigator Park in New Bedford, Massachusetts.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator, was a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and in the 15th-century European maritime discoveries and maritime expansion. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry was the fourth child of King Dom John I of Portugal, who founded the House of Aviz. After procuring the new caravel ship, Henry was responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes. He encouraged his father to conquer Ceuta (1415), the Muslim port on the North African coast across the Straits of Gibraltar from the Iberian Peninsula. He learned of the opportunity offered by the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general; he was most intrigued by the Christian legend of Prester John and the expansion of Portuguese trade. He is regarded as the patron of Portuguese exploration. | 2001-11-07T15:25:15Z | 2023-12-18T11:51:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Henry_the_Navigator |
14,094 | Human cloning | Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissue. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibilities of human cloning have raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass laws regarding human cloning.
Two commonly discussed types of human cloning are therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning.
Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants. It is an active area of research, and is in medical practice in the world. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and (more recently) pluripotent stem cell induction.
Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.
Although the possibility of cloning humans had been the subject of speculation for much of the 20th century, scientists and policymakers began to take the prospect seriously in 1969. J. B. S. Haldane was the first to introduce the idea of human cloning, for which he used the terms "clone" and "cloning", which had been used in agriculture since the early 20th century. In his speech on "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years" at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future in 1963, he said:
It is extremely hopeful that some human cell lines can be grown on a medium of precisely known chemical composition. Perhaps the first step will be the production of a clone from a single fertilized egg, as in Brave New World... Assuming that cloning is possible, I expect that most clones would be made from people aged at least fifty, except for athletes and dancers, who would be cloned younger. They would be made from people who were held to have excelled in a socially acceptable accomplishment...
Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg advocated cloning and genetic engineering in an article in The American Naturalist in 1966 and again, the following year, in The Washington Post. He sparked a debate with conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who wrote at the time that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Another Nobel Laureate, James D. Watson, publicized the potential and the perils of cloning in his Atlantic Monthly essay, "Moving Toward the Clonal Man", in 1971.
With the cloning of a sheep known as Dolly in 1996 by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the idea of human cloning became a hot debate topic. Many nations outlawed it, while a few scientists promised to make a clone within the next few years. The first hybrid human clone was created in November 1998, by Advanced Cell Technology. It was created using SCNT; a nucleus was taken from a man's leg cell and inserted into a cow's egg from which the nucleus had been removed, and the hybrid cell was cultured and developed into an embryo. The embryo was destroyed after 12 days.
In 2004 and 2005, Hwang Woo-suk, a professor at Seoul National University, published two separate articles in the journal Science claiming to have successfully harvested pluripotent, embryonic stem cells from a cloned human blastocyst using SCNT techniques. Hwang claimed to have created eleven different patient-specific stem cell lines. This would have been the first major breakthrough in human cloning. However, in 2006 Science retracted both of his articles on account of clear evidence that much of his data from the experiments was fabricated.
In January 2008, Dr. Andrew French and Samuel Wood of the biotechnology company Stemagen announced that they successfully created the first five mature human embryos using SCNT. In this case, each embryo was created by taking a nucleus from a skin cell (donated by Wood and a colleague) and inserting it into a human egg from which the nucleus had been removed. The embryos were developed only to the blastocyst stage, at which point they were studied in processes that destroyed them. Members of the lab said that their next set of experiments would aim to generate embryonic stem cell lines; these are the "holy grail" that would be useful for therapeutic or reproductive cloning.
In 2011, scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation announced that they had succeeded in generating embryonic stem cell lines, but their process involved leaving the oocyte's nucleus in place, resulting in triploid cells, which would not be useful for cloning.
In 2013, a group of scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov published the first report of embryonic stem cells created using SCNT. In this experiment, the researchers developed a protocol for using SCNT in human cells, which differs slightly from the one used in other organisms. Four embryonic stem cell lines from human fetal somatic cells were derived from those blastocysts. All four lines were derived using oocytes from the same donor, ensuring that all mitochondrial DNA inherited was identical. A year later, a team led by Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology reported that they had replicated Mitalipov's results and further demonstrated the effectiveness by cloning adult cells using SCNT.
In 2018, the first successful cloning of primates using SCNT was reported with the birth of two live female clones, crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua.
In somatic cell nuclear transfer ("SCNT"), the nucleus of a somatic cell is taken from a donor and transplanted into a host egg cell, which had its own genetic material removed previously, making it an enucleated egg. After the donor somatic cell genetic material is transferred into the host oocyte with a micropipette, the somatic cell genetic material is fused with the egg using an electric current. Once the two cells have fused, the new cell can be permitted to grow in a surrogate or artificially. This is the process that was used to successfully clone Dolly the sheep (see § History). The technique, now refined, has indicated that it was possible to replicate cells and reestablish pluripotency, or "the potential of an embryonic cell to grow into any one of the numerous different types of mature body cells that make up a complete organism".
Creating induced pluripotent stem cells ("iPSCs") is a long and inefficient process. Pluripotency refers to a stem cell that has the potential to differentiate into any of the three germ layers: endoderm (interior stomach lining, gastrointestinal tract, the lungs), mesoderm (muscle, bone, blood, urogenital), or ectoderm (epidermal tissues and nervous tissue). A specific set of genes, often called "reprogramming factors", are introduced into a specific adult cell type. These factors send signals in the mature cell that cause the cell to become a pluripotent stem cell. This process is highly studied and new techniques are being discovered frequently on how to improve this induction process.
Depending on the method used, reprogramming of adult cells into iPSCs for implantation could have severe limitations in humans. If a virus is used as a reprogramming factor for the cell, cancer-causing genes called oncogenes may be activated. These cells would appear as rapidly dividing cancer cells that do not respond to the body's natural cell signaling process. However, in 2008 scientists discovered a technique that could remove the presence of these oncogenes after pluripotency induction, thereby increasing the potential use of iPSC in humans.
Both the processes of SCNT and iPSCs have benefits and deficiencies. Historically, reprogramming methods were better studied than SCNT derived embryonic stem cells (ESCs). However, more recent studies have put more emphasis on developing new procedures for SCNT-ESCs. The major advantage of SCNT over iPSCs at this time is the speed with which cells can be produced. iPSCs derivation takes several months while SCNT would take a much shorter time, which could be important for medical applications. New studies are working to improve the process of iPSC in terms of both speed and efficiency with the discovery of new reprogramming factors in oocytes. Another advantage SCNT could have over iPSCs is its potential to treat mitochondrial disease, as it uses a donor oocyte. No other advantages are known at this time in using stem cells derived from one method over stem cells derived from the other.
Work on cloning techniques has advanced understanding of developmental biology in humans. Observing human pluripotent stem cells grown in culture provides great insight into human embryo development, which otherwise cannot be seen. Scientists are now able to better define steps of early human development. Studying signal transduction along with genetic manipulation within the early human embryo has the potential to provide answers to many developmental diseases and defects. Many human-specific signaling pathways have been discovered by studying human embryonic stem cells. Studying developmental pathways in humans has given developmental biologists more evidence toward the hypothesis that developmental pathways are conserved throughout species.
iPSCs and cells created by SCNT are useful for research into the causes of disease, and as model systems used in drug discovery.
Cells produced with SCNT, or iPSCs could eventually be used in stem cell therapy, or to create organs to be used in transplantation, known as regenerative medicine. Stem cell therapy is the use of stem cells to treat or prevent a disease or condition. Bone marrow transplantation is a widely used form of stem cell therapy. No other forms of stem cell therapy are in clinical use at this time. Research is underway to potentially use stem cell therapy to treat heart disease, diabetes, and spinal cord injuries. Regenerative medicine is not in clinical practice, but is heavily researched for its potential uses. This type of medicine would allow for autologous transplantation, thus removing the risk of organ transplant rejection by the recipient. For instance, a person with liver disease could potentially have a new liver grown using their same genetic material and transplanted to remove the damaged liver. In current research, human pluripotent stem cells have been promised as a reliable source for generating human neurons, showing the potential for regenerative medicine in brain and neural injuries.
In bioethics, the ethics of cloning refers to a variety of ethical positions regarding the practice and possibilities of cloning, especially human cloning. While many of these views are religious in origin, for instance relating to Christian views of procreation and personhood, the questions raised by cloning engage secular perspectives as well, particularly the concept of identity.
Advocates support development of therapeutic cloning in order to generate tissues and whole organs to treat patients who otherwise cannot obtain transplants, to avoid the need for immunosuppressive drugs, and to stave off the effects of aging. Advocates for reproductive cloning believe that parents who cannot otherwise procreate should have access to the technology.
Opposition to therapeutic cloning mainly centers around the status of embryonic stem cells, which has connections with the abortion debate. The moral argument put forward is based on the notion that embryos deserve protection from the moment of their conception because it is at this precise moment that a new human entity emerges, with the potential, under the right circumstances, to become a unique individual. Since it is deemed unacceptable to sacrifice human lives for any purpose, the argument asserts that the destruction of embryos for research purposes is no longer justifiable.
Some opponents of reproductive cloning have concerns that technology is not yet developed enough to be safe – for example, the position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as of 2014, while others emphasize that reproductive cloning could be prone to abuse (leading to the generation of humans whose organs and tissues would be harvested), and have concerns about how cloned individuals could integrate with families and with society at large.
Members of religious groups are divided. Some Christian theologians perceive the technology as usurping God's role in creation and, to the extent embryos are used, destroying a human life; others see no inconsistency between Christian tenets and cloning's positive and potentially life-saving benefits.
In 2018 it was reported that about 70 countries had banned human cloning.
In Morocco, all research on human embryos or fetuses is forbidden, as is the conception of human embryos or fetuses for research or experimental purposes, in accordance with article 7 of Dahir no. 1-19-50.
Science fiction has used cloning, most commonly and specifically human cloning, due to the fact that it brings up controversial questions of identity. Humorous fiction, such as Multiplicity (1996) and the Maxwell Smart feature The Nude Bomb (1980), have featured human cloning. A recurring sub-theme of cloning fiction is the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation. Robin Cook's 1997 novel Chromosome 6, Michael Bay's The Island, and Nancy Farmer's 2002 novel House of the Scorpion are examples of this; Chromosome 6 also features genetic manipulation and xenotransplantation. The Star Wars saga makes use of millions of human clones to form the Grand Army of the Republic that participated in the Clone Wars. The series Orphan Black follows human clones' stories and experiences as they deal with issues and react to being the property of a chain of scientific institutions. In the 2019 horror film Us, the entirety of the United States' population is secretly cloned. Years later, these clones (known as The Tethered) reveal themselves to the world by successfully pulling off a mass genocide of their counterparts. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissue. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibilities of human cloning have raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass laws regarding human cloning.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Two commonly discussed types of human cloning are therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants. It is an active area of research, and is in medical practice in the world. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and (more recently) pluripotent stem cell induction.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Although the possibility of cloning humans had been the subject of speculation for much of the 20th century, scientists and policymakers began to take the prospect seriously in 1969. J. B. S. Haldane was the first to introduce the idea of human cloning, for which he used the terms \"clone\" and \"cloning\", which had been used in agriculture since the early 20th century. In his speech on \"Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years\" at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future in 1963, he said:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "It is extremely hopeful that some human cell lines can be grown on a medium of precisely known chemical composition. Perhaps the first step will be the production of a clone from a single fertilized egg, as in Brave New World... Assuming that cloning is possible, I expect that most clones would be made from people aged at least fifty, except for athletes and dancers, who would be cloned younger. They would be made from people who were held to have excelled in a socially acceptable accomplishment...",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg advocated cloning and genetic engineering in an article in The American Naturalist in 1966 and again, the following year, in The Washington Post. He sparked a debate with conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who wrote at the time that \"the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him.\" Another Nobel Laureate, James D. Watson, publicized the potential and the perils of cloning in his Atlantic Monthly essay, \"Moving Toward the Clonal Man\", in 1971.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "With the cloning of a sheep known as Dolly in 1996 by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the idea of human cloning became a hot debate topic. Many nations outlawed it, while a few scientists promised to make a clone within the next few years. The first hybrid human clone was created in November 1998, by Advanced Cell Technology. It was created using SCNT; a nucleus was taken from a man's leg cell and inserted into a cow's egg from which the nucleus had been removed, and the hybrid cell was cultured and developed into an embryo. The embryo was destroyed after 12 days.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 2004 and 2005, Hwang Woo-suk, a professor at Seoul National University, published two separate articles in the journal Science claiming to have successfully harvested pluripotent, embryonic stem cells from a cloned human blastocyst using SCNT techniques. Hwang claimed to have created eleven different patient-specific stem cell lines. This would have been the first major breakthrough in human cloning. However, in 2006 Science retracted both of his articles on account of clear evidence that much of his data from the experiments was fabricated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In January 2008, Dr. Andrew French and Samuel Wood of the biotechnology company Stemagen announced that they successfully created the first five mature human embryos using SCNT. In this case, each embryo was created by taking a nucleus from a skin cell (donated by Wood and a colleague) and inserting it into a human egg from which the nucleus had been removed. The embryos were developed only to the blastocyst stage, at which point they were studied in processes that destroyed them. Members of the lab said that their next set of experiments would aim to generate embryonic stem cell lines; these are the \"holy grail\" that would be useful for therapeutic or reproductive cloning.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 2011, scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation announced that they had succeeded in generating embryonic stem cell lines, but their process involved leaving the oocyte's nucleus in place, resulting in triploid cells, which would not be useful for cloning.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2013, a group of scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov published the first report of embryonic stem cells created using SCNT. In this experiment, the researchers developed a protocol for using SCNT in human cells, which differs slightly from the one used in other organisms. Four embryonic stem cell lines from human fetal somatic cells were derived from those blastocysts. All four lines were derived using oocytes from the same donor, ensuring that all mitochondrial DNA inherited was identical. A year later, a team led by Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology reported that they had replicated Mitalipov's results and further demonstrated the effectiveness by cloning adult cells using SCNT.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 2018, the first successful cloning of primates using SCNT was reported with the birth of two live female clones, crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In somatic cell nuclear transfer (\"SCNT\"), the nucleus of a somatic cell is taken from a donor and transplanted into a host egg cell, which had its own genetic material removed previously, making it an enucleated egg. After the donor somatic cell genetic material is transferred into the host oocyte with a micropipette, the somatic cell genetic material is fused with the egg using an electric current. Once the two cells have fused, the new cell can be permitted to grow in a surrogate or artificially. This is the process that was used to successfully clone Dolly the sheep (see § History). The technique, now refined, has indicated that it was possible to replicate cells and reestablish pluripotency, or \"the potential of an embryonic cell to grow into any one of the numerous different types of mature body cells that make up a complete organism\".",
"title": "Methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Creating induced pluripotent stem cells (\"iPSCs\") is a long and inefficient process. Pluripotency refers to a stem cell that has the potential to differentiate into any of the three germ layers: endoderm (interior stomach lining, gastrointestinal tract, the lungs), mesoderm (muscle, bone, blood, urogenital), or ectoderm (epidermal tissues and nervous tissue). A specific set of genes, often called \"reprogramming factors\", are introduced into a specific adult cell type. These factors send signals in the mature cell that cause the cell to become a pluripotent stem cell. This process is highly studied and new techniques are being discovered frequently on how to improve this induction process.",
"title": "Methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Depending on the method used, reprogramming of adult cells into iPSCs for implantation could have severe limitations in humans. If a virus is used as a reprogramming factor for the cell, cancer-causing genes called oncogenes may be activated. These cells would appear as rapidly dividing cancer cells that do not respond to the body's natural cell signaling process. However, in 2008 scientists discovered a technique that could remove the presence of these oncogenes after pluripotency induction, thereby increasing the potential use of iPSC in humans.",
"title": "Methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Both the processes of SCNT and iPSCs have benefits and deficiencies. Historically, reprogramming methods were better studied than SCNT derived embryonic stem cells (ESCs). However, more recent studies have put more emphasis on developing new procedures for SCNT-ESCs. The major advantage of SCNT over iPSCs at this time is the speed with which cells can be produced. iPSCs derivation takes several months while SCNT would take a much shorter time, which could be important for medical applications. New studies are working to improve the process of iPSC in terms of both speed and efficiency with the discovery of new reprogramming factors in oocytes. Another advantage SCNT could have over iPSCs is its potential to treat mitochondrial disease, as it uses a donor oocyte. No other advantages are known at this time in using stem cells derived from one method over stem cells derived from the other.",
"title": "Methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Work on cloning techniques has advanced understanding of developmental biology in humans. Observing human pluripotent stem cells grown in culture provides great insight into human embryo development, which otherwise cannot be seen. Scientists are now able to better define steps of early human development. Studying signal transduction along with genetic manipulation within the early human embryo has the potential to provide answers to many developmental diseases and defects. Many human-specific signaling pathways have been discovered by studying human embryonic stem cells. Studying developmental pathways in humans has given developmental biologists more evidence toward the hypothesis that developmental pathways are conserved throughout species.",
"title": "Uses and actual potential"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "iPSCs and cells created by SCNT are useful for research into the causes of disease, and as model systems used in drug discovery.",
"title": "Uses and actual potential"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Cells produced with SCNT, or iPSCs could eventually be used in stem cell therapy, or to create organs to be used in transplantation, known as regenerative medicine. Stem cell therapy is the use of stem cells to treat or prevent a disease or condition. Bone marrow transplantation is a widely used form of stem cell therapy. No other forms of stem cell therapy are in clinical use at this time. Research is underway to potentially use stem cell therapy to treat heart disease, diabetes, and spinal cord injuries. Regenerative medicine is not in clinical practice, but is heavily researched for its potential uses. This type of medicine would allow for autologous transplantation, thus removing the risk of organ transplant rejection by the recipient. For instance, a person with liver disease could potentially have a new liver grown using their same genetic material and transplanted to remove the damaged liver. In current research, human pluripotent stem cells have been promised as a reliable source for generating human neurons, showing the potential for regenerative medicine in brain and neural injuries.",
"title": "Uses and actual potential"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In bioethics, the ethics of cloning refers to a variety of ethical positions regarding the practice and possibilities of cloning, especially human cloning. While many of these views are religious in origin, for instance relating to Christian views of procreation and personhood, the questions raised by cloning engage secular perspectives as well, particularly the concept of identity.",
"title": "Ethical implications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Advocates support development of therapeutic cloning in order to generate tissues and whole organs to treat patients who otherwise cannot obtain transplants, to avoid the need for immunosuppressive drugs, and to stave off the effects of aging. Advocates for reproductive cloning believe that parents who cannot otherwise procreate should have access to the technology.",
"title": "Ethical implications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Opposition to therapeutic cloning mainly centers around the status of embryonic stem cells, which has connections with the abortion debate. The moral argument put forward is based on the notion that embryos deserve protection from the moment of their conception because it is at this precise moment that a new human entity emerges, with the potential, under the right circumstances, to become a unique individual. Since it is deemed unacceptable to sacrifice human lives for any purpose, the argument asserts that the destruction of embryos for research purposes is no longer justifiable.",
"title": "Ethical implications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Some opponents of reproductive cloning have concerns that technology is not yet developed enough to be safe – for example, the position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as of 2014, while others emphasize that reproductive cloning could be prone to abuse (leading to the generation of humans whose organs and tissues would be harvested), and have concerns about how cloned individuals could integrate with families and with society at large.",
"title": "Ethical implications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Members of religious groups are divided. Some Christian theologians perceive the technology as usurping God's role in creation and, to the extent embryos are used, destroying a human life; others see no inconsistency between Christian tenets and cloning's positive and potentially life-saving benefits.",
"title": "Ethical implications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2018 it was reported that about 70 countries had banned human cloning.",
"title": "Current law"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In Morocco, all research on human embryos or fetuses is forbidden, as is the conception of human embryos or fetuses for research or experimental purposes, in accordance with article 7 of Dahir no. 1-19-50.",
"title": "Current law"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Science fiction has used cloning, most commonly and specifically human cloning, due to the fact that it brings up controversial questions of identity. Humorous fiction, such as Multiplicity (1996) and the Maxwell Smart feature The Nude Bomb (1980), have featured human cloning. A recurring sub-theme of cloning fiction is the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation. Robin Cook's 1997 novel Chromosome 6, Michael Bay's The Island, and Nancy Farmer's 2002 novel House of the Scorpion are examples of this; Chromosome 6 also features genetic manipulation and xenotransplantation. The Star Wars saga makes use of millions of human clones to form the Grand Army of the Republic that participated in the Clone Wars. The series Orphan Black follows human clones' stories and experiences as they deal with issues and react to being the property of a chain of scientific institutions. In the 2019 horror film Us, the entirety of the United States' population is secretly cloned. Years later, these clones (known as The Tethered) reveal themselves to the world by successfully pulling off a mass genocide of their counterparts.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissue. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibilities of human cloning have raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass laws regarding human cloning. Two commonly discussed types of human cloning are therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants. It is an active area of research, and is in medical practice in the world. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and pluripotent stem cell induction. Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues. | 2001-11-13T21:36:43Z | 2023-12-27T04:24:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning |
14,097 | History of Asia | The history of Asia can be seen as the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe. See History of the Middle East and History of the Indian Subcontinent for further details on those regions.
The coastal periphery was the home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations and religions, with each of three regions developing early civilizations around fertile river valleys. These valleys were fertile because the soil there was rich and could bear many root crops. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient China shared many similarities and likely exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other notions such as that of writing likely developed individually in each area. Cities, states, and then empires developed in these lowlands.
The steppe region had long been inhabited by mounted nomads, and from the central steppes, they could reach all areas of the Asian continent. The northern part of the continent, covering much of Siberia was also inaccessible to the steppe nomads due to the dense forests and the tundra. These areas in Siberia were very sparsely populated.
The centre and periphery were kept separate by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus, Himalaya, Karakum Desert, and Gobi Desert formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could only cross with difficulty. While technologically and culturally the city dwellers were more advanced, they could do little militarily to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force. Thus the nomads who conquered states in the Middle East were soon forced to adapt to the local societies.
The spread of Islam waved the Islamic Golden Age and the Timurid Renaissance, which later influenced the age of Islamic gunpowder empires.
Asia's history features major developments seen in other parts of the world, as well as events that have affected those other regions. These include the trade of the Silk Road, which spread cultures, languages, religions, and diseases throughout Afro-Eurasian trade. Another major advancement was the innovation of gunpowder in medieval China, later developed by the Gunpowder empires, mainly by the Mughals and Safavids, which led to advanced warfare through the use of guns.
A report by archaeologist Rakesh Tewari on Lahuradewa, India shows new C14 datings that range between 9000 and 8000 BC associated with rice, making Lahuradewa the earliest Neolithic site in entire South Asia. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus River alluvium approximately 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BC.
Göbekli Tepe is a Neolithic site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, the site comprises a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths.
The prehistoric Beifudi site near Yixian in Hebei Province, China, contains relics of a culture contemporaneous with the Cishan and Xinglongwa cultures of about 8000–7000 BC, neolithic cultures east of the Taihang Mountains, filling in an archaeological gap between the two Northern Chinese cultures. The total excavated area is more than 1,200 square meters and the collection of neolithic findings at the site consists of two phases.
Around 5500 BC the Halafian culture appeared in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia, based upon dryland agriculture.
In southern Mesopotamia were the alluvial plains of Sumer and Elam. Since there was little rainfall, irrigation systems were necessary. The Ubaid culture flourished from 5500 BC.
The Chalcolithic period (or Copper Age) began about 4500 BC, then the Bronze Age began about 3500 BC, replacing the Neolithic cultures.
The Indus Valley civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilization (3300–1300 BC; mature period 2600–1900 BC) which was centered mostly in the western part of the Indian Subcontinent; it is considered that an early form of Hinduism was performed during this civilization. Some of the great cities of this civilization include Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which had a high level of town planning and arts. The cause of the destruction of these regions around 1700 BC is debatable, although evidence suggests it was caused by natural disasters (especially flooding). This era marks Vedic period in India, which lasted from roughly 1500 to 500 BC. During this period, the Sanskrit language developed and the Vedas were written, epic hymns that told tales of gods and wars. This was the basis for the Vedic religion, which would eventually sophisticate and develop into Hinduism.
China and Vietnam were also centres of metalworking. Dating back to the Neolithic Age, the first bronze drums, called the Dong Son drums have been uncovered in and around the Red River Delta regions of Vietnam and Southern China. These relate to the prehistoric Dong Son Culture of Vietnam. Song Da bronze drum's surface, Dong Son culture, Vietnam
In Ban Chiang, Thailand (Southeast Asia), bronze artifacts have been discovered dating to 2100 BC.
In Nyaunggan, Burma bronze tools have been excavated along with ceramics and stone artifacts. Dating is still currently broad (3500–500 BC).
The Iron Age saw the widespread use of iron tools, weaponry, and armor throughout the major civilizations of Asia.
The Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, ruled an area from Greece and Turkey to the Indus River and Central Asia during the 6th to 4th centuries BC. Persian politics included a tolerance for other cultures, a highly centralized government, and significant infrastructure developments. Later, in Darius the Great's rule, the territories were integrated, a bureaucracy was developed, nobility were assigned military positions, tax collection was carefully organized, and spies were used to ensure the loyalty of regional officials. The primary religion of Persia at this time was Zoroastrianism, developed by the philosopher Zoroaster. It introduced an early form of monotheism to the area. The religion banned animal sacrifice and the use of intoxicants in rituals; and introduced the concept of spiritual salvation through personal moral action, an end time, and both general and Particular judgment with a heaven or hell. These concepts would heavily influence later emperors and the masses. It was itself heavily influenced by earlier much older ancient religious beliefs and practices dating to the beginning of known history and before. The Persian Empire was successful in establishing peace and stability throughout the Middle East and were a major influence in art, politics (affecting Hellenistic leaders), and religion.
Alexander the Great conquered this dynasty in the 4th century BC, creating the brief Hellenistic period. He was unable to establish stability and after his death, Persia broke into small, weak dynasties including the Seleucid Empire, followed by the Parthian Empire. By the end of the Classical age, Persia had been reconsolidated into the Sassanid Empire, also known as the second Persian Empire.
The Roman Empire would later control parts of Western Asia. The Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanid dynasties of Persia dominated Western Asia for centuries.
The Maurya and Gupta empires are called the Golden Age of India and were marked by extensive inventions and discoveries in science, technology, art, religion, and philosophy that crystallized the elements of what is generally known as Indian culture. The religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, which began in Indian sub-continent, were an important influence on South, East and Southeast Asia.
By 600 BC, India had been divided into 17 regional states that would occasionally feud amongst themselves. In 327 BC, Alexander the Great came to India with a vision of conquering the whole world. He crossed northwestern India and created the province Bactria but could not move further because his army wanted to go back to their family. Shortly prior, the soldier Chandragupta Maurya began to take control of the Ganges river and soon established the Maurya Empire. The Maurya Empire (Sanskrit: मौर्य राजवंश, Maurya Rājavaṃśa) was the geographically extensive and powerful empire in ancient India, ruled by the Mauryan dynasty from 321 to 185 BC. It was one of the world's largest empires in its time, stretching to the Himalayas in the north, what is now Assam in the east, probably beyond modern Pakistan in the west, and annexing Balochistan and much of what is now Afghanistan, at its greatest extent. South of Mauryan empire was the Tamilakam an independent country dominated by three dynasties, the Pandyans, Cholas and Cheras. The government established by Chandragupta was led by an autocratic king, who primarily relied on the military to assert his power. It also applied the use of a bureaucracy and even sponsored a postal service. Chandragupta's grandson, Ashoka, greatly extended the empire by conquering most of modern-day India (save for the southern tip). He eventually converted to Buddhism, though, and began a peaceful life where he promoted the religion as well as humane methods throughout India. The Maurya Empire would disintegrate soon after Ashoka's death and was conquered by the Kushan invaders from the northwest, establishing the Kushan Empire. Their conversion to Buddhism caused the religion to be associated with foreigners and therefore a decline in its popularity occurred.
The Kushan Empire would fall apart by 220 AD, creating more political turmoil in India. Then in 320, the Gupta Empire (Sanskrit: गुप्त राजवंश, Gupta Rājavanśha) was established and covered much of the Indian Subcontinent. Founded by Maharaja Sri-Gupta, the dynasty was the model of a classical civilization. Gupta kings united the area primarily through negotiation of local leaders and families as well as strategical intermarriage. Their rule covered less land than the Maurya Empire, but established the greatest stability. In 535, the empire ended when India was overrun by the Hunas.
Since 1029 BC, the Zhou dynasty (Chinese: 周朝; pinyin: Zhōu Cháo; Wade–Giles: Chou Ch'ao [tʂóʊ tʂʰɑ̌ʊ]), had existed in China and it would continue to until 258 BC. The Zhou dynasty had been using a feudal system by giving power to local nobility and relying on their loyalty in order to control its large territory. As a result, the Chinese government at this time tended to be very decentralized and weak, and there was often little the emperor could do to resolve national issues. Nonetheless, the government was able to retain its position with the creation of the Mandate of Heaven, which could establish an emperor as divinely chosen to rule. The Zhou additionally discouraged the human sacrifice of the preceding eras and unified the Chinese language. Finally, the Zhou government encouraged settlers to move into the Yangtze River valley, thus creating the Chinese Middle Kingdom.
But by 500 BC, its political stability began to decline due to repeated nomadic incursions and internal conflict derived from the fighting princes and families. This was lessened by the many philosophical movements, starting with the life of Confucius. His philosophical writings (called Confucianism) concerning the respect of elders and of the state would later be popularly used in the Han dynasty. Additionally, Laozi's concepts of Taoism, including yin and yang and the innate duality and balance of nature and the universe, became popular throughout this period. Nevertheless, the Zhou dynasty eventually disintegrated as the local nobles began to gain more power and their conflict devolved into the Warring States period, from 402 to 201 BC.
One leader eventually came on top, Qin Shi Huang (Chinese: 始皇帝, Shǐ Huángdì), who overthrew the last Zhou emperor and established the Qin dynasty. The Qin dynasty (Chinese: 秦朝; pinyin: Qín Cháo) was the first ruling dynasty of Imperial China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The new Emperor abolished the feudal system and directly appointed a bureaucracy that would rely on him for power. Huang's imperial forces crushed any regional resistance, and they furthered the Chinese empire by expanding down to the South China Sea and northern Vietnam. Greater organization brought a uniform tax system, a national census, regulated road building (and cart width), standard measurements, standard coinage, and an official written and spoken language. Further reforms included new irrigation projects, the encouragement of silk manufacturing, and (most famously) the beginning of the construction of the Great Wall of China—designed to keep out the nomadic raiders who'd constantly badger the Chinese people. However, Shi Huang was infamous for his tyranny, forcing laborers to build the Wall, ordering heavy taxes, and severely punishing all who opposed him. He oppressed Confucians and promoted Legalism, the idea that people were inherently evil, and that a strong, forceful government was needed to control them. Legalism was infused with realistic, logical views and rejected the pleasures of educated conversation as frivolous. All of this made Shi Huang extremely unpopular with the people. As the Qin began to weaken, various factions began to fight for control of China.
The Han dynasty (simplified Chinese: 汉朝; traditional Chinese: 漢朝; pinyin: Hàn Cháo; 206 BC – 220 AD) was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms (220–265 AD). Spanning over four centuries, the period of the Han dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history. One of the Han dynasty's greatest emperors, Emperor Wu of Han, established a peace throughout China comparable to the Pax Romana seen in the Mediterranean a hundred years later. To this day, China's majority ethnic group refers to itself as the "Han people". The Han dynasty was established when two peasants succeeded in rising up against Shi Huang's significantly weaker successor-son. The new Han government retained the centralization and bureaucracy of the Qin, but greatly reduced the repression seen before. They expanded their territory into Korea, Vietnam, and Central Asia, creating an even larger empire than the Qin.
The Han developed contacts with the Persian Empire in the Middle East and the Romans, through the Silk Road, with which they were able to trade many commodities—primarily silk. Many ancient civilizations were influenced by the Silk Road, which connected China, India, the Middle East and Europe. Han emperors like Wu also promoted Confucianism as the national "religion" (although it is debated by theologians as to whether it is defined as such or as a philosophy). Shrines devoted to Confucius were built and Confucian philosophy was taught to all scholars who entered the Chinese bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was further improved with the introduction of an examination system that selected scholars of high merit. These bureaucrats were often upper-class people educated in special schools, but whose power was often checked by the lower-class brought into the bureaucracy through their skill. The Chinese imperial bureaucracy was very effective and highly respected by all in the realm and would last over 2,000 years. The Han government was highly organized and it commanded the military, judicial law (which used a system of courts and strict laws), agricultural production, the economy, and the general lives of its people. The government also promoted intellectual philosophy, scientific research, and detailed historical records.
However, despite all of this impressive stability, central power began to lose control by the turn of the Common Era. As the Han dynasty declined, many factors continued to pummel it into submission until China was left in a state of chaos. By 100 AD, philosophical activity slowed, and corruption ran rampant in the bureaucracy. Local landlords began to take control as the scholars neglected their duties, and this resulted in heavy taxation of the peasantry. Taoists began to gain significant ground and protested the decline. They started to proclaim magical powers and promised to save China with them; the Taoist Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 (led by rebels in yellow scarves) failed but was able to weaken the government. The aforementioned Huns combined with diseases killed up to half of the population and officially ended the Han dynasty by 220. The ensuing period of chaos was so terrible it lasted for three centuries, where many weak regional rulers and dynasties failed to establish order in China. This period of chaos and attempts at order is commonly known as that of the Six Dynasties. The first part of this included the Three Kingdoms which started in 220 and describes the brief and weak successor "dynasties" that followed the Han. In 265, the Jin dynasty of China was started and this soon split into two different empires in control of northwestern and southeastern China. In 420, the conquest and abdication of those two dynasties resulted in the first of the Southern and Northern dynasties. The Northern and Southern dynasties passed through until finally, by 557, the Northern Zhou dynasty ruled the north and the Chen dynasty ruled the south.
During this period, the Eastern world empires continued to expand through trade, migration and conquests of neighboring areas. Gunpowder was widely used as early as the 11th century and they were using moveable type printing five hundred years before Gutenberg created his press. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism were the dominant philosophies of the Far East during the Middle Ages. Marco Polo was not the first Westerner to travel to the Orient and return with amazing stories of this different culture, but his accounts published in the late 13th and early 14th centuries were the first to be widely read throughout Europe.
The Arabian peninsula and the surrounding Middle East and Near East regions saw dramatic change during the Medieval era caused primarily by the spread of Islam and the establishment of the Arabian Empires.
In the 5th century, the Middle East was separated into small, weak states; the two most prominent were the Sassanian Empire of the Persians in what is now Iran and Iraq, and the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). The Byzantines and Sassanians fought with each other continually, a reflection of the rivalry between the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire seen during the previous five hundred years. The fighting weakened both states, leaving the stage open to a new power. Meanwhile, the nomadic Bedouin tribes who dominated the Arabian desert saw a period of tribal stability, greater trade networking and a familiarity with Abrahamic religions or monotheism.
While the Byzantine Roman and Sassanid Persian empires were both weakened by the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, a new power in the form of Islam grew in the Middle East under Muhammad in Medina. In a series of rapid Muslim conquests, the Rashidun army, led by the Caliphs and skilled military commanders such as Khalid ibn al-Walid, swept through most of the Middle East, taking more than half of Byzantine territory in the Arab–Byzantine wars and completely engulfing Persia in the Muslim conquest of Persia. It would be the Arab Caliphates of the Middle Ages that would first unify the entire Middle East as a distinct region and create the dominant ethnic identity that persists today. These Caliphates included the Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate, and later the Seljuq Empire.
After Muhammad introduced Islam, it jump-started Middle Eastern culture into an Islamic Golden Age, inspiring achievements in architecture, the revival of old advances in science and technology, and the formation of a distinct way of life. Muslims saved and spread Greek advances in medicine, algebra, geometry, astronomy, anatomy, and ethics that would later finds it way back to Western Europe.
The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuq Turks, migrating south from the Turkic homelands in Central Asia. They conquered Persia, Iraq (capturing Baghdad in 1055), Syria, Palestine, and the Hejaz. This was followed by a series of Christian Western Europe invasions. The fragmentation of the Middle East allowed joined forces, mainly from England, France, and the emerging Holy Roman Empire, to enter the region. In 1099 the knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which survived until 1187, when Saladin retook the city. Smaller crusader fiefdoms survived until 1291. In the early 13th century, a new wave of invaders, the armies of the Mongol Empire, swept through the region, sacking Baghdad in the Siege of Baghdad (1258) and advancing as far south as the border of Egypt in what became known as the Mongol conquests. The Mongols eventually retreated in 1335, but the chaos that ensued throughout the empire deposed the Seljuq Turks. In 1401, the region was further plagued by the Turko-Mongol, Timur, and his ferocious raids. By then, another group of Turks had arisen as well, the Ottomans.
The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Medieval Asia was the kingdom of the Khans. Never before had any person controlled as much land as Genghis Khan. He built his power unifying separate Mongol tribes before expanding his kingdom south and west. He and his grandson, Kublai Khan, controlled lands in China, Burma, Central Asia, Russia, Iran, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan was a Khagan who tolerated nearly every religion.
The Indian early medieval age, 600 to 1200, is defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity. When Harsha of Kannauj, who ruled much of the Indo-Gangetic Plain from 606 to 647, attempted to expand southwards, he was defeated by the Chalukya ruler of the Deccan. When his successor attempted to expand eastwards, he was defeated by the Pala king of Bengal. When the Chalukyas attempted to expand southwards, they were defeated by the Pallavas from farther south, who in turn were opposed by the Pandyas and the Cholas from still farther south. The Cholas could under the rule of Raja Raja Chola defeat their rivals and rise to a regional power. Cholas expanded northward and defeated Eastern Chalukya, Kalinga and the Pala. Under Rajendra Chola the Cholas created the first notable navy of Indian subcontinent. The Chola navy extended the influence of Chola empire to southeast asia. During this time, pastoral peoples whose land had been cleared to make way for the growing agricultural economy were accommodated within caste society, as were new non-traditional ruling classes. The Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent mainly took place from the 12th century onwards, though earlier Muslim conquests include the limited inroads into modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Umayyad campaigns in India, during the time of the Rajput kingdoms in the 8th century.
Major economic and military powers like the Delhi Sultanate and Bengal Sultanate, were seen to be established. The search of their wealth led the Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
The Vijayanagara Empire based in the Deccan Plateau region of South India, was established in 1336 by the brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I of the Sangama dynasty, patronized by saint Vidyaranya, the 12th Shankaracharya of Sringeri in Karnataka. The empire rose to prominence as a result of attempts by the southern powers to resist and ward off Turkic Islamic invasions by the end of the 13th century. At its peak, it subjugated almost all of South India's rulers and pushed the sultans of the Deccan beyond the Tungabhadra-Krishna river region. After annexing modern day Odisha (ancient Kalinga) from the Gajapati Kingdom, became a notable power. The Kingdome lasted until 1646 after a major military defeat in the Battle of Talikota in 1565 by the combined armies of the Deccan sultanates.
China saw the rise and fall of the Sui, Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties and therefore improvements in its bureaucracy, the spread of Buddhism, and the advent of Neo-Confucianism. It was an unsurpassed era for Chinese ceramics and painting. Medieval architectural masterpieces the Great South Gate in Todaiji, Japan, and the Tien-ning Temple in Peking, China are some of the surviving constructs from this era.
A new powerful dynasty began to rise in the 580s, amongst the divided factions of China. This was started when an aristocrat named Yang Jian married his daughter into the Northern Zhou dynasty. He proclaimed himself Emperor Wen of Sui and appeased the nomadic military by abandoning the Confucian scholar-gentry. Emperor Wen soon led the conquest of the southern Chen dynasty and united China once more under the Sui dynasty. The emperor lowered taxes and constructed granaries that he used to prevent famine and control the market. Later Wen's son would murder him for the throne and declare himself Emperor Yang of Sui. Emperor Yang revived the Confucian scholars and the bureaucracy, much to anger of the aristocrats and nomadic military leaders. Yang became an excessive leader who overused China's resources for personal luxury and perpetuated exhaustive attempts to conquer Goguryeo. His military failures and neglect of the empire forced his own ministers to assassinate him in 618, ending the Sui dynasty.
Fortunately, one of Yang's most respectable advisors, Li Yuan, was able to claim the throne quickly, preventing a chaotic collapse. He proclaimed himself Emperor Gaozu, and established the Tang dynasty in 623. The Tang saw expansion of China through conquest to Tibet in the west, Vietnam in the south, and Manchuria in the north. Tang emperors also improved the education of scholars in the Chinese bureaucracy. A Ministry of Rites was established and the examination system was improved to better qualify scholars for their jobs. In addition, Buddhism became popular in China with two different strains between the peasantry and the elite, the Pure Land and Zen strains, respectively. Greatly supporting the spread of Buddhism was Empress Wu, who additionally claimed an unofficial "Zhou dynasty" and displayed China's tolerance of a woman ruler, which was rare at the time. However, Buddhism would also experience some backlash, especially from Confucianists and Taoists. This would usually involve criticism about how it was costing the state money, since the government was unable to tax Buddhist monasteries, and additionally sent many grants and gifts to them.
The Tang dynasty began to decline under the rule of Emperor Xuanzong, who began to neglect the economy and military and caused unrest amongst the court officials due to the excessive influence of his concubine, Yang Guifei, and her family. This eventually sparked a revolt in 755. Although the revolt failed, subduing it required involvement with the unruly nomadic tribes outside of China and distributing more power to local leaders—leaving the government and economy in a degraded state. The Tang dynasty officially ended in 907 and various factions led by the aforementioned nomadic tribes and local leaders would fight for control of China in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.
By 960, most of China proper had been reunited under the Song dynasty, although it lost territories in the north and could not defeat one of the nomadic tribes there—the Liao dynasty of the highly sinicized Khitan people. From then on, the Song would have to pay tribute to avoid invasion and thus set the precedent for other nomadic kingdoms to oppress them. The Song also saw the revival of Confucianism in the form of Neo-Confucianism. This had the effect of putting the Confucian scholars at a higher status than aristocrats or Buddhists and also intensified the reduction of power in women. The infamous practice of foot binding developed in this period as a result. Eventually the Liao dynasty in the north was overthrown by the Jin dynasty of the Manchu-related Jurchen people. The new Jin kingdom invaded northern China, leaving the Song to flee farther south and creating the Southern Song dynasty in 1126. There, cultural life flourished.
By 1227, the Mongols had conquered the Western Xia kingdom northwest of China. Soon the Mongols incurred upon the Jin empire of the Jurchens. Chinese cities were soon besieged by the Mongol hordes that showed little mercy for those who resisted and the Southern Song Chinese were quickly losing territory. In 1271 the current great khan, Kublai Khan, claimed himself Emperor of China and officially established the Yuan dynasty. By 1290, all of China was under control of the Mongols, marking the first time they were ever completely conquered by a foreign invader; the new capital was established at Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing). Kublai Khan segregated Mongol culture from Chinese culture by discouraging interactions between the two peoples, separating living spaces and places of worship, and reserving top administrative positions to Mongols, thus preventing Confucian scholars to continue the bureaucratic system. Nevertheless, Kublai remained fascinated with Chinese thinking, surrounding himself with Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian advisors.
Mongol women displayed a contrasting independent nature compared to the Chinese women who continued to be suppressed. Mongol women often rode out on hunts or even to war. Kublai's wife, Chabi, was a perfect example of this; Chabi advised her husband on several political and diplomatic matters; she convinced him that the Chinese were to be respected and well-treated in order to make them easier to rule. However, this was not enough to affect Chinese women's position, and the increasingly Neo-Confucian successors of Kublai further repressed Chinese and even Mongol women.
The Black Death, which would later ravage Western Europe, had its beginnings in Asia, where it wiped out large populations in China in 1331.
Japan's medieval history began with the Asuka period, from around 600 to 710. The time was characterized by the Taika Reform and imperial centralization, both of which were a direct result of growing Chinese contact and influences. In 603, Prince Shōtoku of the Yamato dynasty began significant political and cultural changes. He issued the Seventeen-article constitution in 604, centralizing power towards the emperor (under the title tenno, or heavenly sovereign) and removing the power to levy taxes from provincial lords. Shōtoku was also a patron of Buddhism and he encouraged building temples competitively.
Shōtoku's reforms transitioned Japan to the Nara period (c. 710 to c. 794), with the moving of the Japanese capital to Nara in Honshu. This period saw the culmination of Chinese-style writing, etiquette, and architecture in Japan along with Confucian ideals to supplement the already present Buddhism. Peasants revered both Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks. However, in the wake of the 735–737 Japanese smallpox epidemic, Buddhism gained the status of state religion and the government ordered the construction of numerous Buddhist temples, monasteries, and statues. The lavish spending combined with the fact that many aristocrats did not pay taxes, put a heavy burden on peasantry that caused poverty and famine. Eventually the Buddhist position got out of control, threatening to seize imperial power and causing Emperor Kanmu to move the capital to Heian-kyō to avoid a Buddhist takeover. This marked the beginning of the Heian period and the end of Taika reform.
With the Heian period (from 794 to 1185) came a decline of imperial power. Chinese influence also declined, as a result of its correlation with imperial centralization and the heavenly mandate, which came to be regarded as ineffective. By 838, the Japanese court discontinued its embassies in China; only traders and Buddhist monks continued to travel to China. Buddhism itself came to be considered more Japanese than Chinese, and persisted to be popular in Japan. Buddhists monks and monasteries continued their attempts to gather personal power in courts, along with aristocrats. One particular noble family that dominated influence in the imperial bureaucracy was the Fujiwara clan. During this time cultural life in the imperial court flourished. There was a focus on beauty and social interaction and writing and literature was considered refined. Noblewomen were cultured the same as noblemen, dabbling in creative works and politics. A prime example of both Japanese literature and women's role in high-class culture at this time was The Tale of Genji, written by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. Popularization of wooden palaces and shōji sliding doors amongst the nobility also occurred.
Loss of imperial power also led to the rise of provincial warrior elites. Small lords began to function independently. They administered laws, supervised public works projects, and collected revenue for themselves instead of the imperial court. Regional lords also began to build their own armies. These warriors were loyal only their local lords and not the emperor, although the imperial government increasingly called them in to protect the capital. The regional warrior class developed into the samurai, which created its own culture: including specialized weapons such as the katana and a form of chivalry, bushido. The imperial government's loss of control in the second half of the Heian period allowed banditry to grow, requiring both feudal lords and Buddhist monasteries to procure warriors for protection. As imperial control over Japan declined, feudal lords also became more independent and seceded from the empire. These feudal states squandered the peasants living in them, reducing the farmers to an almost serfdom status. Peasants were also rigidly restricted from rising to the samurai class, being physically set off by dress and weapon restrictions. As a result of their oppression, many peasants turned to Buddhism as a hope for reward in the afterlife for upright behavior.
With the increase of feudalism, families in the imperial court began to depend on alliances with regional lords. The Fujiwara clan declined from power, replaced by a rivalry between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan. This rivalry grew into the Genpei War in the early 1180s. This war saw the use of both samurai and peasant soldiers. For the samurai, battle was ritual and they often easily cut down the poorly trained peasantry. The Minamoto clan proved successful due to their rural alliances. Once the Taira was destroyed, the Minamoto established a military government called the shogunate (or bakufu), centered in Kamakura.
The end of the Genpei War and the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate marked the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura period in 1185, solidifying feudal Japan.
The three Kingdoms of Korea involves Goguryeo in north, Baekje in southwest, and Silla in southeast Korean peninsula. These three kingdoms act as a bridge of cultures between China and Japan. Prince Shōtoku of Japan had been taught by two teachers. One was from Baekje, the other was from Goguryeo. Once Japan invaded Silla, Goguryeo helped Silla to defeat Japan. Baekje met the earliest heyday of them. Its heyday was the 5th century AD. Its capital was Seoul. During its heyday, the kingdom made colonies overseas. Liaodong, China and Kyushu, Japan were the colonies of Baekje during its short heyday. Goguryeo was the strongest kingdom of all. They sometimes called themselves as an Empire. Its heyday was 6th century. King Gwanggaeto widened its territory to north. So Goguryeo dominated from Korean peninsula to Manchuria. And his son, King Jangsu widened its territory to south. He occupied Seoul, and moved its capital to Pyeongyang. Goguryeo almost occupied three quarters of South Korean peninsula thanks to king Jangsu who widened the kingdom's territory to south. Silla met the latest heyday. King Jinheung went north and occupiedSeoul. But it was short. Baekje became stronger and attacked Silla. Baekje occupied more than 40 cities of Silla. So Silla could hardly survive. China's Sui dynasty invaded Goguryeo and Goguryeo–Sui War occurred between Korea and China. Goguryeo won against China and Sui dynasty fell. After then, Tang dynasty reinvaded Goguryeo and helped Silla to unify the peninsula. Goguryeo, Baekje, and Japan helped each other against Tang-Silla alliance, but Baekje and Goguryeo fell. Unfortunately, Tang dynasty betrayed Silla and invaded Korean peninsula in order to occupy the whole Korean peninsula (Silla-Tang war). Silla advocated 'Unification of Three Korea', so people of fallen Baekje and Goguryeo helped Silla against Chinese invasion. Eventually Silla could beat China and unified the peninsula. This war helped Korean people to unite mentally.
The rest of Goguryeo people established Balhae and won the war against Tang in later 7th century AD. Balhae is the north state, and Later Silla was the south state. Balhae was a quite strong kingdom as their ancestor Goguryeo did. Finally, the Emperor of Tang dynasty admits Balhae as 'A strong country in the East'. They liked to trade with Japan, China, and Silla. Balhae and Later Silla sent a lot of international students to China. And Arabian merchants came into Korean peninsula, so Korea became known as 'Silla' in the western countries. Silla improved Korean writing system called Idu letters. Idu affected Katakana of Japan. Liao dynasty invaded Balhae in early 10th century, so Balhae fell.
The unified Korean kingdom, Later Silla divided into three kingdoms again because of the corrupt central government. It involves Later Goguryeo (also as known as "Taebong"), Later Baekje, and Later Silla. The general of Later Goguryeo, Wang Geon took the throne and changed the name of kingdom into Goryeo, which was derived by the ancient strong kingdom, Goguryeo, and Goryeo reunified the peninsula.
Goryeo reunited the Korean peninsula during the later three kingdoms period and named itself as 'Empire'. But nowadays, Goryeo is known as a kingdom. The name 'Goryeo' was derived from Goguryeo, and the name Korea was derived from Goryeo. Goryeo adopted people from fallen Balhae. They also widened their territory to north by defending Liao dynasty and attacking the Jurchen people. Goryeo developed a splendid culture. The first metal type printed book Jikji was also from Korea. The Goryeo ware is one of the most famous legacies of this kingdom. Goryeo imported Chinese government system and developed into their own ways.
During this period, laws were codified and a civil service system was introduced. Buddhism flourished and spread throughout the peninsula. The Tripitaka Koreana is 81,258 books total. It was made to keep Korea safe against the Mongolian invasion. It is now a UNESCO world heritage. Goryeo won the battle against Liao dynasty. Then, the Mongolian Empire invaded Goryeo. Goryeo did not disappear but it had to obey Mongolians. After 80 years, in 14th century, the Mongolian dynasty Yuan lost power, King Gongmin tried to free themselves against Mongol although his wife was also Mongolian. At the 14th century, Ming dynasty wanted Goryeo to obey China. But Goryeo didn't. They decided to invade China. Going to China, the general of Goryeo, Lee Sung-Gae came back and destroyed Goryeo. Then, in 1392, he established new dynasty, Joseon. And he became Taejo of Joseon, which means the first king of Joseon.
In 802, Jayavarman II consolidated his rule over neighboring peoples and declared himself chakravartin, or "universal ruler". The Khmer Empire effectively dominated all Mainland Southeast Asia from the early 9th until the 15th century, during which time they developed a sophisticated monumental architecture of most exquisite expression and mastery of composition at Angkor.
The history of Vietnam can be traced back to around 20,000 years ago, as the first modern humans arrived and settled on this land, known as the Hoabinhians, which can be traced back to the modern-day Negritos. Archaeological findings from 1965, which are still under research, show the remains of two hominins closely related to the Sinanthropus, dating as far back as the Middle Pleistocene era, roughly half a million years ago.
Pre-historic Vietnam was home to some of the world's earliest civilizations and societies—making them one of the world's first people who had practiced agriculture. The Red River valley formed a natural geographic and economic unit, bounded to the north and west by mountains and jungles, to the east by the sea and to the south by the Red River Delta. The need to have a single authority to prevent floods of the Red River, to cooperate in constructing hydraulic systems, trade exchange, and to repel invaders, led to the creation of the first legendary Vietnamese states approximately 2879 BC. While in the later times, ongoing research from archaeologists have suggested that the Vietnamese Đông Sơn culture were traceable back to Northern Vietnam, Guangxi and Laos around 700 BC.
Vietnam's long coastal and narrowed lands, rugged mountainous terrains, with two major deltas, were soon home to several different ancient cultures and civilizations. In the north, the Đông Sơn culture and its indigenous chiefdoms of Văn Lang and Âu Lạc started to flourish by 500 BC. In Central, Sa Huỳnh culture of Austronesian Chamic peoples also thrived. Both were swept by the Chinese Han dynasty expansion from the north - the Han conquest of Nanyue brought parts of Vietnam under the Chinese rule in 111 BC. Traditional Chinese became the official script as well as the later developed independent Nôm script of Vietnamese.
In 40 BC, the Trưng Sisters led the first uprising of indigenous tribes and peoples against Chinese domination. The rebellion was however defeated, but as the Han dynasty began to weaken by late 2nd century and China (中国) started to descend into state of turmoil, the indigenous peoples of Vietnam rose again and some became free. In 192 AD, the Chams of Central Vietnam revolted against the Chinese and subsequently became independent Kingdom of Champa, while the Red River Delta saw loosening Northern control. At that time, with the introduction of Buddhism and Hinduism by the second century AD, Vietnam was the first place in Southeast Asia which shared influences of both Indian and Sino cultures, and the rise of first Indianized kingdoms Champa and Funan.
During these 1,000 years there were many uprisings against Chinese domination, and at certain periods Vietnam was independently governed under the Trưng Sisters, Early Lý, Khúc and Dương Đình Nghệ—although their triumphs and reigns were temporary.
When Ngô Quyền (Emperor of Vietnam, 938–944) restored sovereign power in the country with the victory at The battle of Bạch Đằng River (938), the next millennium was advanced by the accomplishments of successive local dynasties: Ngô, Đinh, Early Lê, Lý, Trần, Hồ, Later Trần, Later Lê, Mạc, Revival Lê, Tây Sơn and Nguyễn. Nôm script (Chữ Nôm) of the Vietnamese started to develop and become more sophisticated, with literature being published and written in Nôm. At various points during the imperial dynasties, Vietnam was ravaged and divided by civil wars and witnessed interventions by the Song, Yuan, Cham, Ming, Siamese, Qing, French, and Empire of Japan.
The Ming Empire conquered the Red River valley for a while before native Vietnamese regained control and the French Empire reduced Vietnam to a French dependency for nearly a century, followed by brief but brutal occupation by the Japanese Empire. During the French period, widespread brutality, inequality and cultural remnants of Hán-Nôm were being destroyed, with the French wishing to rid the Vietnamese of their Confucian legacy from the 1880s. French was the official language during this period. The Vietnamese Latin script, seen to be a Latin transliteration of Hán-Nôm, superseded the Hán-Nôm logographic scripts and became the main mode of written as well as spoken language since the 20th century.
Japan invaded in 1940, creating deep resentment that fuelled resistance to post-World War II military-political efforts by the returning power of France, and the United States who had viewed themselves as fighters for liberty and democracy against the red waves of communism. In the Vietnam War, the United States or the Western Bloc supported South Vietnam and the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc supported North Vietnam. Political upheaval, a period of intense fighting and war, followed by Communist insurrection and victory further put an end to the monarchy after World War II, and the country was proclaimed a Socialist Republic. Vietnam suffered heavy sanctions as well as political and economic isolation following brutal wars with China and Cambodia in the successive years. Following that era, the Đổi Mới (renovation/innovation) reformations were enacted. The forces of market liberalisation and globalisation has shaped Vietnam's economic and political circumstances since.
The Russian Empire began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire controlled Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the 16th century onwards. In the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire controlled much of India and initiated the second golden age for India. China was the largest economy in the world for much of the time, followed by India until the 18th century.
By 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang had claimed himself Hongwu Emperor and established the Ming dynasty of China. Immediately, the new emperor and his followers drove the Mongols and their culture out of China and beyond the Great Wall. The new emperor was somewhat suspicious of the scholars that dominated China's bureaucracy, for he had been born a peasant and was uneducated. Nevertheless, Confucian scholars were necessary to China's bureaucracy and were reestablished as well as reforms that would improve the exam systems and make them more important in entering the bureaucracy than ever before. The exams became more rigorous, cut down harshly on cheating, and those who excelled were more highly appraised. Finally, Hongwu also directed more power towards the role of emperor so as to end the corrupt influences of the bureaucrats.
The Hongwu emperor, perhaps for his sympathy of the common-folk, had built many irrigation systems and other public projects that provided help for the peasant farmers. They were also allowed to cultivate and claim unoccupied land without having to pay any taxes and labor demands were lowered. However, none of this was able to stop the rising landlord class that gained many privileges from the government and slowly gained control of the peasantry. Moneylenders foreclosed on peasant debt in exchange for mortgages and bought up farmer land, forcing them to become the landlords' tenants or to wander elsewhere for work. Also during this time, Neo-Confucianism intensified even more than the previous two dynasties (the Song and Yuan). Focus on the superiority of elders over youth, men over women, and teachers over students resulted in minor discrimination of the "inferior" classes. The fine arts grew in the Ming era, with improved techniques in brush painting that depicted scenes of court, city or country life; people such as scholars or travelers; or the beauty of mountains, lakes, or marshes. The Chinese novel fully developed in this era, with such classics written such as Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Jin Ping Mei.
Economics grew rapidly in the Ming dynasty as well. The introduction of American crops such as maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts allowed for cultivation of crops in infertile land and helped prevent famine. The population boom that began in the Song dynasty accelerated until China's population went from 80 or 90 million to 150 million in three centuries, culminating in 1600. This paralleled the market economy that was growing both internally and externally. Silk, tea, ceramics, and lacquer-ware were produced by artisans that traded them in Asia and to Europeans. Westerners began to trade (with some Chinese-assigned limits), primarily in the port-towns of Macau and Canton. Although merchants benefited greatly from this, land remained the primary symbol of wealth in China and traders' riches were often put into acquiring more land. Therefore, little of these riches were used in private enterprises that could've allowed for China to develop the market economy that often accompanied the highly-successful Western countries.
In the interest of national glory, the Chinese began sending impressive junk ships across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. From 1403 to 1433, the Yongle Emperor commissioned expeditions led by the admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from China. Chinese junks carrying hundreds of soldiers, goods, and animals for zoos, traveled to Southeast Asia, Persia, southern Arabia, and east Africa to show off Chinese power. Their prowess exceeded that of current Europeans at the time, and had these expeditions not ended, the world economy may be different from today. In 1433, the Chinese government decided that the cost of a navy was an unnecessary expense. The Chinese navy was slowly dismantled and focus on interior reform and military defense began. It was China's longstanding priority that they protect themselves from nomads and they have accordingly returned to it. The growing limits on the Chinese navy would leave them vulnerable to foreign invasion by sea later on.
As was inevitable, Westerners arrived on the Chinese east coast, primarily Jesuit missionaries which reached the mainland in 1582. They attempted to convert the Chinese people to Christianity by first converting the top of the social hierarchy and allowing the lower classes to subsequently convert. To further gain support, many Jesuits adopted Chinese dress, customs, and language. Some Chinese scholars were interested in certain Western teachings and especially in Western technology. By the 1580s, Jesuit scholars like Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall amazed the Chinese elite with technological advances such as European clocks, improved calendars and cannons, and the accurate prediction of eclipses. Although some the scholar-gentry converted, many were suspicious of the Westerners whom they called "barbarians" and even resented them for the embarrassment they received at the hand of Western correction. Nevertheless, a small group of Jesuit scholars remained at the court to impress the emperor and his advisors.
Near the end of the 1500s, the extremely centralized government that gave so much power to the emperor had begun to fail as more incompetent rulers took the mantle. Along with these weak rulers came increasingly corrupt officials who took advantage of the decline. Once more the public projects fell into disrepair due to neglect by the bureaucracy and resulted in floods, drought, and famine that rocked the peasantry. The famine soon became so terrible that some peasants resorted to selling their children to slavery to save them from starvation, or to eating bark, the feces of geese, or other people. Many landlords abused the situation by building large estates where desperate farmers would work and be exploited. In turn, many of these farmers resorted to flight, banditry, and open rebellion.
All of this corresponded with the usual dynastic decline of China seen before, as well as the growing foreign threats. In the mid-16th century, Japanese and ethnic Chinese pirates began to raid the southern coast, and neither the bureaucracy nor the military were able to stop them. The threat of the northern Manchu people also grew. The Manchu were an already large state north of China, when in the early 17th century a local leader named Nurhaci suddenly united them under the Eight Banners—armies that the opposing families were organized into. The Manchus adopted many Chinese customs, specifically taking after their bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the Manchus still remained a Chinese vassal. In 1644 Chinese administration became so weak, the 16th and last emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, did not respond to the severity of an ensuing rebellion by local dissenters until the enemy had invaded the Forbidden City (his personal estate). He soon hanged himself in the imperial gardens. For a brief amount of time, the Shun dynasty was claimed, until a loyalist Ming official called support from the Manchus to put down the new dynasty. The Shun dynasty ended within a year and the Manchu were now within the Great Wall. Taking advantage of the situation, the Manchus marched on the Chinese capital of Beijing. Within two decades all of China belonged to the Manchu and the Qing dynasty was established.
In early-modern Korea, the 500-year-old kingdom, Goryeo fell and new dynasty Joseon rose in August 5, 1392. Taejo of Joseon changed the country's name from Goryeo to Joseon. Sejong the Great created Hangul, the modern Korean alphabet, in 1443; likewise the Joseon dynasty saw several improvements in science and technology, like Sun Clocks, Water Clocks, Rain-Measuring systems, Star Maps, and detailed records of Korean small villages. The ninth king, Seongjong accomplished the first complete Korean law code in 1485. So the culture and people's lives were improved again.
In 1592, Japan under Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea. That war is Imjin war. Before that war, Joseon was in a long peace like PAX ROMANA. So Joseon was not ready for the war. Joseon had lost again and again. Japanese army conquered Seoul. The whole Korean peninsula was in danger. But Yi Sun-sin, the most renowned general of Korea, defeated Japanese fleet in southern Korea coast even 13 ships VS 133 ships. This incredible battle is called "Battle of Myeongnyang". After that, Ming dynasty helped Joseon, and Japan lost the battle. So Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign in Korea failed, and the Tokugawa Shogunate has later began. Korea was hurt a lot at Imjin war. Not long after, Manchurian people invaded Joseon again. It is called Qing invasion of Joseon. The first invasion was for sake. Because Qing was at war between Ming, so Ming's alliance with Joseon was threatening. And the second invasion was for Joseon to obey Qing. After that, Qing defeated Ming and took the whole Chinese territories. Joseon also had to obey Qing because Joseon lose the second war against Qing.
After the Qing invasion, the princes of the Joseon dynasty lived their childhood in China. The son of King Injo met Adam Schall in Beijing. So he wanted to introduce western technologies to Korean people when he becomes a king. He died before he could take the throne. After then, the alternative prince became the 17th king of the Joseon dynasty, Hyojong, trying to revenge for his kingdom and fallen Ming dynasty to Qing. Later kings such as Yeongjo and Jeongjo tried to improve their people's lives and stop the governors' unreasonable competition. From the 17th century to the 18th century, Joseon sent diplomats and artists to Japan more than 10 times. This group was called 'Tongshinsa'. They were sent to Japan to teach Japan about advanced Korean culture. Japanese people liked to receive poems from Korean nobles. At that time, Korea was more powerful than Japan. But that relationship between Joseon and Japan was reversed after the 19th century. Because Japan became more powerful than Korea and China, either. So Joseon sent diplomats called 'Sooshinsa' to learn Japanese advanced technologies. After king Jeongjo's death, some noble families controlled the whole kingdom in the early 19th century. At the end of that period, Western people invaded Joseon. In 1876, Joseon was set free from Qing so they did not have to obey Qing. But Japanese Empire was happy because Joseon became a perfect independent kingdom. So Japan could intervene in the kingdom more. After this, Joseon traded with the United States and sent 'Sooshinsa' to Japan, 'Youngshinsa' to Qing, and 'Bobingsa' to the US and Europe. These groups took many modern things to the Korean peninsula.
In early-modern Japan following the Sengoku period of "warring states", central government had been largely reestablished by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the Azuchi–Momoyama period. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, central authority fell to Tokugawa Ieyasu who completed this process and received the title of shōgun in 1603.
Society in the Japanese "Tokugawa period" (see Edo society), unlike the shogunates before it, was based on the strict class hierarchy originally established by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The daimyōs (feudal lords) were at the top, followed by the warrior-caste of samurai, with the farmers, artisans, and merchants ranking below. The country was strictly closed to foreigners with few exceptions with the Sakoku policy. Literacy rose in the two centuries of isolation.
In some parts of the country, particularly smaller regions, daimyōs and samurai were more or less identical, since daimyōs might be trained as samurai, and samurai might act as local lords. Otherwise, the largely inflexible nature of this social stratification system unleashed disruptive forces over time. Taxes on the peasantry were set at fixed amounts which did not account for inflation or other changes in monetary value. As a result, the tax revenues collected by the samurai landowners were worth less and less over time. This often led to numerous confrontations between noble but impoverished samurai and well-to-do peasants. None, however, proved compelling enough to seriously challenge the established order until the arrival of foreign powers.
In the Indian subcontinent, the Mughal Empire ruled most of India in the early 18th century. During emperor Shah Jahan and his son Aurangzeb's Islamic sharia reigns, the empire reached its architectural and economic zenith, and became the world's largest economy, worth over 25% of world GDP. In the mid-18th century it was a major proto-industrializing region.
Following major events such as the Nader Shah's invasion of the Mughal Empire, Battle of Plassey, Battle of Buxar and the long Anglo-Mysore Wars, most of South Asia was colonised and governed by the British Empire, thus establishing the British Raj. The "classic period" ended with the death of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, although the dynasty continued for another 150 years. During this period, the Empire was marked by a highly centralized administration connecting the different regions. All the significant monuments of the Mughals, their most visible legacy, date to this period which was characterised by the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic, and architectural results. The Maratha Empire was located in the south west of present-day India and expanded greatly under the rule of the Peshwas, the prime ministers of the Maratha empire. In 1761, the Maratha army lost the Third Battle of Panipat against Ahmad shah Durrani king of Afghanistan which halted imperial expansion and the empire was then divided into a confederacy of Maratha states.
The European economic and naval powers pushed into Asia, first to do trading, and then to take over major colonies. The Dutch led the way followed by the British. Portugal had arrived first, but was too weak to maintain its small holdings and was largely pushed out, retaining only Goa and Macau. The British set up a private organization, the East India Company, which handled both trade and Imperial control of much of India.
The commercial colonization of India commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal surrendered his dominions to the British East India Company, in 1765, when the company was granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal and Bihar, or in 1772, when the company established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance.
The Maratha states, following the Anglo-Maratha wars, eventually lost to the British East India Company in 1818 with the Third Anglo-Maratha War. The rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian rebellion of 1857 and consequent of the Government of India Act 1858, the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj. In 1819 Stamford Raffles established Singapore as a key trading post for Britain in their rivalry with the Dutch. However, their rivalry cooled in 1824 when an Anglo-Dutch treaty demarcated their respective interests in Southeast Asia. From the 1850s onwards, the pace of colonization shifted to a significantly higher gear.
The Dutch East India Company (1800) and British East India Company (1858) were dissolved by their respective governments, who took over the direct administration of the colonies. Only Thailand was spared the experience of foreign rule, although, Thailand itself was also greatly affected by the power politics of the Western powers. Colonial rule had a profound effect on Southeast Asia. While the colonial powers profited much from the region's vast resources and large market, colonial rule did develop the region to a varying extent.
The Great Game was a political and diplomatic confrontation between Great Britain and Russia over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia. It lasted from 1828 to 1907. There was no war, but there were many threats. Russia was fearful of British commercial and military inroads into Central Asia, and Britain was fearful of Russia threatening its largest and most important possession, India. This resulted in an atmosphere of distrust and the constant threat of war between the two empires. Britain made it a high priority to protect all the approaches to India, and the "great game" is primarily how the British did this in terms of a possible Russian threat. Historians with access to the archives have concluded that Russia had no plans involving India, as the Russians repeatedly stated.
The Great Game began in 1838 when Britain decided to gain control over the Emirate of Afghanistan and make it a protectorate, and to use the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Khanate of Khiva, and the Emirate of Bukhara as buffer states between both empires. This would protect India and also key British sea trade routes by stopping Russia from gaining a port on the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. Russia proposed Afghanistan as the neutral zone, and the final result was diving up Afghanistan with a neutral zone in the middle between Russian areas in the north and British in the South. Important episodes included the failed First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838, the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845, the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848, the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878, and the annexation of Kokand by Russia. The 1901 novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling made the term popular and introduced the new implication of great power rivalry. It became even more popular after the 1979 advent of the Soviet–Afghan War.
By 1644, the northern Manchu people had conquered Ming dynasty and established a foreign dynasty—the Qing dynasty—once more. The Manchu Qing emperors, especially Confucian scholar Kangxi, remained largely conservative—retaining the bureaucracy and the scholars within it, as well as the Confucian ideals present in Chinese society. However, changes in the economy and new attempts at resolving certain issues occurred too. These included increased trade with Western countries that brought large amounts of silver into the Chinese economy in exchange for tea, porcelain, and silk textiles. This allowed for a new merchant-class, the compradors, to develop. In addition, repairs were done on existing dikes, canals, roadways, and irrigation works. This, combined with the lowering of taxes and government-assigned labor, was supposed to calm peasant unrest. However, the Qing failed to control the growing landlord class which had begun to exploit the peasantry and abuse their position.
By the late 18th century, both internal and external issues began to arise in Qing China's politics, society, and economy. The exam system with which scholars were assigned into the bureaucracy became increasingly corrupt; bribes and other forms of cheating allowed for inexperienced and inept scholars to enter the bureaucracy and this eventually caused rampant neglect of the peasantry, military, and the previously mentioned infrastructure projects. Poverty and banditry steadily rose, especially in rural areas, and mass migrations looking for work throughout China occurred. The perpetually conservative government refused to make reforms that could resolve these issues.
China saw its status reduced by what it perceived as parasitic trade with Westerners. Originally, European traders were at a disadvantage because the Chinese cared little for their goods, while European demand for Chinese commodities such as tea and porcelain only grew. In order to tip the trade imbalance in their favor, British merchants began to sell Indian opium to the Chinese. Not only did this sap Chinese bullion reserves, it also led to widespread drug addiction amongst the bureaucracy and society in general. A ban was placed on opium as early as 1729 by the Yongzheng Emperor, but little was done to enforce it. By the early 19th century, under the new Daoguang Emperor, the government began serious efforts to eradicate opium from Chinese society. Leading this endeavour were respected scholar-officials including Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu.
After Lin destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium in the summer of 1839, Europeans demanded compensation for what they saw as unwarranted Chinese interference in their affairs. When it was not paid, the British declared war later the same year, starting what became known as the First Opium War. The outdated Chinese junks were no match for the advanced British gunboats, and soon the Yangzi River region came under threat of British bombardment and invasion. The emperor had no choice but to sue for peace, resulting in the exile of Lin and the making of the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded the British control of Hong Kong and opened up trade and diplomacy with other European countries, including Germany, France, and the USA.
Manchuria/Northeast China came under influence of Russia with the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway through Harbin to Vladivostok. The Empire of Japan replaced Russian influence in the region as a result of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, and Japan laid the South Manchurian Railway in 1906 to Port Arthur. During the Warlord Era in China, Zhang Zuolin established himself in Northeast China, but was murdered by the Japanese for being too independent. The former Chinese emperor, Puyi, was then placed on the throne to lead a Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In August 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the region. From 1945 to 1948, Northeast China was a base area for Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. With the encouragement of the Kremlin, the area was used as a staging ground during the Civil War for the Chinese Communists, who were victorious in 1949 and have controlled ever since.
When it became the 19th century, the king of Joseon was powerless. Because the noble family of the king's wife got the power and ruled the country by their way. The 26th king of Joseon dynasty, Gojong's father, Heungseon Daewongun wanted the king be powerful again. Even he wasn't the king. As the father of young king, he destroyed noble families and corrupt organizations. So the royal family got the power again. But he wanted to rebuild Gyeongbokgung palace in order to show the royal power to people. So he was criticized by people because he spent enormous money and inflation occurred because of that. So his son, the real king Gojong got power.
By the Treaty of Shimonoseki article 1 of the first Sino-Japanese war, Korea was independented from China. The 26th king of Joseon, Gojong changed the nation's name to Daehan Jeguk (Korean Empire). And he also promoted himself as an emperor. The new empire accepted more western technology and strengthened military power. And Korean Empire was going to become a neutral nation. Unfortunately, in the Russo-Japanese war, Japan ignored this, and eventually Japan won against Russian Empire, and started to invade Korea. Japan first stole the right of diplomacy from Korean Empire illegally. But every western country ignored this invasion because they knew Japan became a strong country as they defeated Russian Empire. So emperor Gojong sent diplomats to a Dutch city known as The Hague to let everyone know that Japan stole the Empire's right illegally. But it was failed. Because the diplomats couldn't go into the conference room. Japan kicked Gojong off on the grounds that this reason. 3 years after, In 1910, Korean Empire became a part of Empire of Japan. It was the first time ever after invasion of Han dynasty in 108 BC.
The European powers had control of other parts of Asia by the early 20th century, such as British India, French Indochina, Spanish East Indies, and Portuguese Macau and Goa. The Great Game between Russia and Britain was the struggle for power in the Central Asian region in the nineteenth century. The Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing Asia by train, was complete by 1916. Parts of Asia remained free from European control, although not influence, such as Persia, Thailand and most of China. In the twentieth century, Imperial Japan expanded into China and Southeast Asia during World War II. After the war, many Asian countries became independent from European powers. During the Cold War, the northern parts of Asia were communist controlled with the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, while western allies formed pacts such as CENTO and SEATO. Conflicts such as the Korean War, Vietnam War and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were fought between communists and anti-communists. In the decades after the Second World War, a massive restructuring plan drove Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, a phenomenon known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The Arab–Israeli conflict has dominated much of the recent history of the Middle East. After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, there were many new independent nations in Central Asia.
Prior to World War II, China faced a civil war between Mao Zedong's Communist party and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist party; the nationalists appeared to be in the lead. However, once the Japanese invaded in 1937, the two parties were forced to form a temporary cease-fire in order to defend China. The nationalists faced many military failures that caused them to lose territory and subsequently, respect from the Chinese masses. In contrast, the communists' use of guerilla warfare (led by Lin Biao) proved effective against the Japanese's conventional methods and put the Communist Party on top by 1945. They also gained popularity for the reforms they were already applying in controlled areas, including land redistribution, education reforms, and widespread health care. For the next four years, the nationalists would be forced to retreat to the small island east of Fujian province, known as Taiwan (formerly known as Formosa), where they remain today. In mainland China, People's Republic of China was established by the Communist Party, with Mao Zedong as its state chairman.
The communist government in China was defined by the party cadres. These hard-line officers controlled the People's Liberation Army, which itself controlled large amounts of the bureaucracy. This system was further controlled by the Central Committee, which additionally supported the state chairman who was considered the head of the government. The People's Republic's foreign policies included the repressing of secession attempts in Mongolia and Tibet and supporting of North Korea and North Vietnam in the Korean War and Vietnam War, respectively. By 1960 China and the USSR became adversaries, battling worldwide for control of local communist movements.
Today China plays important roles in world economics and politics. China today is the world's second largest economy and the second fastest growing economy.
From the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century, large regions of India were gradually annexed by the East India Company, a chartered company acting as a sovereign power on behalf of the British government. Dissatisfaction with company rule in India led to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which rocked parts of north and central India, and led to the dissolution of the company. India was afterwards ruled directly by the British Crown, in the British Raj. After World War I, a nationwide struggle for independence was launched by the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, and noted for nonviolence. Later, the All-India Muslim League would advocate for a separate Muslim-majority nation state.
In August 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. In particular, the partition of Punjab and Bengal led to rioting between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in these provinces and spread to other nearby regions, leaving some 500,000 dead. The police and army units were largely ineffective. The British officers were gone, and the units were beginning to tolerate if not actually indulge in violence against their religious enemies. Also, this period saw one of the largest mass migrations anywhere in modern history, with a total of 12 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims moving between the newly created nations of India and Pakistan (which gained independence on 15 and 14 August 1947 respectively). In 1971, Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan and East Bengal, seceded from Pakistan through an armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement.
During the period when the Korean War occurred, Korea divided into North and South. Syngman Rhee became the first president of South Korea, and Kim Il Sung became the supreme leader of North Korea. After the war, the president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee tries to become a dictator. So the April Revolution occurred, eventually Syngman Rhee was exiled from his country. In 1963, Park Chung Hee was empowered with a military coup d'état. He dispatched Republic of Korea Army to Vietnam War. And during this age, the economy of South Korea outran that of North Korea.
Although Park Chung Hee improved the nation's economy, he was a dictator, so people didn't like him. Eventually, he was murdered by Kim Jae-gyu. In 1979, Chun Doo-hwan was empowered by another coup d’état by military. He oppressed the resistances in the city of Gwangju. That event is called 'Gwangju Uprising'. Despite the Gwangju Uprising, Chun Doo-hwan became the president. But the people resisted again in 1987. This movement is called 'June Struggle'. As a result of Gwangju Uprising and June Struggle, South Korea finally became a democratic republic in 1987.
Roh Tae-woo (1988–93), Kim Young-sam (1993–98), Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), Moon Jae-in (2017–) were elected as a president in order after 1987. In 1960, North Korea was far wealthier than South Korea. But in 1970, South Korea begins to outrun the North Korean economy. In 2018, South Korea is ranked #10 in world GDP ranking. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Asia can be seen as the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe. See History of the Middle East and History of the Indian Subcontinent for further details on those regions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The coastal periphery was the home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations and religions, with each of three regions developing early civilizations around fertile river valleys. These valleys were fertile because the soil there was rich and could bear many root crops. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient China shared many similarities and likely exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other notions such as that of writing likely developed individually in each area. Cities, states, and then empires developed in these lowlands.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The steppe region had long been inhabited by mounted nomads, and from the central steppes, they could reach all areas of the Asian continent. The northern part of the continent, covering much of Siberia was also inaccessible to the steppe nomads due to the dense forests and the tundra. These areas in Siberia were very sparsely populated.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The centre and periphery were kept separate by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus, Himalaya, Karakum Desert, and Gobi Desert formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could only cross with difficulty. While technologically and culturally the city dwellers were more advanced, they could do little militarily to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force. Thus the nomads who conquered states in the Middle East were soon forced to adapt to the local societies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The spread of Islam waved the Islamic Golden Age and the Timurid Renaissance, which later influenced the age of Islamic gunpowder empires.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Asia's history features major developments seen in other parts of the world, as well as events that have affected those other regions. These include the trade of the Silk Road, which spread cultures, languages, religions, and diseases throughout Afro-Eurasian trade. Another major advancement was the innovation of gunpowder in medieval China, later developed by the Gunpowder empires, mainly by the Mughals and Safavids, which led to advanced warfare through the use of guns.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A report by archaeologist Rakesh Tewari on Lahuradewa, India shows new C14 datings that range between 9000 and 8000 BC associated with rice, making Lahuradewa the earliest Neolithic site in entire South Asia. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus River alluvium approximately 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Göbekli Tepe is a Neolithic site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, the site comprises a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The prehistoric Beifudi site near Yixian in Hebei Province, China, contains relics of a culture contemporaneous with the Cishan and Xinglongwa cultures of about 8000–7000 BC, neolithic cultures east of the Taihang Mountains, filling in an archaeological gap between the two Northern Chinese cultures. The total excavated area is more than 1,200 square meters and the collection of neolithic findings at the site consists of two phases.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Around 5500 BC the Halafian culture appeared in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia, based upon dryland agriculture.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In southern Mesopotamia were the alluvial plains of Sumer and Elam. Since there was little rainfall, irrigation systems were necessary. The Ubaid culture flourished from 5500 BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Chalcolithic period (or Copper Age) began about 4500 BC, then the Bronze Age began about 3500 BC, replacing the Neolithic cultures.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Indus Valley civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilization (3300–1300 BC; mature period 2600–1900 BC) which was centered mostly in the western part of the Indian Subcontinent; it is considered that an early form of Hinduism was performed during this civilization. Some of the great cities of this civilization include Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which had a high level of town planning and arts. The cause of the destruction of these regions around 1700 BC is debatable, although evidence suggests it was caused by natural disasters (especially flooding). This era marks Vedic period in India, which lasted from roughly 1500 to 500 BC. During this period, the Sanskrit language developed and the Vedas were written, epic hymns that told tales of gods and wars. This was the basis for the Vedic religion, which would eventually sophisticate and develop into Hinduism.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "China and Vietnam were also centres of metalworking. Dating back to the Neolithic Age, the first bronze drums, called the Dong Son drums have been uncovered in and around the Red River Delta regions of Vietnam and Southern China. These relate to the prehistoric Dong Son Culture of Vietnam. Song Da bronze drum's surface, Dong Son culture, Vietnam",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In Ban Chiang, Thailand (Southeast Asia), bronze artifacts have been discovered dating to 2100 BC.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In Nyaunggan, Burma bronze tools have been excavated along with ceramics and stone artifacts. Dating is still currently broad (3500–500 BC).",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Iron Age saw the widespread use of iron tools, weaponry, and armor throughout the major civilizations of Asia.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, ruled an area from Greece and Turkey to the Indus River and Central Asia during the 6th to 4th centuries BC. Persian politics included a tolerance for other cultures, a highly centralized government, and significant infrastructure developments. Later, in Darius the Great's rule, the territories were integrated, a bureaucracy was developed, nobility were assigned military positions, tax collection was carefully organized, and spies were used to ensure the loyalty of regional officials. The primary religion of Persia at this time was Zoroastrianism, developed by the philosopher Zoroaster. It introduced an early form of monotheism to the area. The religion banned animal sacrifice and the use of intoxicants in rituals; and introduced the concept of spiritual salvation through personal moral action, an end time, and both general and Particular judgment with a heaven or hell. These concepts would heavily influence later emperors and the masses. It was itself heavily influenced by earlier much older ancient religious beliefs and practices dating to the beginning of known history and before. The Persian Empire was successful in establishing peace and stability throughout the Middle East and were a major influence in art, politics (affecting Hellenistic leaders), and religion.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Alexander the Great conquered this dynasty in the 4th century BC, creating the brief Hellenistic period. He was unable to establish stability and after his death, Persia broke into small, weak dynasties including the Seleucid Empire, followed by the Parthian Empire. By the end of the Classical age, Persia had been reconsolidated into the Sassanid Empire, also known as the second Persian Empire.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Roman Empire would later control parts of Western Asia. The Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanid dynasties of Persia dominated Western Asia for centuries.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Maurya and Gupta empires are called the Golden Age of India and were marked by extensive inventions and discoveries in science, technology, art, religion, and philosophy that crystallized the elements of what is generally known as Indian culture. The religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, which began in Indian sub-continent, were an important influence on South, East and Southeast Asia.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "By 600 BC, India had been divided into 17 regional states that would occasionally feud amongst themselves. In 327 BC, Alexander the Great came to India with a vision of conquering the whole world. He crossed northwestern India and created the province Bactria but could not move further because his army wanted to go back to their family. Shortly prior, the soldier Chandragupta Maurya began to take control of the Ganges river and soon established the Maurya Empire. The Maurya Empire (Sanskrit: मौर्य राजवंश, Maurya Rājavaṃśa) was the geographically extensive and powerful empire in ancient India, ruled by the Mauryan dynasty from 321 to 185 BC. It was one of the world's largest empires in its time, stretching to the Himalayas in the north, what is now Assam in the east, probably beyond modern Pakistan in the west, and annexing Balochistan and much of what is now Afghanistan, at its greatest extent. South of Mauryan empire was the Tamilakam an independent country dominated by three dynasties, the Pandyans, Cholas and Cheras. The government established by Chandragupta was led by an autocratic king, who primarily relied on the military to assert his power. It also applied the use of a bureaucracy and even sponsored a postal service. Chandragupta's grandson, Ashoka, greatly extended the empire by conquering most of modern-day India (save for the southern tip). He eventually converted to Buddhism, though, and began a peaceful life where he promoted the religion as well as humane methods throughout India. The Maurya Empire would disintegrate soon after Ashoka's death and was conquered by the Kushan invaders from the northwest, establishing the Kushan Empire. Their conversion to Buddhism caused the religion to be associated with foreigners and therefore a decline in its popularity occurred.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Kushan Empire would fall apart by 220 AD, creating more political turmoil in India. Then in 320, the Gupta Empire (Sanskrit: गुप्त राजवंश, Gupta Rājavanśha) was established and covered much of the Indian Subcontinent. Founded by Maharaja Sri-Gupta, the dynasty was the model of a classical civilization. Gupta kings united the area primarily through negotiation of local leaders and families as well as strategical intermarriage. Their rule covered less land than the Maurya Empire, but established the greatest stability. In 535, the empire ended when India was overrun by the Hunas.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Since 1029 BC, the Zhou dynasty (Chinese: 周朝; pinyin: Zhōu Cháo; Wade–Giles: Chou Ch'ao [tʂóʊ tʂʰɑ̌ʊ]), had existed in China and it would continue to until 258 BC. The Zhou dynasty had been using a feudal system by giving power to local nobility and relying on their loyalty in order to control its large territory. As a result, the Chinese government at this time tended to be very decentralized and weak, and there was often little the emperor could do to resolve national issues. Nonetheless, the government was able to retain its position with the creation of the Mandate of Heaven, which could establish an emperor as divinely chosen to rule. The Zhou additionally discouraged the human sacrifice of the preceding eras and unified the Chinese language. Finally, the Zhou government encouraged settlers to move into the Yangtze River valley, thus creating the Chinese Middle Kingdom.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "But by 500 BC, its political stability began to decline due to repeated nomadic incursions and internal conflict derived from the fighting princes and families. This was lessened by the many philosophical movements, starting with the life of Confucius. His philosophical writings (called Confucianism) concerning the respect of elders and of the state would later be popularly used in the Han dynasty. Additionally, Laozi's concepts of Taoism, including yin and yang and the innate duality and balance of nature and the universe, became popular throughout this period. Nevertheless, the Zhou dynasty eventually disintegrated as the local nobles began to gain more power and their conflict devolved into the Warring States period, from 402 to 201 BC.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "One leader eventually came on top, Qin Shi Huang (Chinese: 始皇帝, Shǐ Huángdì), who overthrew the last Zhou emperor and established the Qin dynasty. The Qin dynasty (Chinese: 秦朝; pinyin: Qín Cháo) was the first ruling dynasty of Imperial China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The new Emperor abolished the feudal system and directly appointed a bureaucracy that would rely on him for power. Huang's imperial forces crushed any regional resistance, and they furthered the Chinese empire by expanding down to the South China Sea and northern Vietnam. Greater organization brought a uniform tax system, a national census, regulated road building (and cart width), standard measurements, standard coinage, and an official written and spoken language. Further reforms included new irrigation projects, the encouragement of silk manufacturing, and (most famously) the beginning of the construction of the Great Wall of China—designed to keep out the nomadic raiders who'd constantly badger the Chinese people. However, Shi Huang was infamous for his tyranny, forcing laborers to build the Wall, ordering heavy taxes, and severely punishing all who opposed him. He oppressed Confucians and promoted Legalism, the idea that people were inherently evil, and that a strong, forceful government was needed to control them. Legalism was infused with realistic, logical views and rejected the pleasures of educated conversation as frivolous. All of this made Shi Huang extremely unpopular with the people. As the Qin began to weaken, various factions began to fight for control of China.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Han dynasty (simplified Chinese: 汉朝; traditional Chinese: 漢朝; pinyin: Hàn Cháo; 206 BC – 220 AD) was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms (220–265 AD). Spanning over four centuries, the period of the Han dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history. One of the Han dynasty's greatest emperors, Emperor Wu of Han, established a peace throughout China comparable to the Pax Romana seen in the Mediterranean a hundred years later. To this day, China's majority ethnic group refers to itself as the \"Han people\". The Han dynasty was established when two peasants succeeded in rising up against Shi Huang's significantly weaker successor-son. The new Han government retained the centralization and bureaucracy of the Qin, but greatly reduced the repression seen before. They expanded their territory into Korea, Vietnam, and Central Asia, creating an even larger empire than the Qin.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Han developed contacts with the Persian Empire in the Middle East and the Romans, through the Silk Road, with which they were able to trade many commodities—primarily silk. Many ancient civilizations were influenced by the Silk Road, which connected China, India, the Middle East and Europe. Han emperors like Wu also promoted Confucianism as the national \"religion\" (although it is debated by theologians as to whether it is defined as such or as a philosophy). Shrines devoted to Confucius were built and Confucian philosophy was taught to all scholars who entered the Chinese bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was further improved with the introduction of an examination system that selected scholars of high merit. These bureaucrats were often upper-class people educated in special schools, but whose power was often checked by the lower-class brought into the bureaucracy through their skill. The Chinese imperial bureaucracy was very effective and highly respected by all in the realm and would last over 2,000 years. The Han government was highly organized and it commanded the military, judicial law (which used a system of courts and strict laws), agricultural production, the economy, and the general lives of its people. The government also promoted intellectual philosophy, scientific research, and detailed historical records.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "However, despite all of this impressive stability, central power began to lose control by the turn of the Common Era. As the Han dynasty declined, many factors continued to pummel it into submission until China was left in a state of chaos. By 100 AD, philosophical activity slowed, and corruption ran rampant in the bureaucracy. Local landlords began to take control as the scholars neglected their duties, and this resulted in heavy taxation of the peasantry. Taoists began to gain significant ground and protested the decline. They started to proclaim magical powers and promised to save China with them; the Taoist Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 (led by rebels in yellow scarves) failed but was able to weaken the government. The aforementioned Huns combined with diseases killed up to half of the population and officially ended the Han dynasty by 220. The ensuing period of chaos was so terrible it lasted for three centuries, where many weak regional rulers and dynasties failed to establish order in China. This period of chaos and attempts at order is commonly known as that of the Six Dynasties. The first part of this included the Three Kingdoms which started in 220 and describes the brief and weak successor \"dynasties\" that followed the Han. In 265, the Jin dynasty of China was started and this soon split into two different empires in control of northwestern and southeastern China. In 420, the conquest and abdication of those two dynasties resulted in the first of the Southern and Northern dynasties. The Northern and Southern dynasties passed through until finally, by 557, the Northern Zhou dynasty ruled the north and the Chen dynasty ruled the south.",
"title": "Ancient"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "During this period, the Eastern world empires continued to expand through trade, migration and conquests of neighboring areas. Gunpowder was widely used as early as the 11th century and they were using moveable type printing five hundred years before Gutenberg created his press. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism were the dominant philosophies of the Far East during the Middle Ages. Marco Polo was not the first Westerner to travel to the Orient and return with amazing stories of this different culture, but his accounts published in the late 13th and early 14th centuries were the first to be widely read throughout Europe.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Arabian peninsula and the surrounding Middle East and Near East regions saw dramatic change during the Medieval era caused primarily by the spread of Islam and the establishment of the Arabian Empires.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the 5th century, the Middle East was separated into small, weak states; the two most prominent were the Sassanian Empire of the Persians in what is now Iran and Iraq, and the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). The Byzantines and Sassanians fought with each other continually, a reflection of the rivalry between the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire seen during the previous five hundred years. The fighting weakened both states, leaving the stage open to a new power. Meanwhile, the nomadic Bedouin tribes who dominated the Arabian desert saw a period of tribal stability, greater trade networking and a familiarity with Abrahamic religions or monotheism.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "While the Byzantine Roman and Sassanid Persian empires were both weakened by the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, a new power in the form of Islam grew in the Middle East under Muhammad in Medina. In a series of rapid Muslim conquests, the Rashidun army, led by the Caliphs and skilled military commanders such as Khalid ibn al-Walid, swept through most of the Middle East, taking more than half of Byzantine territory in the Arab–Byzantine wars and completely engulfing Persia in the Muslim conquest of Persia. It would be the Arab Caliphates of the Middle Ages that would first unify the entire Middle East as a distinct region and create the dominant ethnic identity that persists today. These Caliphates included the Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate, and later the Seljuq Empire.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "After Muhammad introduced Islam, it jump-started Middle Eastern culture into an Islamic Golden Age, inspiring achievements in architecture, the revival of old advances in science and technology, and the formation of a distinct way of life. Muslims saved and spread Greek advances in medicine, algebra, geometry, astronomy, anatomy, and ethics that would later finds it way back to Western Europe.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuq Turks, migrating south from the Turkic homelands in Central Asia. They conquered Persia, Iraq (capturing Baghdad in 1055), Syria, Palestine, and the Hejaz. This was followed by a series of Christian Western Europe invasions. The fragmentation of the Middle East allowed joined forces, mainly from England, France, and the emerging Holy Roman Empire, to enter the region. In 1099 the knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which survived until 1187, when Saladin retook the city. Smaller crusader fiefdoms survived until 1291. In the early 13th century, a new wave of invaders, the armies of the Mongol Empire, swept through the region, sacking Baghdad in the Siege of Baghdad (1258) and advancing as far south as the border of Egypt in what became known as the Mongol conquests. The Mongols eventually retreated in 1335, but the chaos that ensued throughout the empire deposed the Seljuq Turks. In 1401, the region was further plagued by the Turko-Mongol, Timur, and his ferocious raids. By then, another group of Turks had arisen as well, the Ottomans.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Medieval Asia was the kingdom of the Khans. Never before had any person controlled as much land as Genghis Khan. He built his power unifying separate Mongol tribes before expanding his kingdom south and west. He and his grandson, Kublai Khan, controlled lands in China, Burma, Central Asia, Russia, Iran, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan was a Khagan who tolerated nearly every religion.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Indian early medieval age, 600 to 1200, is defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity. When Harsha of Kannauj, who ruled much of the Indo-Gangetic Plain from 606 to 647, attempted to expand southwards, he was defeated by the Chalukya ruler of the Deccan. When his successor attempted to expand eastwards, he was defeated by the Pala king of Bengal. When the Chalukyas attempted to expand southwards, they were defeated by the Pallavas from farther south, who in turn were opposed by the Pandyas and the Cholas from still farther south. The Cholas could under the rule of Raja Raja Chola defeat their rivals and rise to a regional power. Cholas expanded northward and defeated Eastern Chalukya, Kalinga and the Pala. Under Rajendra Chola the Cholas created the first notable navy of Indian subcontinent. The Chola navy extended the influence of Chola empire to southeast asia. During this time, pastoral peoples whose land had been cleared to make way for the growing agricultural economy were accommodated within caste society, as were new non-traditional ruling classes. The Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent mainly took place from the 12th century onwards, though earlier Muslim conquests include the limited inroads into modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Umayyad campaigns in India, during the time of the Rajput kingdoms in the 8th century.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Major economic and military powers like the Delhi Sultanate and Bengal Sultanate, were seen to be established. The search of their wealth led the Voyages of Christopher Columbus.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Vijayanagara Empire based in the Deccan Plateau region of South India, was established in 1336 by the brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I of the Sangama dynasty, patronized by saint Vidyaranya, the 12th Shankaracharya of Sringeri in Karnataka. The empire rose to prominence as a result of attempts by the southern powers to resist and ward off Turkic Islamic invasions by the end of the 13th century. At its peak, it subjugated almost all of South India's rulers and pushed the sultans of the Deccan beyond the Tungabhadra-Krishna river region. After annexing modern day Odisha (ancient Kalinga) from the Gajapati Kingdom, became a notable power. The Kingdome lasted until 1646 after a major military defeat in the Battle of Talikota in 1565 by the combined armies of the Deccan sultanates.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "China saw the rise and fall of the Sui, Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties and therefore improvements in its bureaucracy, the spread of Buddhism, and the advent of Neo-Confucianism. It was an unsurpassed era for Chinese ceramics and painting. Medieval architectural masterpieces the Great South Gate in Todaiji, Japan, and the Tien-ning Temple in Peking, China are some of the surviving constructs from this era.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A new powerful dynasty began to rise in the 580s, amongst the divided factions of China. This was started when an aristocrat named Yang Jian married his daughter into the Northern Zhou dynasty. He proclaimed himself Emperor Wen of Sui and appeased the nomadic military by abandoning the Confucian scholar-gentry. Emperor Wen soon led the conquest of the southern Chen dynasty and united China once more under the Sui dynasty. The emperor lowered taxes and constructed granaries that he used to prevent famine and control the market. Later Wen's son would murder him for the throne and declare himself Emperor Yang of Sui. Emperor Yang revived the Confucian scholars and the bureaucracy, much to anger of the aristocrats and nomadic military leaders. Yang became an excessive leader who overused China's resources for personal luxury and perpetuated exhaustive attempts to conquer Goguryeo. His military failures and neglect of the empire forced his own ministers to assassinate him in 618, ending the Sui dynasty.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Fortunately, one of Yang's most respectable advisors, Li Yuan, was able to claim the throne quickly, preventing a chaotic collapse. He proclaimed himself Emperor Gaozu, and established the Tang dynasty in 623. The Tang saw expansion of China through conquest to Tibet in the west, Vietnam in the south, and Manchuria in the north. Tang emperors also improved the education of scholars in the Chinese bureaucracy. A Ministry of Rites was established and the examination system was improved to better qualify scholars for their jobs. In addition, Buddhism became popular in China with two different strains between the peasantry and the elite, the Pure Land and Zen strains, respectively. Greatly supporting the spread of Buddhism was Empress Wu, who additionally claimed an unofficial \"Zhou dynasty\" and displayed China's tolerance of a woman ruler, which was rare at the time. However, Buddhism would also experience some backlash, especially from Confucianists and Taoists. This would usually involve criticism about how it was costing the state money, since the government was unable to tax Buddhist monasteries, and additionally sent many grants and gifts to them.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Tang dynasty began to decline under the rule of Emperor Xuanzong, who began to neglect the economy and military and caused unrest amongst the court officials due to the excessive influence of his concubine, Yang Guifei, and her family. This eventually sparked a revolt in 755. Although the revolt failed, subduing it required involvement with the unruly nomadic tribes outside of China and distributing more power to local leaders—leaving the government and economy in a degraded state. The Tang dynasty officially ended in 907 and various factions led by the aforementioned nomadic tribes and local leaders would fight for control of China in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "By 960, most of China proper had been reunited under the Song dynasty, although it lost territories in the north and could not defeat one of the nomadic tribes there—the Liao dynasty of the highly sinicized Khitan people. From then on, the Song would have to pay tribute to avoid invasion and thus set the precedent for other nomadic kingdoms to oppress them. The Song also saw the revival of Confucianism in the form of Neo-Confucianism. This had the effect of putting the Confucian scholars at a higher status than aristocrats or Buddhists and also intensified the reduction of power in women. The infamous practice of foot binding developed in this period as a result. Eventually the Liao dynasty in the north was overthrown by the Jin dynasty of the Manchu-related Jurchen people. The new Jin kingdom invaded northern China, leaving the Song to flee farther south and creating the Southern Song dynasty in 1126. There, cultural life flourished.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "By 1227, the Mongols had conquered the Western Xia kingdom northwest of China. Soon the Mongols incurred upon the Jin empire of the Jurchens. Chinese cities were soon besieged by the Mongol hordes that showed little mercy for those who resisted and the Southern Song Chinese were quickly losing territory. In 1271 the current great khan, Kublai Khan, claimed himself Emperor of China and officially established the Yuan dynasty. By 1290, all of China was under control of the Mongols, marking the first time they were ever completely conquered by a foreign invader; the new capital was established at Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing). Kublai Khan segregated Mongol culture from Chinese culture by discouraging interactions between the two peoples, separating living spaces and places of worship, and reserving top administrative positions to Mongols, thus preventing Confucian scholars to continue the bureaucratic system. Nevertheless, Kublai remained fascinated with Chinese thinking, surrounding himself with Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian advisors.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Mongol women displayed a contrasting independent nature compared to the Chinese women who continued to be suppressed. Mongol women often rode out on hunts or even to war. Kublai's wife, Chabi, was a perfect example of this; Chabi advised her husband on several political and diplomatic matters; she convinced him that the Chinese were to be respected and well-treated in order to make them easier to rule. However, this was not enough to affect Chinese women's position, and the increasingly Neo-Confucian successors of Kublai further repressed Chinese and even Mongol women.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Black Death, which would later ravage Western Europe, had its beginnings in Asia, where it wiped out large populations in China in 1331.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Japan's medieval history began with the Asuka period, from around 600 to 710. The time was characterized by the Taika Reform and imperial centralization, both of which were a direct result of growing Chinese contact and influences. In 603, Prince Shōtoku of the Yamato dynasty began significant political and cultural changes. He issued the Seventeen-article constitution in 604, centralizing power towards the emperor (under the title tenno, or heavenly sovereign) and removing the power to levy taxes from provincial lords. Shōtoku was also a patron of Buddhism and he encouraged building temples competitively.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Shōtoku's reforms transitioned Japan to the Nara period (c. 710 to c. 794), with the moving of the Japanese capital to Nara in Honshu. This period saw the culmination of Chinese-style writing, etiquette, and architecture in Japan along with Confucian ideals to supplement the already present Buddhism. Peasants revered both Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks. However, in the wake of the 735–737 Japanese smallpox epidemic, Buddhism gained the status of state religion and the government ordered the construction of numerous Buddhist temples, monasteries, and statues. The lavish spending combined with the fact that many aristocrats did not pay taxes, put a heavy burden on peasantry that caused poverty and famine. Eventually the Buddhist position got out of control, threatening to seize imperial power and causing Emperor Kanmu to move the capital to Heian-kyō to avoid a Buddhist takeover. This marked the beginning of the Heian period and the end of Taika reform.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "With the Heian period (from 794 to 1185) came a decline of imperial power. Chinese influence also declined, as a result of its correlation with imperial centralization and the heavenly mandate, which came to be regarded as ineffective. By 838, the Japanese court discontinued its embassies in China; only traders and Buddhist monks continued to travel to China. Buddhism itself came to be considered more Japanese than Chinese, and persisted to be popular in Japan. Buddhists monks and monasteries continued their attempts to gather personal power in courts, along with aristocrats. One particular noble family that dominated influence in the imperial bureaucracy was the Fujiwara clan. During this time cultural life in the imperial court flourished. There was a focus on beauty and social interaction and writing and literature was considered refined. Noblewomen were cultured the same as noblemen, dabbling in creative works and politics. A prime example of both Japanese literature and women's role in high-class culture at this time was The Tale of Genji, written by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. Popularization of wooden palaces and shōji sliding doors amongst the nobility also occurred.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Loss of imperial power also led to the rise of provincial warrior elites. Small lords began to function independently. They administered laws, supervised public works projects, and collected revenue for themselves instead of the imperial court. Regional lords also began to build their own armies. These warriors were loyal only their local lords and not the emperor, although the imperial government increasingly called them in to protect the capital. The regional warrior class developed into the samurai, which created its own culture: including specialized weapons such as the katana and a form of chivalry, bushido. The imperial government's loss of control in the second half of the Heian period allowed banditry to grow, requiring both feudal lords and Buddhist monasteries to procure warriors for protection. As imperial control over Japan declined, feudal lords also became more independent and seceded from the empire. These feudal states squandered the peasants living in them, reducing the farmers to an almost serfdom status. Peasants were also rigidly restricted from rising to the samurai class, being physically set off by dress and weapon restrictions. As a result of their oppression, many peasants turned to Buddhism as a hope for reward in the afterlife for upright behavior.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "With the increase of feudalism, families in the imperial court began to depend on alliances with regional lords. The Fujiwara clan declined from power, replaced by a rivalry between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan. This rivalry grew into the Genpei War in the early 1180s. This war saw the use of both samurai and peasant soldiers. For the samurai, battle was ritual and they often easily cut down the poorly trained peasantry. The Minamoto clan proved successful due to their rural alliances. Once the Taira was destroyed, the Minamoto established a military government called the shogunate (or bakufu), centered in Kamakura.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The end of the Genpei War and the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate marked the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura period in 1185, solidifying feudal Japan.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The three Kingdoms of Korea involves Goguryeo in north, Baekje in southwest, and Silla in southeast Korean peninsula. These three kingdoms act as a bridge of cultures between China and Japan. Prince Shōtoku of Japan had been taught by two teachers. One was from Baekje, the other was from Goguryeo. Once Japan invaded Silla, Goguryeo helped Silla to defeat Japan. Baekje met the earliest heyday of them. Its heyday was the 5th century AD. Its capital was Seoul. During its heyday, the kingdom made colonies overseas. Liaodong, China and Kyushu, Japan were the colonies of Baekje during its short heyday. Goguryeo was the strongest kingdom of all. They sometimes called themselves as an Empire. Its heyday was 6th century. King Gwanggaeto widened its territory to north. So Goguryeo dominated from Korean peninsula to Manchuria. And his son, King Jangsu widened its territory to south. He occupied Seoul, and moved its capital to Pyeongyang. Goguryeo almost occupied three quarters of South Korean peninsula thanks to king Jangsu who widened the kingdom's territory to south. Silla met the latest heyday. King Jinheung went north and occupiedSeoul. But it was short. Baekje became stronger and attacked Silla. Baekje occupied more than 40 cities of Silla. So Silla could hardly survive. China's Sui dynasty invaded Goguryeo and Goguryeo–Sui War occurred between Korea and China. Goguryeo won against China and Sui dynasty fell. After then, Tang dynasty reinvaded Goguryeo and helped Silla to unify the peninsula. Goguryeo, Baekje, and Japan helped each other against Tang-Silla alliance, but Baekje and Goguryeo fell. Unfortunately, Tang dynasty betrayed Silla and invaded Korean peninsula in order to occupy the whole Korean peninsula (Silla-Tang war). Silla advocated 'Unification of Three Korea', so people of fallen Baekje and Goguryeo helped Silla against Chinese invasion. Eventually Silla could beat China and unified the peninsula. This war helped Korean people to unite mentally.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The rest of Goguryeo people established Balhae and won the war against Tang in later 7th century AD. Balhae is the north state, and Later Silla was the south state. Balhae was a quite strong kingdom as their ancestor Goguryeo did. Finally, the Emperor of Tang dynasty admits Balhae as 'A strong country in the East'. They liked to trade with Japan, China, and Silla. Balhae and Later Silla sent a lot of international students to China. And Arabian merchants came into Korean peninsula, so Korea became known as 'Silla' in the western countries. Silla improved Korean writing system called Idu letters. Idu affected Katakana of Japan. Liao dynasty invaded Balhae in early 10th century, so Balhae fell.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The unified Korean kingdom, Later Silla divided into three kingdoms again because of the corrupt central government. It involves Later Goguryeo (also as known as \"Taebong\"), Later Baekje, and Later Silla. The general of Later Goguryeo, Wang Geon took the throne and changed the name of kingdom into Goryeo, which was derived by the ancient strong kingdom, Goguryeo, and Goryeo reunified the peninsula.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Goryeo reunited the Korean peninsula during the later three kingdoms period and named itself as 'Empire'. But nowadays, Goryeo is known as a kingdom. The name 'Goryeo' was derived from Goguryeo, and the name Korea was derived from Goryeo. Goryeo adopted people from fallen Balhae. They also widened their territory to north by defending Liao dynasty and attacking the Jurchen people. Goryeo developed a splendid culture. The first metal type printed book Jikji was also from Korea. The Goryeo ware is one of the most famous legacies of this kingdom. Goryeo imported Chinese government system and developed into their own ways.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "During this period, laws were codified and a civil service system was introduced. Buddhism flourished and spread throughout the peninsula. The Tripitaka Koreana is 81,258 books total. It was made to keep Korea safe against the Mongolian invasion. It is now a UNESCO world heritage. Goryeo won the battle against Liao dynasty. Then, the Mongolian Empire invaded Goryeo. Goryeo did not disappear but it had to obey Mongolians. After 80 years, in 14th century, the Mongolian dynasty Yuan lost power, King Gongmin tried to free themselves against Mongol although his wife was also Mongolian. At the 14th century, Ming dynasty wanted Goryeo to obey China. But Goryeo didn't. They decided to invade China. Going to China, the general of Goryeo, Lee Sung-Gae came back and destroyed Goryeo. Then, in 1392, he established new dynasty, Joseon. And he became Taejo of Joseon, which means the first king of Joseon.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 802, Jayavarman II consolidated his rule over neighboring peoples and declared himself chakravartin, or \"universal ruler\". The Khmer Empire effectively dominated all Mainland Southeast Asia from the early 9th until the 15th century, during which time they developed a sophisticated monumental architecture of most exquisite expression and mastery of composition at Angkor.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The history of Vietnam can be traced back to around 20,000 years ago, as the first modern humans arrived and settled on this land, known as the Hoabinhians, which can be traced back to the modern-day Negritos. Archaeological findings from 1965, which are still under research, show the remains of two hominins closely related to the Sinanthropus, dating as far back as the Middle Pleistocene era, roughly half a million years ago.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Pre-historic Vietnam was home to some of the world's earliest civilizations and societies—making them one of the world's first people who had practiced agriculture. The Red River valley formed a natural geographic and economic unit, bounded to the north and west by mountains and jungles, to the east by the sea and to the south by the Red River Delta. The need to have a single authority to prevent floods of the Red River, to cooperate in constructing hydraulic systems, trade exchange, and to repel invaders, led to the creation of the first legendary Vietnamese states approximately 2879 BC. While in the later times, ongoing research from archaeologists have suggested that the Vietnamese Đông Sơn culture were traceable back to Northern Vietnam, Guangxi and Laos around 700 BC.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Vietnam's long coastal and narrowed lands, rugged mountainous terrains, with two major deltas, were soon home to several different ancient cultures and civilizations. In the north, the Đông Sơn culture and its indigenous chiefdoms of Văn Lang and Âu Lạc started to flourish by 500 BC. In Central, Sa Huỳnh culture of Austronesian Chamic peoples also thrived. Both were swept by the Chinese Han dynasty expansion from the north - the Han conquest of Nanyue brought parts of Vietnam under the Chinese rule in 111 BC. Traditional Chinese became the official script as well as the later developed independent Nôm script of Vietnamese.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 40 BC, the Trưng Sisters led the first uprising of indigenous tribes and peoples against Chinese domination. The rebellion was however defeated, but as the Han dynasty began to weaken by late 2nd century and China (中国) started to descend into state of turmoil, the indigenous peoples of Vietnam rose again and some became free. In 192 AD, the Chams of Central Vietnam revolted against the Chinese and subsequently became independent Kingdom of Champa, while the Red River Delta saw loosening Northern control. At that time, with the introduction of Buddhism and Hinduism by the second century AD, Vietnam was the first place in Southeast Asia which shared influences of both Indian and Sino cultures, and the rise of first Indianized kingdoms Champa and Funan.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "During these 1,000 years there were many uprisings against Chinese domination, and at certain periods Vietnam was independently governed under the Trưng Sisters, Early Lý, Khúc and Dương Đình Nghệ—although their triumphs and reigns were temporary.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "When Ngô Quyền (Emperor of Vietnam, 938–944) restored sovereign power in the country with the victory at The battle of Bạch Đằng River (938), the next millennium was advanced by the accomplishments of successive local dynasties: Ngô, Đinh, Early Lê, Lý, Trần, Hồ, Later Trần, Later Lê, Mạc, Revival Lê, Tây Sơn and Nguyễn. Nôm script (Chữ Nôm) of the Vietnamese started to develop and become more sophisticated, with literature being published and written in Nôm. At various points during the imperial dynasties, Vietnam was ravaged and divided by civil wars and witnessed interventions by the Song, Yuan, Cham, Ming, Siamese, Qing, French, and Empire of Japan.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Ming Empire conquered the Red River valley for a while before native Vietnamese regained control and the French Empire reduced Vietnam to a French dependency for nearly a century, followed by brief but brutal occupation by the Japanese Empire. During the French period, widespread brutality, inequality and cultural remnants of Hán-Nôm were being destroyed, with the French wishing to rid the Vietnamese of their Confucian legacy from the 1880s. French was the official language during this period. The Vietnamese Latin script, seen to be a Latin transliteration of Hán-Nôm, superseded the Hán-Nôm logographic scripts and became the main mode of written as well as spoken language since the 20th century.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Japan invaded in 1940, creating deep resentment that fuelled resistance to post-World War II military-political efforts by the returning power of France, and the United States who had viewed themselves as fighters for liberty and democracy against the red waves of communism. In the Vietnam War, the United States or the Western Bloc supported South Vietnam and the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc supported North Vietnam. Political upheaval, a period of intense fighting and war, followed by Communist insurrection and victory further put an end to the monarchy after World War II, and the country was proclaimed a Socialist Republic. Vietnam suffered heavy sanctions as well as political and economic isolation following brutal wars with China and Cambodia in the successive years. Following that era, the Đổi Mới (renovation/innovation) reformations were enacted. The forces of market liberalisation and globalisation has shaped Vietnam's economic and political circumstances since.",
"title": "Medieval"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Russian Empire began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire controlled Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the 16th century onwards. In the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire controlled much of India and initiated the second golden age for India. China was the largest economy in the world for much of the time, followed by India until the 18th century.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "By 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang had claimed himself Hongwu Emperor and established the Ming dynasty of China. Immediately, the new emperor and his followers drove the Mongols and their culture out of China and beyond the Great Wall. The new emperor was somewhat suspicious of the scholars that dominated China's bureaucracy, for he had been born a peasant and was uneducated. Nevertheless, Confucian scholars were necessary to China's bureaucracy and were reestablished as well as reforms that would improve the exam systems and make them more important in entering the bureaucracy than ever before. The exams became more rigorous, cut down harshly on cheating, and those who excelled were more highly appraised. Finally, Hongwu also directed more power towards the role of emperor so as to end the corrupt influences of the bureaucrats.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Hongwu emperor, perhaps for his sympathy of the common-folk, had built many irrigation systems and other public projects that provided help for the peasant farmers. They were also allowed to cultivate and claim unoccupied land without having to pay any taxes and labor demands were lowered. However, none of this was able to stop the rising landlord class that gained many privileges from the government and slowly gained control of the peasantry. Moneylenders foreclosed on peasant debt in exchange for mortgages and bought up farmer land, forcing them to become the landlords' tenants or to wander elsewhere for work. Also during this time, Neo-Confucianism intensified even more than the previous two dynasties (the Song and Yuan). Focus on the superiority of elders over youth, men over women, and teachers over students resulted in minor discrimination of the \"inferior\" classes. The fine arts grew in the Ming era, with improved techniques in brush painting that depicted scenes of court, city or country life; people such as scholars or travelers; or the beauty of mountains, lakes, or marshes. The Chinese novel fully developed in this era, with such classics written such as Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Jin Ping Mei.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Economics grew rapidly in the Ming dynasty as well. The introduction of American crops such as maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts allowed for cultivation of crops in infertile land and helped prevent famine. The population boom that began in the Song dynasty accelerated until China's population went from 80 or 90 million to 150 million in three centuries, culminating in 1600. This paralleled the market economy that was growing both internally and externally. Silk, tea, ceramics, and lacquer-ware were produced by artisans that traded them in Asia and to Europeans. Westerners began to trade (with some Chinese-assigned limits), primarily in the port-towns of Macau and Canton. Although merchants benefited greatly from this, land remained the primary symbol of wealth in China and traders' riches were often put into acquiring more land. Therefore, little of these riches were used in private enterprises that could've allowed for China to develop the market economy that often accompanied the highly-successful Western countries.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In the interest of national glory, the Chinese began sending impressive junk ships across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. From 1403 to 1433, the Yongle Emperor commissioned expeditions led by the admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from China. Chinese junks carrying hundreds of soldiers, goods, and animals for zoos, traveled to Southeast Asia, Persia, southern Arabia, and east Africa to show off Chinese power. Their prowess exceeded that of current Europeans at the time, and had these expeditions not ended, the world economy may be different from today. In 1433, the Chinese government decided that the cost of a navy was an unnecessary expense. The Chinese navy was slowly dismantled and focus on interior reform and military defense began. It was China's longstanding priority that they protect themselves from nomads and they have accordingly returned to it. The growing limits on the Chinese navy would leave them vulnerable to foreign invasion by sea later on.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "As was inevitable, Westerners arrived on the Chinese east coast, primarily Jesuit missionaries which reached the mainland in 1582. They attempted to convert the Chinese people to Christianity by first converting the top of the social hierarchy and allowing the lower classes to subsequently convert. To further gain support, many Jesuits adopted Chinese dress, customs, and language. Some Chinese scholars were interested in certain Western teachings and especially in Western technology. By the 1580s, Jesuit scholars like Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall amazed the Chinese elite with technological advances such as European clocks, improved calendars and cannons, and the accurate prediction of eclipses. Although some the scholar-gentry converted, many were suspicious of the Westerners whom they called \"barbarians\" and even resented them for the embarrassment they received at the hand of Western correction. Nevertheless, a small group of Jesuit scholars remained at the court to impress the emperor and his advisors.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Near the end of the 1500s, the extremely centralized government that gave so much power to the emperor had begun to fail as more incompetent rulers took the mantle. Along with these weak rulers came increasingly corrupt officials who took advantage of the decline. Once more the public projects fell into disrepair due to neglect by the bureaucracy and resulted in floods, drought, and famine that rocked the peasantry. The famine soon became so terrible that some peasants resorted to selling their children to slavery to save them from starvation, or to eating bark, the feces of geese, or other people. Many landlords abused the situation by building large estates where desperate farmers would work and be exploited. In turn, many of these farmers resorted to flight, banditry, and open rebellion.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "All of this corresponded with the usual dynastic decline of China seen before, as well as the growing foreign threats. In the mid-16th century, Japanese and ethnic Chinese pirates began to raid the southern coast, and neither the bureaucracy nor the military were able to stop them. The threat of the northern Manchu people also grew. The Manchu were an already large state north of China, when in the early 17th century a local leader named Nurhaci suddenly united them under the Eight Banners—armies that the opposing families were organized into. The Manchus adopted many Chinese customs, specifically taking after their bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the Manchus still remained a Chinese vassal. In 1644 Chinese administration became so weak, the 16th and last emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, did not respond to the severity of an ensuing rebellion by local dissenters until the enemy had invaded the Forbidden City (his personal estate). He soon hanged himself in the imperial gardens. For a brief amount of time, the Shun dynasty was claimed, until a loyalist Ming official called support from the Manchus to put down the new dynasty. The Shun dynasty ended within a year and the Manchu were now within the Great Wall. Taking advantage of the situation, the Manchus marched on the Chinese capital of Beijing. Within two decades all of China belonged to the Manchu and the Qing dynasty was established.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In early-modern Korea, the 500-year-old kingdom, Goryeo fell and new dynasty Joseon rose in August 5, 1392. Taejo of Joseon changed the country's name from Goryeo to Joseon. Sejong the Great created Hangul, the modern Korean alphabet, in 1443; likewise the Joseon dynasty saw several improvements in science and technology, like Sun Clocks, Water Clocks, Rain-Measuring systems, Star Maps, and detailed records of Korean small villages. The ninth king, Seongjong accomplished the first complete Korean law code in 1485. So the culture and people's lives were improved again.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1592, Japan under Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea. That war is Imjin war. Before that war, Joseon was in a long peace like PAX ROMANA. So Joseon was not ready for the war. Joseon had lost again and again. Japanese army conquered Seoul. The whole Korean peninsula was in danger. But Yi Sun-sin, the most renowned general of Korea, defeated Japanese fleet in southern Korea coast even 13 ships VS 133 ships. This incredible battle is called \"Battle of Myeongnyang\". After that, Ming dynasty helped Joseon, and Japan lost the battle. So Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign in Korea failed, and the Tokugawa Shogunate has later began. Korea was hurt a lot at Imjin war. Not long after, Manchurian people invaded Joseon again. It is called Qing invasion of Joseon. The first invasion was for sake. Because Qing was at war between Ming, so Ming's alliance with Joseon was threatening. And the second invasion was for Joseon to obey Qing. After that, Qing defeated Ming and took the whole Chinese territories. Joseon also had to obey Qing because Joseon lose the second war against Qing.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "After the Qing invasion, the princes of the Joseon dynasty lived their childhood in China. The son of King Injo met Adam Schall in Beijing. So he wanted to introduce western technologies to Korean people when he becomes a king. He died before he could take the throne. After then, the alternative prince became the 17th king of the Joseon dynasty, Hyojong, trying to revenge for his kingdom and fallen Ming dynasty to Qing. Later kings such as Yeongjo and Jeongjo tried to improve their people's lives and stop the governors' unreasonable competition. From the 17th century to the 18th century, Joseon sent diplomats and artists to Japan more than 10 times. This group was called 'Tongshinsa'. They were sent to Japan to teach Japan about advanced Korean culture. Japanese people liked to receive poems from Korean nobles. At that time, Korea was more powerful than Japan. But that relationship between Joseon and Japan was reversed after the 19th century. Because Japan became more powerful than Korea and China, either. So Joseon sent diplomats called 'Sooshinsa' to learn Japanese advanced technologies. After king Jeongjo's death, some noble families controlled the whole kingdom in the early 19th century. At the end of that period, Western people invaded Joseon. In 1876, Joseon was set free from Qing so they did not have to obey Qing. But Japanese Empire was happy because Joseon became a perfect independent kingdom. So Japan could intervene in the kingdom more. After this, Joseon traded with the United States and sent 'Sooshinsa' to Japan, 'Youngshinsa' to Qing, and 'Bobingsa' to the US and Europe. These groups took many modern things to the Korean peninsula.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In early-modern Japan following the Sengoku period of \"warring states\", central government had been largely reestablished by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the Azuchi–Momoyama period. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, central authority fell to Tokugawa Ieyasu who completed this process and received the title of shōgun in 1603.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Society in the Japanese \"Tokugawa period\" (see Edo society), unlike the shogunates before it, was based on the strict class hierarchy originally established by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The daimyōs (feudal lords) were at the top, followed by the warrior-caste of samurai, with the farmers, artisans, and merchants ranking below. The country was strictly closed to foreigners with few exceptions with the Sakoku policy. Literacy rose in the two centuries of isolation.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In some parts of the country, particularly smaller regions, daimyōs and samurai were more or less identical, since daimyōs might be trained as samurai, and samurai might act as local lords. Otherwise, the largely inflexible nature of this social stratification system unleashed disruptive forces over time. Taxes on the peasantry were set at fixed amounts which did not account for inflation or other changes in monetary value. As a result, the tax revenues collected by the samurai landowners were worth less and less over time. This often led to numerous confrontations between noble but impoverished samurai and well-to-do peasants. None, however, proved compelling enough to seriously challenge the established order until the arrival of foreign powers.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In the Indian subcontinent, the Mughal Empire ruled most of India in the early 18th century. During emperor Shah Jahan and his son Aurangzeb's Islamic sharia reigns, the empire reached its architectural and economic zenith, and became the world's largest economy, worth over 25% of world GDP. In the mid-18th century it was a major proto-industrializing region.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Following major events such as the Nader Shah's invasion of the Mughal Empire, Battle of Plassey, Battle of Buxar and the long Anglo-Mysore Wars, most of South Asia was colonised and governed by the British Empire, thus establishing the British Raj. The \"classic period\" ended with the death of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, although the dynasty continued for another 150 years. During this period, the Empire was marked by a highly centralized administration connecting the different regions. All the significant monuments of the Mughals, their most visible legacy, date to this period which was characterised by the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic, and architectural results. The Maratha Empire was located in the south west of present-day India and expanded greatly under the rule of the Peshwas, the prime ministers of the Maratha empire. In 1761, the Maratha army lost the Third Battle of Panipat against Ahmad shah Durrani king of Afghanistan which halted imperial expansion and the empire was then divided into a confederacy of Maratha states.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The European economic and naval powers pushed into Asia, first to do trading, and then to take over major colonies. The Dutch led the way followed by the British. Portugal had arrived first, but was too weak to maintain its small holdings and was largely pushed out, retaining only Goa and Macau. The British set up a private organization, the East India Company, which handled both trade and Imperial control of much of India.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The commercial colonization of India commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal surrendered his dominions to the British East India Company, in 1765, when the company was granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal and Bihar, or in 1772, when the company established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Maratha states, following the Anglo-Maratha wars, eventually lost to the British East India Company in 1818 with the Third Anglo-Maratha War. The rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian rebellion of 1857 and consequent of the Government of India Act 1858, the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj. In 1819 Stamford Raffles established Singapore as a key trading post for Britain in their rivalry with the Dutch. However, their rivalry cooled in 1824 when an Anglo-Dutch treaty demarcated their respective interests in Southeast Asia. From the 1850s onwards, the pace of colonization shifted to a significantly higher gear.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Dutch East India Company (1800) and British East India Company (1858) were dissolved by their respective governments, who took over the direct administration of the colonies. Only Thailand was spared the experience of foreign rule, although, Thailand itself was also greatly affected by the power politics of the Western powers. Colonial rule had a profound effect on Southeast Asia. While the colonial powers profited much from the region's vast resources and large market, colonial rule did develop the region to a varying extent.",
"title": "Early modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Great Game was a political and diplomatic confrontation between Great Britain and Russia over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia. It lasted from 1828 to 1907. There was no war, but there were many threats. Russia was fearful of British commercial and military inroads into Central Asia, and Britain was fearful of Russia threatening its largest and most important possession, India. This resulted in an atmosphere of distrust and the constant threat of war between the two empires. Britain made it a high priority to protect all the approaches to India, and the \"great game\" is primarily how the British did this in terms of a possible Russian threat. Historians with access to the archives have concluded that Russia had no plans involving India, as the Russians repeatedly stated.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The Great Game began in 1838 when Britain decided to gain control over the Emirate of Afghanistan and make it a protectorate, and to use the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Khanate of Khiva, and the Emirate of Bukhara as buffer states between both empires. This would protect India and also key British sea trade routes by stopping Russia from gaining a port on the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. Russia proposed Afghanistan as the neutral zone, and the final result was diving up Afghanistan with a neutral zone in the middle between Russian areas in the north and British in the South. Important episodes included the failed First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838, the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845, the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848, the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878, and the annexation of Kokand by Russia. The 1901 novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling made the term popular and introduced the new implication of great power rivalry. It became even more popular after the 1979 advent of the Soviet–Afghan War.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "By 1644, the northern Manchu people had conquered Ming dynasty and established a foreign dynasty—the Qing dynasty—once more. The Manchu Qing emperors, especially Confucian scholar Kangxi, remained largely conservative—retaining the bureaucracy and the scholars within it, as well as the Confucian ideals present in Chinese society. However, changes in the economy and new attempts at resolving certain issues occurred too. These included increased trade with Western countries that brought large amounts of silver into the Chinese economy in exchange for tea, porcelain, and silk textiles. This allowed for a new merchant-class, the compradors, to develop. In addition, repairs were done on existing dikes, canals, roadways, and irrigation works. This, combined with the lowering of taxes and government-assigned labor, was supposed to calm peasant unrest. However, the Qing failed to control the growing landlord class which had begun to exploit the peasantry and abuse their position.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "By the late 18th century, both internal and external issues began to arise in Qing China's politics, society, and economy. The exam system with which scholars were assigned into the bureaucracy became increasingly corrupt; bribes and other forms of cheating allowed for inexperienced and inept scholars to enter the bureaucracy and this eventually caused rampant neglect of the peasantry, military, and the previously mentioned infrastructure projects. Poverty and banditry steadily rose, especially in rural areas, and mass migrations looking for work throughout China occurred. The perpetually conservative government refused to make reforms that could resolve these issues.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "China saw its status reduced by what it perceived as parasitic trade with Westerners. Originally, European traders were at a disadvantage because the Chinese cared little for their goods, while European demand for Chinese commodities such as tea and porcelain only grew. In order to tip the trade imbalance in their favor, British merchants began to sell Indian opium to the Chinese. Not only did this sap Chinese bullion reserves, it also led to widespread drug addiction amongst the bureaucracy and society in general. A ban was placed on opium as early as 1729 by the Yongzheng Emperor, but little was done to enforce it. By the early 19th century, under the new Daoguang Emperor, the government began serious efforts to eradicate opium from Chinese society. Leading this endeavour were respected scholar-officials including Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "After Lin destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium in the summer of 1839, Europeans demanded compensation for what they saw as unwarranted Chinese interference in their affairs. When it was not paid, the British declared war later the same year, starting what became known as the First Opium War. The outdated Chinese junks were no match for the advanced British gunboats, and soon the Yangzi River region came under threat of British bombardment and invasion. The emperor had no choice but to sue for peace, resulting in the exile of Lin and the making of the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded the British control of Hong Kong and opened up trade and diplomacy with other European countries, including Germany, France, and the USA.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Manchuria/Northeast China came under influence of Russia with the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway through Harbin to Vladivostok. The Empire of Japan replaced Russian influence in the region as a result of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, and Japan laid the South Manchurian Railway in 1906 to Port Arthur. During the Warlord Era in China, Zhang Zuolin established himself in Northeast China, but was murdered by the Japanese for being too independent. The former Chinese emperor, Puyi, was then placed on the throne to lead a Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In August 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the region. From 1945 to 1948, Northeast China was a base area for Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. With the encouragement of the Kremlin, the area was used as a staging ground during the Civil War for the Chinese Communists, who were victorious in 1949 and have controlled ever since.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "When it became the 19th century, the king of Joseon was powerless. Because the noble family of the king's wife got the power and ruled the country by their way. The 26th king of Joseon dynasty, Gojong's father, Heungseon Daewongun wanted the king be powerful again. Even he wasn't the king. As the father of young king, he destroyed noble families and corrupt organizations. So the royal family got the power again. But he wanted to rebuild Gyeongbokgung palace in order to show the royal power to people. So he was criticized by people because he spent enormous money and inflation occurred because of that. So his son, the real king Gojong got power.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "By the Treaty of Shimonoseki article 1 of the first Sino-Japanese war, Korea was independented from China. The 26th king of Joseon, Gojong changed the nation's name to Daehan Jeguk (Korean Empire). And he also promoted himself as an emperor. The new empire accepted more western technology and strengthened military power. And Korean Empire was going to become a neutral nation. Unfortunately, in the Russo-Japanese war, Japan ignored this, and eventually Japan won against Russian Empire, and started to invade Korea. Japan first stole the right of diplomacy from Korean Empire illegally. But every western country ignored this invasion because they knew Japan became a strong country as they defeated Russian Empire. So emperor Gojong sent diplomats to a Dutch city known as The Hague to let everyone know that Japan stole the Empire's right illegally. But it was failed. Because the diplomats couldn't go into the conference room. Japan kicked Gojong off on the grounds that this reason. 3 years after, In 1910, Korean Empire became a part of Empire of Japan. It was the first time ever after invasion of Han dynasty in 108 BC.",
"title": "Late modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The European powers had control of other parts of Asia by the early 20th century, such as British India, French Indochina, Spanish East Indies, and Portuguese Macau and Goa. The Great Game between Russia and Britain was the struggle for power in the Central Asian region in the nineteenth century. The Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing Asia by train, was complete by 1916. Parts of Asia remained free from European control, although not influence, such as Persia, Thailand and most of China. In the twentieth century, Imperial Japan expanded into China and Southeast Asia during World War II. After the war, many Asian countries became independent from European powers. During the Cold War, the northern parts of Asia were communist controlled with the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, while western allies formed pacts such as CENTO and SEATO. Conflicts such as the Korean War, Vietnam War and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were fought between communists and anti-communists. In the decades after the Second World War, a massive restructuring plan drove Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, a phenomenon known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The Arab–Israeli conflict has dominated much of the recent history of the Middle East. After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, there were many new independent nations in Central Asia.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Prior to World War II, China faced a civil war between Mao Zedong's Communist party and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist party; the nationalists appeared to be in the lead. However, once the Japanese invaded in 1937, the two parties were forced to form a temporary cease-fire in order to defend China. The nationalists faced many military failures that caused them to lose territory and subsequently, respect from the Chinese masses. In contrast, the communists' use of guerilla warfare (led by Lin Biao) proved effective against the Japanese's conventional methods and put the Communist Party on top by 1945. They also gained popularity for the reforms they were already applying in controlled areas, including land redistribution, education reforms, and widespread health care. For the next four years, the nationalists would be forced to retreat to the small island east of Fujian province, known as Taiwan (formerly known as Formosa), where they remain today. In mainland China, People's Republic of China was established by the Communist Party, with Mao Zedong as its state chairman.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The communist government in China was defined by the party cadres. These hard-line officers controlled the People's Liberation Army, which itself controlled large amounts of the bureaucracy. This system was further controlled by the Central Committee, which additionally supported the state chairman who was considered the head of the government. The People's Republic's foreign policies included the repressing of secession attempts in Mongolia and Tibet and supporting of North Korea and North Vietnam in the Korean War and Vietnam War, respectively. By 1960 China and the USSR became adversaries, battling worldwide for control of local communist movements.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Today China plays important roles in world economics and politics. China today is the world's second largest economy and the second fastest growing economy.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "From the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century, large regions of India were gradually annexed by the East India Company, a chartered company acting as a sovereign power on behalf of the British government. Dissatisfaction with company rule in India led to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which rocked parts of north and central India, and led to the dissolution of the company. India was afterwards ruled directly by the British Crown, in the British Raj. After World War I, a nationwide struggle for independence was launched by the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, and noted for nonviolence. Later, the All-India Muslim League would advocate for a separate Muslim-majority nation state.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In August 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. In particular, the partition of Punjab and Bengal led to rioting between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in these provinces and spread to other nearby regions, leaving some 500,000 dead. The police and army units were largely ineffective. The British officers were gone, and the units were beginning to tolerate if not actually indulge in violence against their religious enemies. Also, this period saw one of the largest mass migrations anywhere in modern history, with a total of 12 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims moving between the newly created nations of India and Pakistan (which gained independence on 15 and 14 August 1947 respectively). In 1971, Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan and East Bengal, seceded from Pakistan through an armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "During the period when the Korean War occurred, Korea divided into North and South. Syngman Rhee became the first president of South Korea, and Kim Il Sung became the supreme leader of North Korea. After the war, the president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee tries to become a dictator. So the April Revolution occurred, eventually Syngman Rhee was exiled from his country. In 1963, Park Chung Hee was empowered with a military coup d'état. He dispatched Republic of Korea Army to Vietnam War. And during this age, the economy of South Korea outran that of North Korea.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Although Park Chung Hee improved the nation's economy, he was a dictator, so people didn't like him. Eventually, he was murdered by Kim Jae-gyu. In 1979, Chun Doo-hwan was empowered by another coup d’état by military. He oppressed the resistances in the city of Gwangju. That event is called 'Gwangju Uprising'. Despite the Gwangju Uprising, Chun Doo-hwan became the president. But the people resisted again in 1987. This movement is called 'June Struggle'. As a result of Gwangju Uprising and June Struggle, South Korea finally became a democratic republic in 1987.",
"title": "Contemporary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Roh Tae-woo (1988–93), Kim Young-sam (1993–98), Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), Moon Jae-in (2017–) were elected as a president in order after 1987. In 1960, North Korea was far wealthier than South Korea. But in 1970, South Korea begins to outrun the North Korean economy. In 2018, South Korea is ranked #10 in world GDP ranking.",
"title": "Contemporary"
}
]
| The history of Asia can be seen as the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe. See History of the Middle East and History of the Indian Subcontinent for further details on those regions. The coastal periphery was the home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations and religions, with each of three regions developing early civilizations around fertile river valleys. These valleys were fertile because the soil there was rich and could bear many root crops. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient China shared many similarities and likely exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other notions such as that of writing likely developed individually in each area. Cities, states, and then empires developed in these lowlands. The steppe region had long been inhabited by mounted nomads, and from the central steppes, they could reach all areas of the Asian continent. The northern part of the continent, covering much of Siberia was also inaccessible to the steppe nomads due to the dense forests and the tundra. These areas in Siberia were very sparsely populated. The centre and periphery were kept separate by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus, Himalaya, Karakum Desert, and Gobi Desert formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could only cross with difficulty. While technologically and culturally the city dwellers were more advanced, they could do little militarily to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force. Thus the nomads who conquered states in the Middle East were soon forced to adapt to the local societies. The spread of Islam waved the Islamic Golden Age and the Timurid Renaissance, which later influenced the age of Islamic gunpowder empires. Asia's history features major developments seen in other parts of the world, as well as events that have affected those other regions. These include the trade of the Silk Road, which spread cultures, languages, religions, and diseases throughout Afro-Eurasian trade. Another major advancement was the innovation of gunpowder in medieval China, later developed by the Gunpowder empires, mainly by the Mughals and Safavids, which led to advanced warfare through the use of guns. | 2001-11-07T20:30:57Z | 2023-12-31T23:50:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Asia |
14,098 | History of the Americas | The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the "Old World" until the coming of Europeans in the 10th century from Iceland led by Leif Erikson, and in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
The ancestors of today's American Indigenous peoples were the Paleo-Indians; they were hunter-gatherers who migrated into North America. The most popular theory asserts that migrants came to the Americas via Beringia, the land mass now covered by the ocean waters of the Bering Strait. Small lithic stage peoples followed megafauna like bison, mammoth (now extinct), and caribou, thus gaining the modern nickname "big-game hunters." Groups of people may also have traveled into North America on shelf or sheet ice along the northern Pacific coast.
Sedentary societies developed primarily in two regions: Mesoamerica and the Andean civilizations. Mesoamerican cultures include Zapotec, Toltec, Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Mixtec, Totonac, Teotihuacan, Huastec people, Purépecha, Izapa and Mazatec. Andean cultures include Inca, Caral-Supe, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimor, Moche, Muisca, Chavin, Paracas and Nazca.
After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Spanish and later Portuguese, English, French and Dutch colonial expeditions arrived in the New World, conquering and settling the discovered lands, which led to a transformation of the cultural and physical landscape in the Americas. Spain colonized most of the Americas from present-day Southwestern United States, Florida and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Portugal settled in what is mostly present-day Brazil while England established colonies on the Eastern coast of the United States, as well as the North Pacific coast and in most of Canada. France settled in Quebec and other parts of Eastern Canada and claimed an area in what is today the central United States. The Netherlands settled New Netherland (administrative centre New Amsterdam – now New York), some Caribbean islands and parts of Northern South America.
European colonization of the Americas led to the rise of new cultures, civilizations and eventually states, which resulted from the fusion of Native American, European, and African traditions, peoples and institutions. The transformation of American cultures through colonization is evident in architecture, religion, gastronomy, the arts and particularly languages, the most widespread being Spanish (376 million speakers), English (348 million) and Portuguese (201 million). The colonial period lasted approximately three centuries, from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries, when Brazil and the larger Hispanic American nations declared independence. The United States obtained independence from Great Britain much earlier, in 1776, while Canada formed a federal dominion in 1867 and received legal independence in 1931. Others remained attached to their European parent state until the end of the 19th century, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico which were linked to Spain until 1898. Smaller territories such as Guyana obtained independence in the mid-20th century, while certain Caribbean islands and French Guiana remain part of a European power to this day.
The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the exact dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion. The traditional theory has been that these early migrants moved into the Beringia land bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska around 40,000 – 17,000 years ago, when sea levels were significantly lowered due to the Quaternary glaciation. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific Northwest coast to South America. Evidence of the latter would since have been covered by a sea level rise of a hundred meters following the last ice age.
Archaeologists contend that the Paleo-Indian migration out of Beringia (eastern Alaska), ranges from 40,000 to around 16,500 years ago. This time range is a hot source of debate. The few agreements achieved to date are the origin from Central Asia, with widespread habitation of the Americas during the end of the last glacial period, or more specifically what is known as the late glacial maximum, around 16,000 – 13,000 years before present.
The American Journal of Human Genetics released an article in 2007 stating "Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Indigenous American haplogroups, including Haplogroup X (mtDNA), were part of a single founding population." Amerindian groups in the Bering Strait region exhibit perhaps the strongest DNA or mitochondrial DNA relations to Siberian peoples. The genetic diversity of Amerindian indigenous groups increase with distance from the assumed entry point into the Americas. Certain genetic diversity patterns from West to East suggest, particularly in South America, that migration proceeded first down the west coast, and then proceeded eastward. Geneticists have variously estimated that peoples of Asia and the Americas were part of the same population from 42,000 to 21,000 years ago.
New studies shed light on the founding population of indigenous Americans, suggesting that their ancestry traced to both east Asian and western Eurasians who migrated to North America directly from Siberia. A 2013 study in the journal Nature reported that DNA found in the 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy in Mal’ta Siberia suggest that up to one-third of the indigenous Americans may have ancestry that can be traced back to western Eurasians, who may have "had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought" Professor Kelly Graf said that "Our findings are significant at two levels. First, it shows that Upper Paleolithic Siberians came from a cosmopolitan population of early modern humans that spread out of Africa to Europe and Central and South Asia. Second, Paleoindian skeletons with phenotypic traits atypical of modern-day Native Americans can be explained as having a direct historical connection to Upper Paleolithic Siberia." A route through Beringia is seen as more likely than the Solutrean hypothesis.
On October 3, 2014, the Oregon cave where the oldest DNA evidence of human habitation in North America was found was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The DNA, radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago, was found in fossilized human coprolites uncovered in the Paisley Five Mile Point Caves in south central Oregon.
The Lithic stage or Paleo-Indian period, is the earliest classification term referring to the first stage of human habitation in the Americas, covering the Late Pleistocene epoch. The time period derives its name from the appearance of "Lithic flaked" stone tools. Stone tools, particularly projectile points and scrapers, are the primary evidence of the earliest well known human activity in the Americas. Lithic reduction stone tools are used by archaeologists and anthropologists to classify cultural periods.
Several thousand years after the first migrations, the first complex civilizations arose as hunter-gatherers settled into semi-agricultural communities. Identifiable sedentary settlements began to emerge in the so-called Middle Archaic period around 6000 BCE. Particular archaeological cultures can be identified and easily classified throughout the Archaic period.
In the late Archaic, on the north-central coastal region of Peru, a complex civilization arose which has been termed the Norte Chico civilization, also known as Caral-Supe. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas and one of the six sites where civilization originated independently and indigenously in the ancient world, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. It pre-dated the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization by nearly two millennia. It was contemporaneous with the Egypt following the unification of its kingdom under Narmer and the emergence of the first Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Monumental architecture, including earthwork platform mounds and sunken plazas have been identified as part of the civilization. Archaeological evidence points to the use of textile technology and the worship of common god symbols. Government, possibly in the form of theocracy, is assumed to have been required to manage the region. However, numerous questions remain about its organization. In archaeological nomenclature, the culture was pre-ceramic culture of the pre-Columbian Late Archaic period. It appears to have lacked ceramics and art.
Ongoing scholarly debate persists over the extent to which the flourishing of Norte Chico resulted from its abundant maritime food resources, and the relationship that these resources would suggest between coastal and inland sites. The role of seafood in the Norte Chico diet has been a subject of scholarly debate. In 1973, examining the Aspero region of Norte Chico, Michael E. Moseley contended that a maritime subsistence (seafood) economy had been the basis of society and its early flourishing. This theory, later termed "maritime foundation of Andean Civilization" was at odds with the general scholarly consensus that civilization arose as a result of intensive grain-based agriculture, as had been the case in the emergence of civilizations in northeast Africa (Egypt) and southwest Asia (Mesopotamia).
While earlier research pointed to edible domestic plants such as squash, beans, lucuma, guava, pacay, and camote at Caral, publications by Haas and colleagues have added avocado, achira, and maize (Zea Mays) to the list of foods consumed in the region. In 2013, Haas and colleagues reported that maize was a primary component of the diet throughout the period of 3000 to 1800 BC. Cotton was another widespread crop in Norte Chico, essential to the production of fishing nets and textiles. Jonathan Haas noted a mutual dependency, whereby "The prehistoric residents of the Norte Chico needed the fish resources for their protein and the fishermen needed the cotton to make the nets to catch the fish."
In the 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, journalist Charles C. Mann surveyed the literature at the time, reporting a date "sometime before 3200 BC, and possibly before 3500 BC" as the beginning date for the formation of Norte Chico. He notes that the earliest date securely associated with a city is 3500 BC, at Huaricanga in the (inland) Fortaleza area. The Norte Chico civilization began to decline around 1800 BC as more powerful centers appeared to the south and north along its coast, and to the east within the Andes Mountains.
After the decline of the Norte Chico civilization, numerous complex civilizations and centralized polities developed in the Western Hemisphere: The Chavin, Nazca, Moche, Huari, Quitus, Cañaris, Chimu, Pachacamac, Tiahuanaco, Aymara and Inca in the Andes; the Muisca, Tairona, Miskito, Huetar, and Talamanca in the Intermediate Area; the Taínos in the Caribbean; and the Olmecs, Maya, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, Purepecha and Nicoya in Mesoamerica.
The Olmec civilization was the first Mesoamerican civilization, beginning around 1600–1400 BC and ending around 400 BC. Mesoamerica is considered one of the six sites around the globe in which civilization developed independently and indigenously. This civilization is considered the mother culture of the Mesoamerican civilizations. The Mesoamerican calendar, numeral system, writing, and much of the Mesoamerican pantheon seem to have begun with the Olmec.
Some elements of agriculture seem to have been practiced in Mesoamerica quite early. The domestication of maize is thought to have begun around 7,500 to 12,000 years ago. The earliest record of lowland maize cultivation dates to around 5100 BC. Agriculture continued to be mixed with a hunting-gathering-fishing lifestyle until quite late compared to other regions, but by 2700 BC, Mesoamericans were relying on maize, and living mostly in villages. Temple mounds and classes started to appear. By 1300/ 1200 BC, small centres coalesced into the Olmec civilization, which seems to have been a set of city-states, united in religious and commercial concerns. The Olmec cities had ceremonial complexes with earth/clay pyramids, palaces, stone monuments, aqueducts and walled plazas. The first of these centers was at San Lorenzo (until 900 bc). La Venta was the last great Olmec centre. Olmec artisans sculpted jade and clay figurines of Jaguars and humans. Their iconic giant heads – believed to be of Olmec rulers – stood in every major city.
The Olmec civilization ended in 400 BC, with the defacing and destruction of San Lorenzo and La Venta, two of the major cities. It nevertheless spawned many other states, most notably the Mayan civilization, whose first cities began appearing around 700–600 BC. Olmec influences continued to appear in many later Mesoamerican civilizations.
Cities of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were as large and organized as the largest in the Old World, with an estimated population of 200,000 to 350,000 in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. The market established in the city was said to have been the largest ever seen by the conquistadors when they arrived. The capital of the Cahokians, Cahokia, located near modern East St. Louis, Illinois, may have reached a population of over 20,000. At its peak, between the 12th and 13th centuries, Cahokia may have been the most populous city in North America. Monk's Mound, the major ceremonial center of Cahokia, remains the largest earthen construction of the prehistoric New World.
These civilizations developed agriculture as well, breeding maize (corn) from having ears 2–5 cm in length to perhaps 10–15 cm in length. Potatoes, tomatoes, beans (greens), pumpkins, avocados, and chocolate are now the most popular of the pre-Columbian agricultural products. The civilizations did not develop extensive livestock as there were few suitable species, although alpacas and llamas were domesticated for use as beasts of burden and sources of wool and meat in the Andes. By the 15th century, maize was being farmed in the Mississippi River Valley after introduction from Mexico. The course of further agricultural development was greatly altered by the arrival of Europeans.
Cahokia was a major regional chiefdom, with trade and tributary chiefdoms located in a range of areas from bordering the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House", based in present-day upstate and western New York, had a confederacy model from the mid-15th century. It has been suggested that their culture contributed to political thinking during the development of the later United States government. Their system of affiliation was a kind of federation, different from the strong, centralized European monarchies.
Leadership was restricted to a group of 50 sachem chiefs, each representing one clan within a tribe; the Oneida and Mohawk people had nine seats each; the Onondagas held fourteen; the Cayuga had ten seats; and the Seneca had eight. Representation was not based on population numbers, as the Seneca tribe greatly outnumbered the others. When a sachem chief died, his successor was chosen by the senior woman of his tribe in consultation with other female members of the clan; property and hereditary leadership were passed matrilineally. Decisions were not made through voting but through consensus decision making, with each sachem chief holding theoretical veto power. The Onondaga were the "firekeepers", responsible for raising topics to be discussed. They occupied one side of a three-sided fire (the Mohawk and Seneca sat on one side of the fire, the Oneida and Cayuga sat on the third side.)
Long-distance trading did not prevent warfare and displacement among the indigenous peoples, and their oral histories tell of numerous migrations to the historic territories where Europeans encountered them. The Iroquois invaded and attacked tribes in the Ohio River area of present-day Kentucky and claimed the hunting grounds. Historians have placed these events as occurring as early as the 13th century, or in the 17th century Beaver Wars.
Through warfare, the Iroquois drove several tribes to migrate west to what became known as their historically traditional lands west of the Mississippi River. Tribes originating in the Ohio Valley who moved west included the Osage, Kaw, Ponca and Omaha people. By the mid-17th century, they had resettled in their historical lands in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Oklahoma. The Osage warred with Caddo-speaking Native Americans, displacing them in turn by the mid-18th century and dominating their new historical territories.
The Pueblo people of what is now occupied by the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico, living conditions were that of large stone apartment like adobe structures. They live in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and possibly surrounding areas.
Chichimeca was the name that the Mexica (Aztecs) generically applied to a wide range of semi-nomadic peoples who inhabited the north of modern-day Mexico, and carried the same sense as the European term "barbarian". The name was adopted with a pejorative tone by the Spaniards when referring especially to the semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples of northern Mexico.
The Olmec civilization emerged around 1200 BCE in Mesoamerica and ended around 400 BCE. Olmec art and concepts influenced surrounding cultures after their downfall. This civilization was thought to be the first in America to develop a writing system. After the Olmecs abandoned their cities for unknown reasons, the Maya, Zapotec and Teotihuacan arose.
The Purepecha civilization emerged around 1000 CE in Mesoamerica. They flourished from 1100 CE to 1530 CE. They continue to live on in the state of Michoacán. Fierce warriors, they were never conquered and in their glory years, successfully sealed off huge areas from Aztec domination.
Maya history spans 3,000 years. The Classic Maya may have collapsed due to changing climate in the end of the 10th century.
The Toltec were a nomadic people, dating from the 10th–12th century, whose language was also spoken by the Aztecs.
Teotihuacan (4th century BCE – 7/8th century CE) was both a city, and an empire of the same name, which, at its zenith between 150 and the 5th century, covered most of Mesoamerica.
The Aztec having started to build their empire around 14th century found their civilization abruptly ended by the Spanish conquistadors. They lived in Mesoamerica, and surrounding lands. Their capital city Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities of all time.
The oldest known civilization of the Americas was established in the Norte Chico region of modern Peru. Complex society emerged in the group of coastal valleys, between 3000 and 1800 BCE. The Quipu, a distinctive recording device among Andean civilizations, apparently dates from the era of Norte Chico's prominence.
The Chavín established a trade network and developed agriculture by as early as (or late compared to the Old World) 900 BCE according to some estimates and archaeological finds. Artifacts were found at a site called Chavín in modern Peru at an elevation of 3,177 meters. Chavín civilization spanned from 900 BCE to 300 BCE.
Holding their capital at the great city of Cusco, the Inca civilization dominated the Andes region from 1438 to 1533. Known as Tawantinsuyu, or "the land of the four regions", in Quechua, the Inca culture was highly distinct and developed. Cities were built with precise, unmatched stonework, constructed over many levels of mountain terrain. Terrace farming was a useful form of agriculture. There is evidence of excellent metalwork and even successful trepanation of the skull in Inca civilization.
Around 1000, the Vikings established a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, now known as L'Anse aux Meadows. Speculations exist about other Old World discoveries of the New World, but none of these are generally or completely accepted by most scholars.
Spain sponsored a major exploration led by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492; it quickly led to extensive European colonization of the Americas. The Europeans brought Old World diseases which are thought to have caused catastrophic epidemics and a huge decrease of the native population. Columbus came at a time in which many technical developments in sailing techniques and communication made it possible to report his voyages easily and to spread word of them throughout Europe. It was also a time of growing religious, imperial and economic rivalries that led to a competition for the establishment of colonies.
15th to 19th century colonies in the New World:
The formation of sovereign states in the New World began with the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776. The American Revolutionary War lasted through the period of the Siege of Yorktown—its last major campaign—in the early autumn of 1781, with peace being achieved in 1783. In 1804, after the French of Napoleon Bonaparte were defeated during the Haitian Revolution under the black leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines declare the colony of Saint-Domingue independence of the Haitian Declaration of Independence as he renamed the country Ayiti meaning (Land of Mountains), Haiti became the world's first black-led republic in the New World, the first Caribbean state as well as the first Latin American country and the second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United States to win independence from Britain in 1783.
The Spanish colonies won their independence in the first quarter of the 19th century, in the Spanish American wars of independence. Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, among others, led their independence struggle. Although Bolivar attempted to keep the Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America politically allied, they rapidly became independent of one another as well, and several further wars were fought, such as the Paraguayan War and the War of the Pacific. (See Latin American integration.) In the Portuguese colony Dom Pedro I (also Pedro IV of Portugal), son of the Portuguese king Dom João VI, proclaimed the country's independence in 1822 and became Brazil's first Emperor. This was peacefully accepted by the crown in Portugal, upon compensation.
Slavery has had a significant role in the economic development of the New World after the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. The cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane harvested by slaves became important exports for the United States and the Caribbean countries.
As a part of the British Empire, Canada immediately entered World War I when it broke out in 1914. Canada bore the brunt of several major battles during the early stages of the war, including the use of poison gas attacks at Ypres. Losses became grave, and the government eventually brought in conscription, despite the fact this was against the wishes of the majority of French Canadians. In the ensuing Conscription Crisis of 1917, riots broke out on the streets of Montreal. In neighboring Newfoundland, the new dominion suffered a devastating loss on July 1, 1916, the First day on the Somme.
The United States stayed out of the conflict until 1917, when it joined the Entente powers. The United States was then able to play a crucial role at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that shaped interwar Europe. Mexico was not part of the war, as the country was embroiled in the Mexican Revolution at the time.
The 1920s brought an age of great prosperity in the United States, and to a lesser degree Canada. But the Wall Street Crash of 1929 combined with drought ushered in a period of economic hardship in the United States and Canada. From 1936 to 1949, there was a popular uprising against the anti-Catholic Mexican government of the time, set off specifically by the anti-clerical provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917.
Once again, Canada found itself at war before its neighbors, with numerically modest but significant contributions overseas such as the Battle of Hong Kong and the Battle of Britain. The entry of the United States into the war helped to tip the balance in favour of the allies. Two Mexican tankers, transporting oil to the United States, were attacked and sunk by the Germans in the Gulf of Mexico waters, in 1942. The incident happened in spite of Mexico's neutrality at that time. This led Mexico to enter the conflict with a declaration of war on the Axis nations. The destruction of Europe wrought by the war vaulted all North American countries to more important roles in world affairs, especially the United States, which emerged as a "superpower".
The early Cold War era saw the United States as the most powerful nation in a Western coalition of which Mexico and Canada were also a part. In Canada, Quebec was transformed by the Quiet Revolution and the emergence of Quebec nationalism. Mexico experienced an era of huge economic growth after World War II, a heavy industrialization process and a growth of its middle class, a period known in Mexican history as "El Milagro Mexicano" (the Mexican miracle). The Caribbean saw the beginnings of decolonization, while on the largest island the Cuban Revolution introduced Cold War rivalries into Latin America.
The civil rights movement in the U.S. ended Jim Crow and empowered black voters in the 1960s, which allowed black citizens to move into high government offices for the first time since Reconstruction. However, the dominant New Deal coalition collapsed in the mid 1960s in disputes over race and the Vietnam War, and the conservative movement began its rise to power, as the once dominant liberalism weakened and collapsed. Canada during this era was dominated by the leadership of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In 1982, at the end of his tenure, Canada enshrined a new constitution.
Canada's Brian Mulroney not only ran on a similar platform but also favored closer trade ties with the United States. This led to the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in January 1989. Mexican presidents Miguel de la Madrid, in the early 1980s and Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the late 1980s, started implementing liberal economic strategies that were seen as a good move. However, Mexico experienced a strong economic recession in 1982 and the Mexican peso suffered a devaluation. In the United States president Ronald Reagan attempted to move the United States back towards a hard anti-communist line in foreign affairs, in what his supporters saw as an attempt to assert moral leadership (compared to the Soviet Union) in the world community. Domestically, Reagan attempted to bring in a package of privatization and regulation to stimulate the economy.
The end of the Cold War and the beginning of the era of sustained economic expansion coincided during the 1990s. On January 1, 1994, Canada, Mexico and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, creating the world's largest free trade area. In 2000, Vicente Fox became the first non-PRI candidate to win the Mexican presidency in over 70 years. The optimism of the 1990s was shattered by the 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the United States, which prompted military intervention in Afghanistan, which also involved Canada. Canada did not support the United States' later move to invade Iraq, however.
In the U.S. the Reagan Era of conservative national policies, deregulation and tax cuts took control with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. By 2010, political scientists were debating whether the election of Barack Obama in 2008 represented an end of the Reagan Era, or was only a reaction against the bubble economy of the 2000s (decade), which burst in 2008 and became the Late-2000s recession with prolonged unemployment.
Despite the failure of a lasting political union, the concept of Central American reunification, though lacking enthusiasm from the leaders of the individual countries, rises from time to time. In 1856–1857 the region successfully established a military coalition to repel an invasion by United States adventurer William Walker. Today, all five nations fly flags that retain the old federal motif of two outer blue bands bounding an inner white stripe. (Costa Rica, traditionally the least committed of the five to regional integration, modified its flag significantly in 1848 by darkening the blue and adding a double-wide inner red band, in honor of the French tricolor).
In 1907, a Central American Court of Justice was created. On December 13, 1960, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua established the Central American Common Market ("CACM"). Costa Rica, because of its relative economic prosperity and political stability, chose not to participate in the CACM. The goals for the CACM were to create greater political unification and success of import substitution industrialization policies. The project was an immediate economic success, but was abandoned after the 1969 "Football War" between El Salvador and Honduras. A Central American Parliament has operated, as a purely advisory body, since 1991. Costa Rica has repeatedly declined invitations to join the regional parliament, which seats deputies from the four other former members of the Union, as well as from Panama and the Dominican Republic.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were overthrown or displaced by U.S.-aligned military dictatorships. These dictatorships detained tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of whom were tortured and/or killed (on inter-state collaboration, see Operation Condor). Economically, they began a transition to neoliberal economic policies. They placed their own actions within the United States Cold War doctrine of "National Security" against internal subversion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Peru suffered from an internal conflict (see Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and Shining Path). Revolutionary movements and right-wing military dictatorships have been common, but starting in the 1980s a wave of democratization came through the continent, and democratic rule is widespread now. Allegations of corruption remain common, and several nations have seen crises which have forced the resignation of their presidents, although normal civilian succession has continued.
International indebtedness became a notable problem, as most recently illustrated by Argentina's default in the early 21st century. In recent years, South American governments have drifted to the left, with socialist leaders being elected in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and a leftist president in Argentina and Uruguay. Despite the move to the left, South America is still largely capitalist. With the founding of the Union of South American Nations, South America has started down the road of economic integration, with plans for political integration in the European Union style.
Throughout the 20th century, several island countries, such as Jamaica and Barbados gained independence from British rule. As a result, many of the English-speaking states and territories shifted their economies to tourism and offshore bank industries.
During the Cold War, the Caribbean has faced a series of military interventions from the United States, such as the Banana Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the \"Old World\" until the coming of Europeans in the 10th century from Iceland led by Leif Erikson, and in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The ancestors of today's American Indigenous peoples were the Paleo-Indians; they were hunter-gatherers who migrated into North America. The most popular theory asserts that migrants came to the Americas via Beringia, the land mass now covered by the ocean waters of the Bering Strait. Small lithic stage peoples followed megafauna like bison, mammoth (now extinct), and caribou, thus gaining the modern nickname \"big-game hunters.\" Groups of people may also have traveled into North America on shelf or sheet ice along the northern Pacific coast.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Sedentary societies developed primarily in two regions: Mesoamerica and the Andean civilizations. Mesoamerican cultures include Zapotec, Toltec, Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Mixtec, Totonac, Teotihuacan, Huastec people, Purépecha, Izapa and Mazatec. Andean cultures include Inca, Caral-Supe, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimor, Moche, Muisca, Chavin, Paracas and Nazca.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Spanish and later Portuguese, English, French and Dutch colonial expeditions arrived in the New World, conquering and settling the discovered lands, which led to a transformation of the cultural and physical landscape in the Americas. Spain colonized most of the Americas from present-day Southwestern United States, Florida and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Portugal settled in what is mostly present-day Brazil while England established colonies on the Eastern coast of the United States, as well as the North Pacific coast and in most of Canada. France settled in Quebec and other parts of Eastern Canada and claimed an area in what is today the central United States. The Netherlands settled New Netherland (administrative centre New Amsterdam – now New York), some Caribbean islands and parts of Northern South America.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "European colonization of the Americas led to the rise of new cultures, civilizations and eventually states, which resulted from the fusion of Native American, European, and African traditions, peoples and institutions. The transformation of American cultures through colonization is evident in architecture, religion, gastronomy, the arts and particularly languages, the most widespread being Spanish (376 million speakers), English (348 million) and Portuguese (201 million). The colonial period lasted approximately three centuries, from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries, when Brazil and the larger Hispanic American nations declared independence. The United States obtained independence from Great Britain much earlier, in 1776, while Canada formed a federal dominion in 1867 and received legal independence in 1931. Others remained attached to their European parent state until the end of the 19th century, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico which were linked to Spain until 1898. Smaller territories such as Guyana obtained independence in the mid-20th century, while certain Caribbean islands and French Guiana remain part of a European power to this day.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the exact dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion. The traditional theory has been that these early migrants moved into the Beringia land bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska around 40,000 – 17,000 years ago, when sea levels were significantly lowered due to the Quaternary glaciation. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific Northwest coast to South America. Evidence of the latter would since have been covered by a sea level rise of a hundred meters following the last ice age.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Archaeologists contend that the Paleo-Indian migration out of Beringia (eastern Alaska), ranges from 40,000 to around 16,500 years ago. This time range is a hot source of debate. The few agreements achieved to date are the origin from Central Asia, with widespread habitation of the Americas during the end of the last glacial period, or more specifically what is known as the late glacial maximum, around 16,000 – 13,000 years before present.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The American Journal of Human Genetics released an article in 2007 stating \"Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Indigenous American haplogroups, including Haplogroup X (mtDNA), were part of a single founding population.\" Amerindian groups in the Bering Strait region exhibit perhaps the strongest DNA or mitochondrial DNA relations to Siberian peoples. The genetic diversity of Amerindian indigenous groups increase with distance from the assumed entry point into the Americas. Certain genetic diversity patterns from West to East suggest, particularly in South America, that migration proceeded first down the west coast, and then proceeded eastward. Geneticists have variously estimated that peoples of Asia and the Americas were part of the same population from 42,000 to 21,000 years ago.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "New studies shed light on the founding population of indigenous Americans, suggesting that their ancestry traced to both east Asian and western Eurasians who migrated to North America directly from Siberia. A 2013 study in the journal Nature reported that DNA found in the 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy in Mal’ta Siberia suggest that up to one-third of the indigenous Americans may have ancestry that can be traced back to western Eurasians, who may have \"had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought\" Professor Kelly Graf said that \"Our findings are significant at two levels. First, it shows that Upper Paleolithic Siberians came from a cosmopolitan population of early modern humans that spread out of Africa to Europe and Central and South Asia. Second, Paleoindian skeletons with phenotypic traits atypical of modern-day Native Americans can be explained as having a direct historical connection to Upper Paleolithic Siberia.\" A route through Beringia is seen as more likely than the Solutrean hypothesis.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On October 3, 2014, the Oregon cave where the oldest DNA evidence of human habitation in North America was found was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The DNA, radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago, was found in fossilized human coprolites uncovered in the Paisley Five Mile Point Caves in south central Oregon.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Lithic stage or Paleo-Indian period, is the earliest classification term referring to the first stage of human habitation in the Americas, covering the Late Pleistocene epoch. The time period derives its name from the appearance of \"Lithic flaked\" stone tools. Stone tools, particularly projectile points and scrapers, are the primary evidence of the earliest well known human activity in the Americas. Lithic reduction stone tools are used by archaeologists and anthropologists to classify cultural periods.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Several thousand years after the first migrations, the first complex civilizations arose as hunter-gatherers settled into semi-agricultural communities. Identifiable sedentary settlements began to emerge in the so-called Middle Archaic period around 6000 BCE. Particular archaeological cultures can be identified and easily classified throughout the Archaic period.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the late Archaic, on the north-central coastal region of Peru, a complex civilization arose which has been termed the Norte Chico civilization, also known as Caral-Supe. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas and one of the six sites where civilization originated independently and indigenously in the ancient world, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. It pre-dated the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization by nearly two millennia. It was contemporaneous with the Egypt following the unification of its kingdom under Narmer and the emergence of the first Egyptian hieroglyphics.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Monumental architecture, including earthwork platform mounds and sunken plazas have been identified as part of the civilization. Archaeological evidence points to the use of textile technology and the worship of common god symbols. Government, possibly in the form of theocracy, is assumed to have been required to manage the region. However, numerous questions remain about its organization. In archaeological nomenclature, the culture was pre-ceramic culture of the pre-Columbian Late Archaic period. It appears to have lacked ceramics and art.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ongoing scholarly debate persists over the extent to which the flourishing of Norte Chico resulted from its abundant maritime food resources, and the relationship that these resources would suggest between coastal and inland sites. The role of seafood in the Norte Chico diet has been a subject of scholarly debate. In 1973, examining the Aspero region of Norte Chico, Michael E. Moseley contended that a maritime subsistence (seafood) economy had been the basis of society and its early flourishing. This theory, later termed \"maritime foundation of Andean Civilization\" was at odds with the general scholarly consensus that civilization arose as a result of intensive grain-based agriculture, as had been the case in the emergence of civilizations in northeast Africa (Egypt) and southwest Asia (Mesopotamia).",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "While earlier research pointed to edible domestic plants such as squash, beans, lucuma, guava, pacay, and camote at Caral, publications by Haas and colleagues have added avocado, achira, and maize (Zea Mays) to the list of foods consumed in the region. In 2013, Haas and colleagues reported that maize was a primary component of the diet throughout the period of 3000 to 1800 BC. Cotton was another widespread crop in Norte Chico, essential to the production of fishing nets and textiles. Jonathan Haas noted a mutual dependency, whereby \"The prehistoric residents of the Norte Chico needed the fish resources for their protein and the fishermen needed the cotton to make the nets to catch the fish.\"",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, journalist Charles C. Mann surveyed the literature at the time, reporting a date \"sometime before 3200 BC, and possibly before 3500 BC\" as the beginning date for the formation of Norte Chico. He notes that the earliest date securely associated with a city is 3500 BC, at Huaricanga in the (inland) Fortaleza area. The Norte Chico civilization began to decline around 1800 BC as more powerful centers appeared to the south and north along its coast, and to the east within the Andes Mountains.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "After the decline of the Norte Chico civilization, numerous complex civilizations and centralized polities developed in the Western Hemisphere: The Chavin, Nazca, Moche, Huari, Quitus, Cañaris, Chimu, Pachacamac, Tiahuanaco, Aymara and Inca in the Andes; the Muisca, Tairona, Miskito, Huetar, and Talamanca in the Intermediate Area; the Taínos in the Caribbean; and the Olmecs, Maya, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, Purepecha and Nicoya in Mesoamerica.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Olmec civilization was the first Mesoamerican civilization, beginning around 1600–1400 BC and ending around 400 BC. Mesoamerica is considered one of the six sites around the globe in which civilization developed independently and indigenously. This civilization is considered the mother culture of the Mesoamerican civilizations. The Mesoamerican calendar, numeral system, writing, and much of the Mesoamerican pantheon seem to have begun with the Olmec.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Some elements of agriculture seem to have been practiced in Mesoamerica quite early. The domestication of maize is thought to have begun around 7,500 to 12,000 years ago. The earliest record of lowland maize cultivation dates to around 5100 BC. Agriculture continued to be mixed with a hunting-gathering-fishing lifestyle until quite late compared to other regions, but by 2700 BC, Mesoamericans were relying on maize, and living mostly in villages. Temple mounds and classes started to appear. By 1300/ 1200 BC, small centres coalesced into the Olmec civilization, which seems to have been a set of city-states, united in religious and commercial concerns. The Olmec cities had ceremonial complexes with earth/clay pyramids, palaces, stone monuments, aqueducts and walled plazas. The first of these centers was at San Lorenzo (until 900 bc). La Venta was the last great Olmec centre. Olmec artisans sculpted jade and clay figurines of Jaguars and humans. Their iconic giant heads – believed to be of Olmec rulers – stood in every major city.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Olmec civilization ended in 400 BC, with the defacing and destruction of San Lorenzo and La Venta, two of the major cities. It nevertheless spawned many other states, most notably the Mayan civilization, whose first cities began appearing around 700–600 BC. Olmec influences continued to appear in many later Mesoamerican civilizations.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Cities of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were as large and organized as the largest in the Old World, with an estimated population of 200,000 to 350,000 in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. The market established in the city was said to have been the largest ever seen by the conquistadors when they arrived. The capital of the Cahokians, Cahokia, located near modern East St. Louis, Illinois, may have reached a population of over 20,000. At its peak, between the 12th and 13th centuries, Cahokia may have been the most populous city in North America. Monk's Mound, the major ceremonial center of Cahokia, remains the largest earthen construction of the prehistoric New World.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "These civilizations developed agriculture as well, breeding maize (corn) from having ears 2–5 cm in length to perhaps 10–15 cm in length. Potatoes, tomatoes, beans (greens), pumpkins, avocados, and chocolate are now the most popular of the pre-Columbian agricultural products. The civilizations did not develop extensive livestock as there were few suitable species, although alpacas and llamas were domesticated for use as beasts of burden and sources of wool and meat in the Andes. By the 15th century, maize was being farmed in the Mississippi River Valley after introduction from Mexico. The course of further agricultural development was greatly altered by the arrival of Europeans.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Cahokia was a major regional chiefdom, with trade and tributary chiefdoms located in a range of areas from bordering the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Iroquois League of Nations or \"People of the Long House\", based in present-day upstate and western New York, had a confederacy model from the mid-15th century. It has been suggested that their culture contributed to political thinking during the development of the later United States government. Their system of affiliation was a kind of federation, different from the strong, centralized European monarchies.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Leadership was restricted to a group of 50 sachem chiefs, each representing one clan within a tribe; the Oneida and Mohawk people had nine seats each; the Onondagas held fourteen; the Cayuga had ten seats; and the Seneca had eight. Representation was not based on population numbers, as the Seneca tribe greatly outnumbered the others. When a sachem chief died, his successor was chosen by the senior woman of his tribe in consultation with other female members of the clan; property and hereditary leadership were passed matrilineally. Decisions were not made through voting but through consensus decision making, with each sachem chief holding theoretical veto power. The Onondaga were the \"firekeepers\", responsible for raising topics to be discussed. They occupied one side of a three-sided fire (the Mohawk and Seneca sat on one side of the fire, the Oneida and Cayuga sat on the third side.)",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Long-distance trading did not prevent warfare and displacement among the indigenous peoples, and their oral histories tell of numerous migrations to the historic territories where Europeans encountered them. The Iroquois invaded and attacked tribes in the Ohio River area of present-day Kentucky and claimed the hunting grounds. Historians have placed these events as occurring as early as the 13th century, or in the 17th century Beaver Wars.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Through warfare, the Iroquois drove several tribes to migrate west to what became known as their historically traditional lands west of the Mississippi River. Tribes originating in the Ohio Valley who moved west included the Osage, Kaw, Ponca and Omaha people. By the mid-17th century, they had resettled in their historical lands in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Oklahoma. The Osage warred with Caddo-speaking Native Americans, displacing them in turn by the mid-18th century and dominating their new historical territories.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Pueblo people of what is now occupied by the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico, living conditions were that of large stone apartment like adobe structures. They live in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and possibly surrounding areas.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Chichimeca was the name that the Mexica (Aztecs) generically applied to a wide range of semi-nomadic peoples who inhabited the north of modern-day Mexico, and carried the same sense as the European term \"barbarian\". The name was adopted with a pejorative tone by the Spaniards when referring especially to the semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples of northern Mexico.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Olmec civilization emerged around 1200 BCE in Mesoamerica and ended around 400 BCE. Olmec art and concepts influenced surrounding cultures after their downfall. This civilization was thought to be the first in America to develop a writing system. After the Olmecs abandoned their cities for unknown reasons, the Maya, Zapotec and Teotihuacan arose.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Purepecha civilization emerged around 1000 CE in Mesoamerica. They flourished from 1100 CE to 1530 CE. They continue to live on in the state of Michoacán. Fierce warriors, they were never conquered and in their glory years, successfully sealed off huge areas from Aztec domination.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Maya history spans 3,000 years. The Classic Maya may have collapsed due to changing climate in the end of the 10th century.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Toltec were a nomadic people, dating from the 10th–12th century, whose language was also spoken by the Aztecs.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Teotihuacan (4th century BCE – 7/8th century CE) was both a city, and an empire of the same name, which, at its zenith between 150 and the 5th century, covered most of Mesoamerica.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Aztec having started to build their empire around 14th century found their civilization abruptly ended by the Spanish conquistadors. They lived in Mesoamerica, and surrounding lands. Their capital city Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities of all time.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The oldest known civilization of the Americas was established in the Norte Chico region of modern Peru. Complex society emerged in the group of coastal valleys, between 3000 and 1800 BCE. The Quipu, a distinctive recording device among Andean civilizations, apparently dates from the era of Norte Chico's prominence.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Chavín established a trade network and developed agriculture by as early as (or late compared to the Old World) 900 BCE according to some estimates and archaeological finds. Artifacts were found at a site called Chavín in modern Peru at an elevation of 3,177 meters. Chavín civilization spanned from 900 BCE to 300 BCE.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Holding their capital at the great city of Cusco, the Inca civilization dominated the Andes region from 1438 to 1533. Known as Tawantinsuyu, or \"the land of the four regions\", in Quechua, the Inca culture was highly distinct and developed. Cities were built with precise, unmatched stonework, constructed over many levels of mountain terrain. Terrace farming was a useful form of agriculture. There is evidence of excellent metalwork and even successful trepanation of the skull in Inca civilization.",
"title": "Pre-colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Around 1000, the Vikings established a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, now known as L'Anse aux Meadows. Speculations exist about other Old World discoveries of the New World, but none of these are generally or completely accepted by most scholars.",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Spain sponsored a major exploration led by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492; it quickly led to extensive European colonization of the Americas. The Europeans brought Old World diseases which are thought to have caused catastrophic epidemics and a huge decrease of the native population. Columbus came at a time in which many technical developments in sailing techniques and communication made it possible to report his voyages easily and to spread word of them throughout Europe. It was also a time of growing religious, imperial and economic rivalries that led to a competition for the establishment of colonies.",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "15th to 19th century colonies in the New World:",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The formation of sovereign states in the New World began with the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776. The American Revolutionary War lasted through the period of the Siege of Yorktown—its last major campaign—in the early autumn of 1781, with peace being achieved in 1783. In 1804, after the French of Napoleon Bonaparte were defeated during the Haitian Revolution under the black leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines declare the colony of Saint-Domingue independence of the Haitian Declaration of Independence as he renamed the country Ayiti meaning (Land of Mountains), Haiti became the world's first black-led republic in the New World, the first Caribbean state as well as the first Latin American country and the second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United States to win independence from Britain in 1783.",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Spanish colonies won their independence in the first quarter of the 19th century, in the Spanish American wars of independence. Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, among others, led their independence struggle. Although Bolivar attempted to keep the Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America politically allied, they rapidly became independent of one another as well, and several further wars were fought, such as the Paraguayan War and the War of the Pacific. (See Latin American integration.) In the Portuguese colony Dom Pedro I (also Pedro IV of Portugal), son of the Portuguese king Dom João VI, proclaimed the country's independence in 1822 and became Brazil's first Emperor. This was peacefully accepted by the crown in Portugal, upon compensation.",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Slavery has had a significant role in the economic development of the New World after the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. The cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane harvested by slaves became important exports for the United States and the Caribbean countries.",
"title": "European colonization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "As a part of the British Empire, Canada immediately entered World War I when it broke out in 1914. Canada bore the brunt of several major battles during the early stages of the war, including the use of poison gas attacks at Ypres. Losses became grave, and the government eventually brought in conscription, despite the fact this was against the wishes of the majority of French Canadians. In the ensuing Conscription Crisis of 1917, riots broke out on the streets of Montreal. In neighboring Newfoundland, the new dominion suffered a devastating loss on July 1, 1916, the First day on the Somme.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The United States stayed out of the conflict until 1917, when it joined the Entente powers. The United States was then able to play a crucial role at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that shaped interwar Europe. Mexico was not part of the war, as the country was embroiled in the Mexican Revolution at the time.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The 1920s brought an age of great prosperity in the United States, and to a lesser degree Canada. But the Wall Street Crash of 1929 combined with drought ushered in a period of economic hardship in the United States and Canada. From 1936 to 1949, there was a popular uprising against the anti-Catholic Mexican government of the time, set off specifically by the anti-clerical provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Once again, Canada found itself at war before its neighbors, with numerically modest but significant contributions overseas such as the Battle of Hong Kong and the Battle of Britain. The entry of the United States into the war helped to tip the balance in favour of the allies. Two Mexican tankers, transporting oil to the United States, were attacked and sunk by the Germans in the Gulf of Mexico waters, in 1942. The incident happened in spite of Mexico's neutrality at that time. This led Mexico to enter the conflict with a declaration of war on the Axis nations. The destruction of Europe wrought by the war vaulted all North American countries to more important roles in world affairs, especially the United States, which emerged as a \"superpower\".",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The early Cold War era saw the United States as the most powerful nation in a Western coalition of which Mexico and Canada were also a part. In Canada, Quebec was transformed by the Quiet Revolution and the emergence of Quebec nationalism. Mexico experienced an era of huge economic growth after World War II, a heavy industrialization process and a growth of its middle class, a period known in Mexican history as \"El Milagro Mexicano\" (the Mexican miracle). The Caribbean saw the beginnings of decolonization, while on the largest island the Cuban Revolution introduced Cold War rivalries into Latin America.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The civil rights movement in the U.S. ended Jim Crow and empowered black voters in the 1960s, which allowed black citizens to move into high government offices for the first time since Reconstruction. However, the dominant New Deal coalition collapsed in the mid 1960s in disputes over race and the Vietnam War, and the conservative movement began its rise to power, as the once dominant liberalism weakened and collapsed. Canada during this era was dominated by the leadership of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In 1982, at the end of his tenure, Canada enshrined a new constitution.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Canada's Brian Mulroney not only ran on a similar platform but also favored closer trade ties with the United States. This led to the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in January 1989. Mexican presidents Miguel de la Madrid, in the early 1980s and Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the late 1980s, started implementing liberal economic strategies that were seen as a good move. However, Mexico experienced a strong economic recession in 1982 and the Mexican peso suffered a devaluation. In the United States president Ronald Reagan attempted to move the United States back towards a hard anti-communist line in foreign affairs, in what his supporters saw as an attempt to assert moral leadership (compared to the Soviet Union) in the world community. Domestically, Reagan attempted to bring in a package of privatization and regulation to stimulate the economy.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The end of the Cold War and the beginning of the era of sustained economic expansion coincided during the 1990s. On January 1, 1994, Canada, Mexico and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, creating the world's largest free trade area. In 2000, Vicente Fox became the first non-PRI candidate to win the Mexican presidency in over 70 years. The optimism of the 1990s was shattered by the 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the United States, which prompted military intervention in Afghanistan, which also involved Canada. Canada did not support the United States' later move to invade Iraq, however.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In the U.S. the Reagan Era of conservative national policies, deregulation and tax cuts took control with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. By 2010, political scientists were debating whether the election of Barack Obama in 2008 represented an end of the Reagan Era, or was only a reaction against the bubble economy of the 2000s (decade), which burst in 2008 and became the Late-2000s recession with prolonged unemployment.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Despite the failure of a lasting political union, the concept of Central American reunification, though lacking enthusiasm from the leaders of the individual countries, rises from time to time. In 1856–1857 the region successfully established a military coalition to repel an invasion by United States adventurer William Walker. Today, all five nations fly flags that retain the old federal motif of two outer blue bands bounding an inner white stripe. (Costa Rica, traditionally the least committed of the five to regional integration, modified its flag significantly in 1848 by darkening the blue and adding a double-wide inner red band, in honor of the French tricolor).",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1907, a Central American Court of Justice was created. On December 13, 1960, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua established the Central American Common Market (\"CACM\"). Costa Rica, because of its relative economic prosperity and political stability, chose not to participate in the CACM. The goals for the CACM were to create greater political unification and success of import substitution industrialization policies. The project was an immediate economic success, but was abandoned after the 1969 \"Football War\" between El Salvador and Honduras. A Central American Parliament has operated, as a purely advisory body, since 1991. Costa Rica has repeatedly declined invitations to join the regional parliament, which seats deputies from the four other former members of the Union, as well as from Panama and the Dominican Republic.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In the 1960s and 1970s, the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were overthrown or displaced by U.S.-aligned military dictatorships. These dictatorships detained tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of whom were tortured and/or killed (on inter-state collaboration, see Operation Condor). Economically, they began a transition to neoliberal economic policies. They placed their own actions within the United States Cold War doctrine of \"National Security\" against internal subversion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Peru suffered from an internal conflict (see Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and Shining Path). Revolutionary movements and right-wing military dictatorships have been common, but starting in the 1980s a wave of democratization came through the continent, and democratic rule is widespread now. Allegations of corruption remain common, and several nations have seen crises which have forced the resignation of their presidents, although normal civilian succession has continued.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "International indebtedness became a notable problem, as most recently illustrated by Argentina's default in the early 21st century. In recent years, South American governments have drifted to the left, with socialist leaders being elected in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and a leftist president in Argentina and Uruguay. Despite the move to the left, South America is still largely capitalist. With the founding of the Union of South American Nations, South America has started down the road of economic integration, with plans for political integration in the European Union style.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Throughout the 20th century, several island countries, such as Jamaica and Barbados gained independence from British rule. As a result, many of the English-speaking states and territories shifted their economies to tourism and offshore bank industries.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "During the Cold War, the Caribbean has faced a series of military interventions from the United States, such as the Banana Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "",
"title": "20th century"
}
]
| The history of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the "Old World" until the coming of Europeans in the 10th century from Iceland led by Leif Erikson, and in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. The ancestors of today's American Indigenous peoples were the Paleo-Indians; they were hunter-gatherers who migrated into North America. The most popular theory asserts that migrants came to the Americas via Beringia, the land mass now covered by the ocean waters of the Bering Strait. Small lithic stage peoples followed megafauna like bison, mammoth, and caribou, thus gaining the modern nickname "big-game hunters." Groups of people may also have traveled into North America on shelf or sheet ice along the northern Pacific coast. Sedentary societies developed primarily in two regions: Mesoamerica and the Andean civilizations. Mesoamerican cultures include Zapotec, Toltec, Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Mixtec, Totonac, Teotihuacan, Huastec people, Purépecha, Izapa and Mazatec. Andean cultures include Inca, Caral-Supe, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimor, Moche, Muisca, Chavin, Paracas and Nazca. After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Spanish and later Portuguese, English, French and Dutch colonial expeditions arrived in the New World, conquering and settling the discovered lands, which led to a transformation of the cultural and physical landscape in the Americas. Spain colonized most of the Americas from present-day Southwestern United States, Florida and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Portugal settled in what is mostly present-day Brazil while England established colonies on the Eastern coast of the United States, as well as the North Pacific coast and in most of Canada. France settled in Quebec and other parts of Eastern Canada and claimed an area in what is today the central United States. The Netherlands settled New Netherland, some Caribbean islands and parts of Northern South America. European colonization of the Americas led to the rise of new cultures, civilizations and eventually states, which resulted from the fusion of Native American, European, and African traditions, peoples and institutions. The transformation of American cultures through colonization is evident in architecture, religion, gastronomy, the arts and particularly languages, the most widespread being Spanish, English and Portuguese. The colonial period lasted approximately three centuries, from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries, when Brazil and the larger Hispanic American nations declared independence. The United States obtained independence from Great Britain much earlier, in 1776, while Canada formed a federal dominion in 1867 and received legal independence in 1931. Others remained attached to their European parent state until the end of the 19th century, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico which were linked to Spain until 1898. Smaller territories such as Guyana obtained independence in the mid-20th century, while certain Caribbean islands and French Guiana remain part of a European power to this day. | 2001-11-07T20:32:51Z | 2023-12-31T04:52:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Americas |
14,099 | History of Africa | The history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans and — around 300,000–250,000 years ago — anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. The earliest known recorded history arose in Ancient Egypt, and later in Nubia, the Sahel, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.
Following the desertification of the Sahara, North African history became entwined with the Middle East and Southern Europe while the Bantu expansion swept from modern day Cameroon (Central West Africa) across much of the sub-Saharan continent in waves between around 1000 BC and 1 AD, creating a linguistic commonality across much of the central and Southern continent.
During the Middle Ages, Islam spread west from Arabia to Egypt, crossing the Maghreb and the Sahel. Some notable pre-colonial states and societies in Africa include the Ajuran Empire, Bachwezi Empire, D'mt, Adal Sultanate, Alodia, Dagbon Kingdom, Warsangali Sultanate, Buganda Kingdom, Kingdom of Nri, Nok civilization, Mali Empire, Bono State, Songhai Empire, Benin Empire, Oyo Empire, Kingdom of Lunda (Punu-yaka), Ashanti Empire, Ghana Empire, Mossi Kingdoms, Mutapa Empire, Kingdom of Mapungubwe, Kingdom of Sine, Kingdom of Sennar, Kingdom of Saloum, Kingdom of Baol, Kingdom of Cayor, Kingdom of Zimbabwe, Kingdom of Kongo, Empire of Kaabu, Ife Empire, Ancient Carthage, Numidia, Mauretania, and the Aksumite Empire.
At its peak, prior to European colonialism, it is estimated that Africa had up to 10,000 different states and autonomous groups with distinct languages and customs.
From the late 15th century, Europeans joined the slave trade. That includes the triangular trade, with the Portuguese initially acquiring slaves through trade and later by force as part of the Atlantic slave trade. They transported enslaved West, Central, and Southern Africans overseas. Subsequently, European colonization of Africa developed rapidly from around 10% (1870) to over 90% (1914) in the Scramble for Africa (1881–1914).
However following struggles for independence in many parts of the continent, as well as a weakened Europe after the Second World War (1939–1945), decolonization took place across the continent, culminating in the 1960 Year of Africa.
Disciplines such as recording of oral history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and genetics have been vital in rediscovering the great African civilizations of antiquity.
The first known hominids evolved in Africa. According to paleontology, the early hominids' skull anatomy was similar to that of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, great apes that also evolved in Africa, but the hominids had adopted a bipedal locomotion which freed their hands. This gave them a crucial advantage, enabling them to live in both forested areas and on the open savanna at a time when Africa was drying up and the savanna was encroaching on forested areas. This would have occurred 10 to 5 million years ago, but these claims are controversial because biologists and genetics have humans appearing around the last 70 thousand to 200 thousand years.
The fossil record shows Homo sapiens (also known as "modern humans" or "anatomically modern humans") living in Africa by about 350,000-260,000 years ago. The earliest known Homo sapiens fossils include the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco (c. 315,000 years ago), the Florisbad Skull from South Africa (c. 259,000 years ago), and the Omo remains from Ethiopia (c. 233,000 years ago). Scientists have suggested that Homo sapiens may have arisen between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East Africa and South Africa.
Evidence of a variety of behaviors indicative of Behavioral modernity date to the African Middle Stone Age, associated with early Homo sapiens and their emergence. Abstract imagery, widened subsistence strategies, and other "modern" behaviors have been discovered from that period in Africa, especially South, North, and East Africa.
The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, for example, is famous for rectangular slabs of ochre engraved with geometric designs. Using multiple dating techniques, the site was confirmed to be around 77,000 and 100–75,000 years old. Ostrich egg shell containers engraved with geometric designs dating to 60,000 years ago were found at Diepkloof, South Africa. Beads and other personal ornamentation have been found from Morocco which might be as much as 130,000 years old; as well, the Cave of Hearths in South Africa has yielded a number of beads dating from significantly prior to 50,000 years ago, and shell beads dating to about 75,000 years ago have been found at Blombos Cave, South Africa.
Around 65–50,000 years ago, the species' expansion out of Africa launched the colonization of the planet by modern human beings. By 10,000 BC, Homo sapiens had spread to most corners of Afro-Eurasia. Their dispersals are traced by linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence. Eurasian back-migrations, specifically West-Eurasian backflow, started in the early Holocene or already earlier in the Paleolithic period, sometimes between 30-15,000 years ago, followed by pre-Neolithic and Neolithic migration waves from the Middle East, mostly affecting Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and wider regions of the Sahel zone and East Africa.
Affad 23 is an archaeological site located in the Affad region of southern Dongola Reach in northern Sudan, which hosts "the well-preserved remains of prehistoric camps (relics of the oldest open-air hut in the world) and diverse hunting and gathering loci some 50,000 years old".
Around 16,000 BC, from the Red Sea Hills to the northern Ethiopian Highlands, nuts, grasses and tubers were being collected for food. By 13,000 to 11,000 BC, people began collecting wild grains. This spread to Western Asia, which domesticated its wild grains, wheat and barley. Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, Northeast Africa was cultivating wheat and barley and raising sheep and cattle from Southwest Asia.
A wet climatic phase in Africa turned the Ethiopian Highlands into a mountain forest. Omotic speakers domesticated enset around 6500–5500 BC. Around 7000 BC, the settlers of the Ethiopian highlands domesticated donkeys, and by 4000 BC domesticated donkeys had spread to Southwest Asia. Cushitic speakers, partially turning away from cattle herding, domesticated teff and finger millet between 5500 and 3500 BC.
During the 11th millennium BP, pottery was independently invented in Africa, with the earliest pottery there dating to about 9,400 BC from central Mali. It soon spread throughout the southern Sahara and Sahel. In the steppes and savannahs of the Sahara and Sahel in Northern West Africa, the Nilo-Saharan speakers and Mandé peoples started to collect and domesticate wild millet, African rice and sorghum between 8000 and 6000 BC. Later, gourds, watermelons, castor beans, and cotton were also collected and domesticated. The people started capturing wild cattle and holding them in circular thorn hedges, resulting in domestication.
They also started making pottery and built stone settlements (e.g., Tichitt, Oualata). Fishing, using bone-tipped harpoons, became a major activity in the numerous streams and lakes formed from the increased rains. Mande peoples have been credited with the independent development of agriculture about 4000–3000 BC.
Evidence of the early smelting of metals – lead, copper, and bronze – dates from the fourth millennium BC.
Egyptians smelted copper during the predynastic period, and bronze came into use after 3,000 BC at the latest in Egypt and Nubia. Nubia became a major source of copper as well as of gold. The use of gold and silver in Egypt dates back to the predynastic period.
In the Aïr Mountains of present-day Niger people smelted copper independently of developments in the Nile valley between 3,000 and 2,500 BC. They used a process unique to the region, suggesting that the technology was not brought in from outside; it became more mature by about 1,500 BC.
By the 1st millennium BC iron working had reached Northwestern Africa, Egypt, and Nubia. Zangato and Holl document evidence of iron-smelting in the Central African Republic and Cameroon that may date back to 3,000 to 2,500 BC. Assyrians using iron weapons pushed Nubians out of Egypt in 670 BC, after which the use of iron became widespread in the Nile valley.
The theory that iron spread to Sub-Saharan Africa via the Nubian city of Meroe is no longer widely accepted, and some researchers believe that sub-Saharan Africans invented iron metallurgy independently. Metalworking in West Africa has been dated as early as 2,500 BC at Egaro west of the Termit in Niger, and iron working was practiced there by 1,500 BC. Iron smelting has been dated to 2,000 BC in southeast Nigeria. Central Africa provides possible evidence of iron working as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Iron smelting developed in the area between Lake Chad and the African Great Lakes between 1,000 and 600 BC, and in West Africa around 2,000 BC, long before the technology reached Egypt. Before 500 BC, the Nok culture in the Jos Plateau was already smelting iron. Archaeological sites containing iron-smelting furnaces and slag have been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in Igboland: dating to 2,000 BC at the site of Lejja (Eze-Uzomaka 2009) and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi (Holl 2009). The site of Gbabiri (in the Central African Republic) has also yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896-773 BC and 907-796 BC respectively.
The ancient history of North Africa is inextricably linked to that of the Ancient Near East. This is particularly true of Ancient Egypt and Nubia. In the Horn of Africa the Kingdom of Aksum ruled modern-day Eritrea, northern Ethiopia and the coastal area of the western part of the Arabian Peninsula. The Ancient Egyptians established ties with the Land of Punt in 2,350 BC. Punt was a trade partner of Ancient Egypt and it is believed that it was located in modern-day Somalia, Djibouti or Eritrea. Phoenician cities such as Carthage were part of the Mediterranean Iron Age and classical antiquity. Sub-Saharan Africa developed more or less independently in those times.
In the western Sahel the rise of settled communities occurred largely as a result of the domestication of millet and of sorghum. Archaeology points to sizable urban populations in West Africa beginning in the 2nd millennium BC. Symbiotic trade relations developed before the trans-Saharan trade, in response to the opportunities afforded by north–south diversity in ecosystems across deserts, grasslands, and forests. The agriculturists received salt from the desert nomads. The desert nomads acquired meat and other foods from pastoralists and farmers of the grasslands, and fishermen on the Niger River. The forest-dwellers provided furs and meat.
The Bantu expansion involved a significant movement of people in African history and in the settling of the continent. People speaking Bantu languages (a branch of the Niger–Congo family) began in the second millennium BC to spread from Cameroon eastward to the Great Lakes region. In the first millennium BC, Bantu languages spread from the Great Lakes to southern and east Africa. One early movement headed south to the upper Zambezi valley in the 2nd century BC. Then Bantu-speakers pushed westward to the savannahs of present-day Angola and eastward into Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in the 1st century AD. The second thrust from the Great Lakes was eastward, 2,000 years ago, expanding to the Indian Ocean coast, Kenya and Tanzania. The eastern group eventually met the southern migrants from the Great Lakes in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Both groups continued southward, with eastern groups continuing to Mozambique and reaching Maputo in the 2nd century AD, and expanding as far as Durban.
The Sao civilization flourished from about the sixth century BC to as late as the 16th century AD in Central Africa. The Sao lived by the Chari River south of Lake Chad in territory that later became part of present-day Cameroon and Chad. They are the earliest people to have left clear traces of their presence in the territory of modern Cameroon. Today, several ethnic groups of northern Cameroon and southern Chad – but particularly the Sara people – claim descent from the civilization of the Sao. Sao artifacts show that they were skilled workers in bronze, copper, and iron. Finds include bronze sculptures and terracotta statues of human and animal figures, coins, funerary urns, household utensils, jewelry, highly decorated pottery, and spears. The largest Sao archaeological finds have occurred south of Lake Chad.
Settlements of Bantu-speaking peoples who were iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen were long already well established south of the Limpopo River by the 4th century CE, displacing and absorbing the original Khoisan speakers. They slowly moved south, and the earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050. The southernmost group was the Xhosa people, whose language incorporates certain linguistic traits from the earlier Khoi-San people, reaching the Great Fish River in today's Eastern Cape Province.
Between 1878 and 1898, European states partitioned and conquered most of Africa. For 400 years, European nations had mainly limited their involvement to trading stations on the African coast. Few dared venture inland from the coast; those that did, like the Portuguese, often met defeats and had to retreat to the coast. Several technological innovations helped to overcome this 400-year pattern. One was the development of repeating rifles, which were easier and quicker to load than muskets. Artillery was being used increasingly. In 1885, Hiram S. Maxim developed the maxim gun, the model of the modern-day machine gun. European states kept these weapons largely among themselves by refusing to sell these weapons to African leaders.
African germs took numerous European lives and deterred permanent settlements. Diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping sickness, yaws, and leprosy made Africa a very inhospitable place for Europeans. The deadliest disease was malaria, endemic throughout Tropical Africa. In 1854, the discovery of quinine and other medical innovations helped to make conquest and colonization in Africa possible.
Strong motives for conquest of Africa were at play. Raw materials were needed for European factories. Europe in the early part of the 19th century was undergoing its Industrial Revolution. Nationalist rivalries and prestige were at play. Acquiring African colonies would show rivals that a nation was powerful and significant. These factors culminated in the Scramble for Africa.
In the 1880s the European powers had divided up almost all of Africa (only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent). They ruled until after World War II when forces of nationalism grew much stronger. In the 1950s and 1960s the colonial holdings became independent states. The process was usually peaceful but there were several long bitter bloody civil wars, as in Algeria, Kenya and elsewhere. Across Africa the powerful new force of nationalism drew upon the organizational skills that natives learned in the British and French and other armies in the world wars. It led to organizations that were not controlled by or endorsed by either the colonial powers not the traditional local power structures that were collaborating with the colonial powers. Nationalistic organizations began to challenge both the traditional and the new colonial structures and finally displaced them. Leaders of nationalist movements took control when the European authorities exited; many ruled for decades or until they died off. These structures included political, educational, religious, and other social organizations. In recent decades, many African countries have undergone the triumph and defeat of nationalistic fervor, changing in the process the loci of the centralizing state power and patrimonial state.
The decolonization of Africa started with Libya in 1951, although Liberia, South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia were already independent. Many countries followed in the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in 1960 with the Year of Africa, which saw 17 African nations declare independence, including a large part of French West Africa. Most of the remaining countries gained independence throughout the 1960s, although some colonizers (Portugal in particular) were reluctant to relinquish sovereignty, resulting in bitter wars of independence which lasted for a decade or more. The last African countries to gain formal independence were Guinea-Bissau (1974), Mozambique (1975) and Angola (1975) from Portugal; Djibouti from France in 1977; Zimbabwe from the United Kingdom in 1980; and Namibia from South Africa in 1990. Eritrea later split off from Ethiopia in 1993.
The first historical studies in English appeared in the 1890s, and followed one of four approaches. 1) The territorial narrative was typically written by a veteran soldier or civil servant who gave heavy emphasis to what he had seen. 2) The "apologia" were essays designed to justify British policies. 3) Popularizers tried to reach a large audience. 4) Compendia appeared designed to combine academic and official credentials. Professional scholarship appeared around 1900, and began with the study of business operations, typically using government documents and unpublished archives.
The economic approach was widely practiced in the 1930s, primarily to provide descriptions of the changes underway in the previous half-century. In 1935, American historian William L. Langer published The Diplomacy of Imperialism: 1890–1902, a book that is still widely cited. In 1939, Oxford professor Reginald Coupland published The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble, another popular treatment.
World War II diverted most scholars to wartime projects and accounted for a pause in scholarship during the 1940s.
By the 1950s many African students were studying in British universities, and they produced a demand for new scholarship, and started themselves to supply it as well. Oxford University became the main center for African studies, with activity as well at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. The perspective of British government policymakers or international business operations slowly gave way to a new interest in the activities of the natives, especially nationalistic movements and the growing demand for independence. The major breakthrough came from Ronald Robinson and John Andrew Gallagher, especially with their studies of the impact of free trade on Africa. In 1985 The Oxford History of South Africa (2 vols.) was published, attempting to synthesize the available materials. In 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History was published, bringing the scholarship up to date.
The current major problem in African studies that Mohamed (2010/2012) identified is the inherited religious, Orientalist, colonial paradigm that European Africanists have preserved in present-day secularist, post-colonial, Anglophone African historiography. African and African-American scholars also bear some responsibility in perpetuating this European Africanist preserved paradigm.
Following conceptualizations of Africa developed by Leo Africanus and Hegel, European Africanists conceptually separated continental Africa into two racialized regions – Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, as a racist geographic construction, serves as an objectified, compartmentalized region of "Africa proper", "Africa noire," or "Black Africa." The African diaspora is also considered to be a part of the same racialized construction as Sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa serves as a racialized region of "European Africa", which is conceptually disconnected from Sub-Saharan Africa, and conceptually connected to the Middle East, Asia, and the Islamic world.
As a result of these racialized constructions and the conceptual separation of Africa, darker skinned North Africans, such as the so-called Haratin, who have long resided in the Maghreb, and do not reside south of Saharan Africa, have become analogically alienated from their indigeneity and historic reality in North Africa. While the origin of the term "Haratin" remains speculative, the term may not date much earlier than the 18th century CE and has been involuntarily assigned to darker skinned Maghrebians. Prior to the modern use of the term Haratin as an identifier, and used in contrast to bidan or bayd (white), sumr/asmar, suud/aswad, or Sudan/sudani (black/brown) were Arabic terms used as identifiers for darker skinned Maghrebians before the modern period. "Haratin" is considered to be an offensive term by the darker skinned Maghrebians it is intended to identify; for example, people in the southern region (e.g., Wad Noun, Draa) of Morocco consider it to be an offensive term. Despite its historicity and etymology being questionable, European colonialists and European Africanists have used the term Haratin as identifiers for groups of "black" and apparently "mixed" people found in Algeria, Mauritania, and Morocco.
The Saadian invasion of the Songhai Empire serves as the precursor to later narratives that grouped darker skinned Maghrebians together and identified their origins as being Sub-Saharan West Africa. With gold serving as a motivation behind the Saadian invasion of the Songhai Empire, this made way for changes in latter behaviors toward dark-skinned Africans. As a result of changing behaviors toward dark-skinned Africans, darker skinned Maghrebians were forcibly recruited into the army of Ismail Ibn Sharif as the Black Guard, based on the claim of them having descended from enslaved peoples from the times of the Saadian invasion. Shurafa historians of the modern period would later use these events in narratives about the manumission of enslaved "Hartani" (a vague term, which, by merit of it needing further definition, is implicit evidence for its historicity being questionable). The narratives derived from Shurafa historians would later become analogically incorporated into the Americanized narratives (e.g., the trans-Saharan slave trade, imported enslaved Sub-Saharan West Africans, darker skinned Magrebian freedmen) of the present-day European Africanist paradigm.
As opposed to having been developed through field research, the analogy in the present-day European Africanist paradigm, which conceptually alienates, dehistoricizes, and denaturalizes darker skinned North Africans in North Africa and darker skinned Africans throughout the Islamic world at-large, is primarily rooted in an Americanized textual tradition inherited from 19th century European Christian abolitionists. Consequently, reliable history, as opposed to an antiquated analogy-based history, for darker skinned North Africans and darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world are limited. Part of the textual tradition generally associates an inherited status of servant with dark skin (e.g., Negro labor, Negro cultivators, Negroid slaves, freedman). The European Africanist paradigm uses this as the primary reference point for its construction of origins narratives for darker skinned North Africans (e.g., imported slaves from Sub-Saharan West Africa). With darker skinned North Africans or darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world treated as an allegory of alterity, another part of the textual tradition is the trans-Saharan slave trade and their presence in these regions are treated as that of an African diaspora in North Africa and the Islamic world. Altogether, darker skinned North Africans (e.g., "black" and apparently "mixed" Maghrebians), darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world, the inherited status of servant associated with dark skin, and the trans-Saharan slave trade are conflated and modeled in analogy with African-Americans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The trans-Saharan slave trade has been used as a literary device in narratives that analogically explain the origins of darker skinned North Africans in North Africa and the Islamic world. Caravans have been equated with slave ships, and the amount of forcibly enslaved Africans transported across the Sahara are alleged to be numerically comparable to the considerably large amount of forcibly enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. The simulated narrative of comparable numbers is contradicted by the limited presence of darker skinned North Africans in the present-day Maghreb. As part of this simulated narrative, post-classical Egypt has also been characterized as having plantations. Another part of this simulated narrative is an Orientalist construction of hypersexualized Moors, concubines, and eunuchs. Concubines in harems have been used as an explanatory bridge between the allegation of comparable numbers of forcibly enslaved Africans and the limited amount of present-day darker skinned Maghrebians who have been characterized as their diasporic descendants. Eunuchs were characterized as sentinels who guarded these harems. The simulated narrative is also based on the major assumption that the indigenous peoples of the Maghreb were once purely white Berbers, who then became biracialized through miscegenation with black concubines (existing within a geographic racial binary of pale-skinned Moors residing further north, closer to the Mediterranean region, and dark-skinned Moors residing further south, closer to the Sahara). The religious polemical narrative involving the suffering of enslaved European Christians of the Barbary slave trade has also been adapted to fit the simulated narrative of a comparable number of enslaved Africans being transported by Muslim slaver caravans, from the south of Saharan Africa, into North Africa and the Islamic world.
Despite being an inherited part of the 19th century religious polemical narratives, the use of race in the secularist narrative of the present-day European Africanist paradigm has given the paradigm an appearance of possessing scientific quality. The religious polemical narrative (e.g., holy cause, hostile neologisms) of 19th century European abolitionists about Africa and Africans are silenced, but still preserved, in the secularist narratives of the present-day European Africanist paradigm. The Orientalist stereotyped hypersexuality of the Moors were viewed by 19th century European abolitionists as deriving from the Quran. The reference to times prior, often used in concert with biblical references, by 19th century European abolitionists, may indicate that realities described of Moors may have been literary fabrications. The purpose of these apparent literary fabrications may have been to affirm their view of the Bible as being greater than the Quran and to affirm the viewpoints held by the readers of their composed works. The adoption of 19th century European abolitionists' religious polemical narrative into the present-day European Africanist paradigm may have been due to its correspondence with the established textual tradition. The use of stereotyped hypersexuality for Moors are what 19th century European abolitionists and the present-day European Africanist paradigm have in common.
Due to a lack of considerable development in field research regarding enslavement in Islamic societies, this has resulted in the present-day European Africanist paradigm relying on unreliable estimates for the trans-Saharan slave trade. However, insufficient data has also used as a justification for continued use of the faulty present-day European Africanist paradigm. Darker skinned Maghrebians, particularly in Morocco, have grown weary of the lack of discretion foreign academics have shown toward them, bear resentment toward the way they have been depicted by foreign academics, and consequently, find the intended activities of foreign academics to be predictable. Rather than continuing to rely on the faulty present-day European Africanist paradigm, Mohamed (2012) recommends revising and improving the current Africanist paradigm (e.g., critical inspection of the origins and introduction of the present characterization of the Saharan caravan; reconsideration of what makes the trans-Saharan slave trade, within its own context in Africa, distinct from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; realistic consideration of the experiences of darker-skinned Maghrebians within their own regional context).
Merolla (2017) has indicated that the academic study of Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa by Europeans developed with North Africa being conceptually subsumed within the Middle East and Arab world, whereas, the study of Sub-Saharan Africa was viewed as conceptually distinct from North Africa, and as its own region, viewed as inherently the same. The common pattern of conceptual separation of continental Africa into two regions and the view of conceptual sameness within the region of Sub-Saharan Africa has continued until present-day. Yet, with increasing exposure of this problem, discussion about the conceptual separation of Africa has begun to develop.
The Sahara has served as a trans-regional zone for peoples in Africa. Authors from various countries (e.g., Algeria, Cameroon, Sudan) in Africa have critiqued the conceptualization of the Sahara as a regional barrier, and provided counter-arguments supporting the interconnectedness of continental Africa; there are historic and cultural connections as well as trade between West Africa, North Africa, and East Africa (e.g., North Africa with Niger and Mali, North Africa with Tanzania and Sudan, major hubs of Islamic learning in Niger and Mali). Africa has been conceptually compartmentalized into meaning "Black Africa", "Africa South of the Sahara", and "Sub-Saharan Africa." North Africa has been conceptually "Orientalized" and separated from Sub-Saharan Africa. While its historic development has occurred within a longer time frame, the epistemic development (e.g., form, content) of the present-day racialized conceptual separation of Africa came as a result of the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa.
In African and Berber literary studies, scholarship has remained largely separate from one another. The conceptual separation of Africa in these studies may be due to how editing policies of studies in the Anglophone and Francophone world are affected by the international politics of the Anglophone and Francophone world. While studies in the Anglophone world have more clearly followed the trend of the conceptual separation of Africa, the Francophone world has been more nuanced, which may stem from imperial policies relating to French colonialism in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. As the study of North Africa has largely been initiated by the Arabophone and Francophone world, denial of the Arabic language having become Africanized throughout the centuries it has been present in Africa has shown that the conceptual separation of Africa remains pervasive in the Francophone world; this denial may stem from historic development of the characterization of an Islamic Arabia existing as a diametric binary to Europe. Among studies in the Francophone world, ties between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa have been denied or downplayed, while the ties (e.g., religious, cultural) between the regions and peoples (e.g., Arab language and literature with Berber language and literature) of the Middle East and North Africa have been established by diminishing the differences between the two and selectively focusing on the similarities between the two. In the Francophone world, construction of racialized regions, such as Black Africa (Sub-Saharan Africans) and White Africa (North Africans, e.g., Berbers and Arabs), has also developed.
Despite having invoked and used identities in reference to the racialized conceptualizations of Africa (e.g., North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa) to oppose imposed identities, Berbers have invoked North African identity to oppose Arabized and Islamicized identities, and Sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Negritude, Black Consciousness) and the African diaspora (e.g., Black is Beautiful) have invoked and used black identity to oppose colonialism and racism. While Berber studies has largely sought to establish ties between Berbers and North Africa with Arabs and the Middle East, Merolla (2017) indicated that efforts to establish ties between Berbers and North Africa with Sub-Saharan Africans and Sub-Saharan Africa have recently started to being undertaken. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans and — around 300,000–250,000 years ago — anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. The earliest known recorded history arose in Ancient Egypt, and later in Nubia, the Sahel, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Following the desertification of the Sahara, North African history became entwined with the Middle East and Southern Europe while the Bantu expansion swept from modern day Cameroon (Central West Africa) across much of the sub-Saharan continent in waves between around 1000 BC and 1 AD, creating a linguistic commonality across much of the central and Southern continent.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "During the Middle Ages, Islam spread west from Arabia to Egypt, crossing the Maghreb and the Sahel. Some notable pre-colonial states and societies in Africa include the Ajuran Empire, Bachwezi Empire, D'mt, Adal Sultanate, Alodia, Dagbon Kingdom, Warsangali Sultanate, Buganda Kingdom, Kingdom of Nri, Nok civilization, Mali Empire, Bono State, Songhai Empire, Benin Empire, Oyo Empire, Kingdom of Lunda (Punu-yaka), Ashanti Empire, Ghana Empire, Mossi Kingdoms, Mutapa Empire, Kingdom of Mapungubwe, Kingdom of Sine, Kingdom of Sennar, Kingdom of Saloum, Kingdom of Baol, Kingdom of Cayor, Kingdom of Zimbabwe, Kingdom of Kongo, Empire of Kaabu, Ife Empire, Ancient Carthage, Numidia, Mauretania, and the Aksumite Empire.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "At its peak, prior to European colonialism, it is estimated that Africa had up to 10,000 different states and autonomous groups with distinct languages and customs.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "From the late 15th century, Europeans joined the slave trade. That includes the triangular trade, with the Portuguese initially acquiring slaves through trade and later by force as part of the Atlantic slave trade. They transported enslaved West, Central, and Southern Africans overseas. Subsequently, European colonization of Africa developed rapidly from around 10% (1870) to over 90% (1914) in the Scramble for Africa (1881–1914).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "However following struggles for independence in many parts of the continent, as well as a weakened Europe after the Second World War (1939–1945), decolonization took place across the continent, culminating in the 1960 Year of Africa.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Disciplines such as recording of oral history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and genetics have been vital in rediscovering the great African civilizations of antiquity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The first known hominids evolved in Africa. According to paleontology, the early hominids' skull anatomy was similar to that of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, great apes that also evolved in Africa, but the hominids had adopted a bipedal locomotion which freed their hands. This gave them a crucial advantage, enabling them to live in both forested areas and on the open savanna at a time when Africa was drying up and the savanna was encroaching on forested areas. This would have occurred 10 to 5 million years ago, but these claims are controversial because biologists and genetics have humans appearing around the last 70 thousand to 200 thousand years.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The fossil record shows Homo sapiens (also known as \"modern humans\" or \"anatomically modern humans\") living in Africa by about 350,000-260,000 years ago. The earliest known Homo sapiens fossils include the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco (c. 315,000 years ago), the Florisbad Skull from South Africa (c. 259,000 years ago), and the Omo remains from Ethiopia (c. 233,000 years ago). Scientists have suggested that Homo sapiens may have arisen between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East Africa and South Africa.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Evidence of a variety of behaviors indicative of Behavioral modernity date to the African Middle Stone Age, associated with early Homo sapiens and their emergence. Abstract imagery, widened subsistence strategies, and other \"modern\" behaviors have been discovered from that period in Africa, especially South, North, and East Africa.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, for example, is famous for rectangular slabs of ochre engraved with geometric designs. Using multiple dating techniques, the site was confirmed to be around 77,000 and 100–75,000 years old. Ostrich egg shell containers engraved with geometric designs dating to 60,000 years ago were found at Diepkloof, South Africa. Beads and other personal ornamentation have been found from Morocco which might be as much as 130,000 years old; as well, the Cave of Hearths in South Africa has yielded a number of beads dating from significantly prior to 50,000 years ago, and shell beads dating to about 75,000 years ago have been found at Blombos Cave, South Africa.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Around 65–50,000 years ago, the species' expansion out of Africa launched the colonization of the planet by modern human beings. By 10,000 BC, Homo sapiens had spread to most corners of Afro-Eurasia. Their dispersals are traced by linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence. Eurasian back-migrations, specifically West-Eurasian backflow, started in the early Holocene or already earlier in the Paleolithic period, sometimes between 30-15,000 years ago, followed by pre-Neolithic and Neolithic migration waves from the Middle East, mostly affecting Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and wider regions of the Sahel zone and East Africa.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Affad 23 is an archaeological site located in the Affad region of southern Dongola Reach in northern Sudan, which hosts \"the well-preserved remains of prehistoric camps (relics of the oldest open-air hut in the world) and diverse hunting and gathering loci some 50,000 years old\".",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Around 16,000 BC, from the Red Sea Hills to the northern Ethiopian Highlands, nuts, grasses and tubers were being collected for food. By 13,000 to 11,000 BC, people began collecting wild grains. This spread to Western Asia, which domesticated its wild grains, wheat and barley. Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, Northeast Africa was cultivating wheat and barley and raising sheep and cattle from Southwest Asia.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A wet climatic phase in Africa turned the Ethiopian Highlands into a mountain forest. Omotic speakers domesticated enset around 6500–5500 BC. Around 7000 BC, the settlers of the Ethiopian highlands domesticated donkeys, and by 4000 BC domesticated donkeys had spread to Southwest Asia. Cushitic speakers, partially turning away from cattle herding, domesticated teff and finger millet between 5500 and 3500 BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "During the 11th millennium BP, pottery was independently invented in Africa, with the earliest pottery there dating to about 9,400 BC from central Mali. It soon spread throughout the southern Sahara and Sahel. In the steppes and savannahs of the Sahara and Sahel in Northern West Africa, the Nilo-Saharan speakers and Mandé peoples started to collect and domesticate wild millet, African rice and sorghum between 8000 and 6000 BC. Later, gourds, watermelons, castor beans, and cotton were also collected and domesticated. The people started capturing wild cattle and holding them in circular thorn hedges, resulting in domestication.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "They also started making pottery and built stone settlements (e.g., Tichitt, Oualata). Fishing, using bone-tipped harpoons, became a major activity in the numerous streams and lakes formed from the increased rains. Mande peoples have been credited with the independent development of agriculture about 4000–3000 BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Evidence of the early smelting of metals – lead, copper, and bronze – dates from the fourth millennium BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Egyptians smelted copper during the predynastic period, and bronze came into use after 3,000 BC at the latest in Egypt and Nubia. Nubia became a major source of copper as well as of gold. The use of gold and silver in Egypt dates back to the predynastic period.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In the Aïr Mountains of present-day Niger people smelted copper independently of developments in the Nile valley between 3,000 and 2,500 BC. They used a process unique to the region, suggesting that the technology was not brought in from outside; it became more mature by about 1,500 BC.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "By the 1st millennium BC iron working had reached Northwestern Africa, Egypt, and Nubia. Zangato and Holl document evidence of iron-smelting in the Central African Republic and Cameroon that may date back to 3,000 to 2,500 BC. Assyrians using iron weapons pushed Nubians out of Egypt in 670 BC, after which the use of iron became widespread in the Nile valley.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The theory that iron spread to Sub-Saharan Africa via the Nubian city of Meroe is no longer widely accepted, and some researchers believe that sub-Saharan Africans invented iron metallurgy independently. Metalworking in West Africa has been dated as early as 2,500 BC at Egaro west of the Termit in Niger, and iron working was practiced there by 1,500 BC. Iron smelting has been dated to 2,000 BC in southeast Nigeria. Central Africa provides possible evidence of iron working as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Iron smelting developed in the area between Lake Chad and the African Great Lakes between 1,000 and 600 BC, and in West Africa around 2,000 BC, long before the technology reached Egypt. Before 500 BC, the Nok culture in the Jos Plateau was already smelting iron. Archaeological sites containing iron-smelting furnaces and slag have been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in Igboland: dating to 2,000 BC at the site of Lejja (Eze-Uzomaka 2009) and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi (Holl 2009). The site of Gbabiri (in the Central African Republic) has also yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896-773 BC and 907-796 BC respectively.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The ancient history of North Africa is inextricably linked to that of the Ancient Near East. This is particularly true of Ancient Egypt and Nubia. In the Horn of Africa the Kingdom of Aksum ruled modern-day Eritrea, northern Ethiopia and the coastal area of the western part of the Arabian Peninsula. The Ancient Egyptians established ties with the Land of Punt in 2,350 BC. Punt was a trade partner of Ancient Egypt and it is believed that it was located in modern-day Somalia, Djibouti or Eritrea. Phoenician cities such as Carthage were part of the Mediterranean Iron Age and classical antiquity. Sub-Saharan Africa developed more or less independently in those times.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the western Sahel the rise of settled communities occurred largely as a result of the domestication of millet and of sorghum. Archaeology points to sizable urban populations in West Africa beginning in the 2nd millennium BC. Symbiotic trade relations developed before the trans-Saharan trade, in response to the opportunities afforded by north–south diversity in ecosystems across deserts, grasslands, and forests. The agriculturists received salt from the desert nomads. The desert nomads acquired meat and other foods from pastoralists and farmers of the grasslands, and fishermen on the Niger River. The forest-dwellers provided furs and meat.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Bantu expansion involved a significant movement of people in African history and in the settling of the continent. People speaking Bantu languages (a branch of the Niger–Congo family) began in the second millennium BC to spread from Cameroon eastward to the Great Lakes region. In the first millennium BC, Bantu languages spread from the Great Lakes to southern and east Africa. One early movement headed south to the upper Zambezi valley in the 2nd century BC. Then Bantu-speakers pushed westward to the savannahs of present-day Angola and eastward into Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in the 1st century AD. The second thrust from the Great Lakes was eastward, 2,000 years ago, expanding to the Indian Ocean coast, Kenya and Tanzania. The eastern group eventually met the southern migrants from the Great Lakes in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Both groups continued southward, with eastern groups continuing to Mozambique and reaching Maputo in the 2nd century AD, and expanding as far as Durban.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Sao civilization flourished from about the sixth century BC to as late as the 16th century AD in Central Africa. The Sao lived by the Chari River south of Lake Chad in territory that later became part of present-day Cameroon and Chad. They are the earliest people to have left clear traces of their presence in the territory of modern Cameroon. Today, several ethnic groups of northern Cameroon and southern Chad – but particularly the Sara people – claim descent from the civilization of the Sao. Sao artifacts show that they were skilled workers in bronze, copper, and iron. Finds include bronze sculptures and terracotta statues of human and animal figures, coins, funerary urns, household utensils, jewelry, highly decorated pottery, and spears. The largest Sao archaeological finds have occurred south of Lake Chad.",
"title": "Medieval and early modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Settlements of Bantu-speaking peoples who were iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen were long already well established south of the Limpopo River by the 4th century CE, displacing and absorbing the original Khoisan speakers. They slowly moved south, and the earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050. The southernmost group was the Xhosa people, whose language incorporates certain linguistic traits from the earlier Khoi-San people, reaching the Great Fish River in today's Eastern Cape Province.",
"title": "Medieval and early modern period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Between 1878 and 1898, European states partitioned and conquered most of Africa. For 400 years, European nations had mainly limited their involvement to trading stations on the African coast. Few dared venture inland from the coast; those that did, like the Portuguese, often met defeats and had to retreat to the coast. Several technological innovations helped to overcome this 400-year pattern. One was the development of repeating rifles, which were easier and quicker to load than muskets. Artillery was being used increasingly. In 1885, Hiram S. Maxim developed the maxim gun, the model of the modern-day machine gun. European states kept these weapons largely among themselves by refusing to sell these weapons to African leaders.",
"title": "Colonial period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "African germs took numerous European lives and deterred permanent settlements. Diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping sickness, yaws, and leprosy made Africa a very inhospitable place for Europeans. The deadliest disease was malaria, endemic throughout Tropical Africa. In 1854, the discovery of quinine and other medical innovations helped to make conquest and colonization in Africa possible.",
"title": "Colonial period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Strong motives for conquest of Africa were at play. Raw materials were needed for European factories. Europe in the early part of the 19th century was undergoing its Industrial Revolution. Nationalist rivalries and prestige were at play. Acquiring African colonies would show rivals that a nation was powerful and significant. These factors culminated in the Scramble for Africa.",
"title": "Colonial period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the 1880s the European powers had divided up almost all of Africa (only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent). They ruled until after World War II when forces of nationalism grew much stronger. In the 1950s and 1960s the colonial holdings became independent states. The process was usually peaceful but there were several long bitter bloody civil wars, as in Algeria, Kenya and elsewhere. Across Africa the powerful new force of nationalism drew upon the organizational skills that natives learned in the British and French and other armies in the world wars. It led to organizations that were not controlled by or endorsed by either the colonial powers not the traditional local power structures that were collaborating with the colonial powers. Nationalistic organizations began to challenge both the traditional and the new colonial structures and finally displaced them. Leaders of nationalist movements took control when the European authorities exited; many ruled for decades or until they died off. These structures included political, educational, religious, and other social organizations. In recent decades, many African countries have undergone the triumph and defeat of nationalistic fervor, changing in the process the loci of the centralizing state power and patrimonial state.",
"title": "Colonial period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The decolonization of Africa started with Libya in 1951, although Liberia, South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia were already independent. Many countries followed in the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in 1960 with the Year of Africa, which saw 17 African nations declare independence, including a large part of French West Africa. Most of the remaining countries gained independence throughout the 1960s, although some colonizers (Portugal in particular) were reluctant to relinquish sovereignty, resulting in bitter wars of independence which lasted for a decade or more. The last African countries to gain formal independence were Guinea-Bissau (1974), Mozambique (1975) and Angola (1975) from Portugal; Djibouti from France in 1977; Zimbabwe from the United Kingdom in 1980; and Namibia from South Africa in 1990. Eritrea later split off from Ethiopia in 1993.",
"title": "Postcolonial period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The first historical studies in English appeared in the 1890s, and followed one of four approaches. 1) The territorial narrative was typically written by a veteran soldier or civil servant who gave heavy emphasis to what he had seen. 2) The \"apologia\" were essays designed to justify British policies. 3) Popularizers tried to reach a large audience. 4) Compendia appeared designed to combine academic and official credentials. Professional scholarship appeared around 1900, and began with the study of business operations, typically using government documents and unpublished archives.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The economic approach was widely practiced in the 1930s, primarily to provide descriptions of the changes underway in the previous half-century. In 1935, American historian William L. Langer published The Diplomacy of Imperialism: 1890–1902, a book that is still widely cited. In 1939, Oxford professor Reginald Coupland published The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble, another popular treatment.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "World War II diverted most scholars to wartime projects and accounted for a pause in scholarship during the 1940s.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "By the 1950s many African students were studying in British universities, and they produced a demand for new scholarship, and started themselves to supply it as well. Oxford University became the main center for African studies, with activity as well at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. The perspective of British government policymakers or international business operations slowly gave way to a new interest in the activities of the natives, especially nationalistic movements and the growing demand for independence. The major breakthrough came from Ronald Robinson and John Andrew Gallagher, especially with their studies of the impact of free trade on Africa. In 1985 The Oxford History of South Africa (2 vols.) was published, attempting to synthesize the available materials. In 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History was published, bringing the scholarship up to date.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The current major problem in African studies that Mohamed (2010/2012) identified is the inherited religious, Orientalist, colonial paradigm that European Africanists have preserved in present-day secularist, post-colonial, Anglophone African historiography. African and African-American scholars also bear some responsibility in perpetuating this European Africanist preserved paradigm.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Following conceptualizations of Africa developed by Leo Africanus and Hegel, European Africanists conceptually separated continental Africa into two racialized regions – Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, as a racist geographic construction, serves as an objectified, compartmentalized region of \"Africa proper\", \"Africa noire,\" or \"Black Africa.\" The African diaspora is also considered to be a part of the same racialized construction as Sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa serves as a racialized region of \"European Africa\", which is conceptually disconnected from Sub-Saharan Africa, and conceptually connected to the Middle East, Asia, and the Islamic world.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "As a result of these racialized constructions and the conceptual separation of Africa, darker skinned North Africans, such as the so-called Haratin, who have long resided in the Maghreb, and do not reside south of Saharan Africa, have become analogically alienated from their indigeneity and historic reality in North Africa. While the origin of the term \"Haratin\" remains speculative, the term may not date much earlier than the 18th century CE and has been involuntarily assigned to darker skinned Maghrebians. Prior to the modern use of the term Haratin as an identifier, and used in contrast to bidan or bayd (white), sumr/asmar, suud/aswad, or Sudan/sudani (black/brown) were Arabic terms used as identifiers for darker skinned Maghrebians before the modern period. \"Haratin\" is considered to be an offensive term by the darker skinned Maghrebians it is intended to identify; for example, people in the southern region (e.g., Wad Noun, Draa) of Morocco consider it to be an offensive term. Despite its historicity and etymology being questionable, European colonialists and European Africanists have used the term Haratin as identifiers for groups of \"black\" and apparently \"mixed\" people found in Algeria, Mauritania, and Morocco.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Saadian invasion of the Songhai Empire serves as the precursor to later narratives that grouped darker skinned Maghrebians together and identified their origins as being Sub-Saharan West Africa. With gold serving as a motivation behind the Saadian invasion of the Songhai Empire, this made way for changes in latter behaviors toward dark-skinned Africans. As a result of changing behaviors toward dark-skinned Africans, darker skinned Maghrebians were forcibly recruited into the army of Ismail Ibn Sharif as the Black Guard, based on the claim of them having descended from enslaved peoples from the times of the Saadian invasion. Shurafa historians of the modern period would later use these events in narratives about the manumission of enslaved \"Hartani\" (a vague term, which, by merit of it needing further definition, is implicit evidence for its historicity being questionable). The narratives derived from Shurafa historians would later become analogically incorporated into the Americanized narratives (e.g., the trans-Saharan slave trade, imported enslaved Sub-Saharan West Africans, darker skinned Magrebian freedmen) of the present-day European Africanist paradigm.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "As opposed to having been developed through field research, the analogy in the present-day European Africanist paradigm, which conceptually alienates, dehistoricizes, and denaturalizes darker skinned North Africans in North Africa and darker skinned Africans throughout the Islamic world at-large, is primarily rooted in an Americanized textual tradition inherited from 19th century European Christian abolitionists. Consequently, reliable history, as opposed to an antiquated analogy-based history, for darker skinned North Africans and darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world are limited. Part of the textual tradition generally associates an inherited status of servant with dark skin (e.g., Negro labor, Negro cultivators, Negroid slaves, freedman). The European Africanist paradigm uses this as the primary reference point for its construction of origins narratives for darker skinned North Africans (e.g., imported slaves from Sub-Saharan West Africa). With darker skinned North Africans or darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world treated as an allegory of alterity, another part of the textual tradition is the trans-Saharan slave trade and their presence in these regions are treated as that of an African diaspora in North Africa and the Islamic world. Altogether, darker skinned North Africans (e.g., \"black\" and apparently \"mixed\" Maghrebians), darker skinned Africans in the Islamic world, the inherited status of servant associated with dark skin, and the trans-Saharan slave trade are conflated and modeled in analogy with African-Americans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The trans-Saharan slave trade has been used as a literary device in narratives that analogically explain the origins of darker skinned North Africans in North Africa and the Islamic world. Caravans have been equated with slave ships, and the amount of forcibly enslaved Africans transported across the Sahara are alleged to be numerically comparable to the considerably large amount of forcibly enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. The simulated narrative of comparable numbers is contradicted by the limited presence of darker skinned North Africans in the present-day Maghreb. As part of this simulated narrative, post-classical Egypt has also been characterized as having plantations. Another part of this simulated narrative is an Orientalist construction of hypersexualized Moors, concubines, and eunuchs. Concubines in harems have been used as an explanatory bridge between the allegation of comparable numbers of forcibly enslaved Africans and the limited amount of present-day darker skinned Maghrebians who have been characterized as their diasporic descendants. Eunuchs were characterized as sentinels who guarded these harems. The simulated narrative is also based on the major assumption that the indigenous peoples of the Maghreb were once purely white Berbers, who then became biracialized through miscegenation with black concubines (existing within a geographic racial binary of pale-skinned Moors residing further north, closer to the Mediterranean region, and dark-skinned Moors residing further south, closer to the Sahara). The religious polemical narrative involving the suffering of enslaved European Christians of the Barbary slave trade has also been adapted to fit the simulated narrative of a comparable number of enslaved Africans being transported by Muslim slaver caravans, from the south of Saharan Africa, into North Africa and the Islamic world.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Despite being an inherited part of the 19th century religious polemical narratives, the use of race in the secularist narrative of the present-day European Africanist paradigm has given the paradigm an appearance of possessing scientific quality. The religious polemical narrative (e.g., holy cause, hostile neologisms) of 19th century European abolitionists about Africa and Africans are silenced, but still preserved, in the secularist narratives of the present-day European Africanist paradigm. The Orientalist stereotyped hypersexuality of the Moors were viewed by 19th century European abolitionists as deriving from the Quran. The reference to times prior, often used in concert with biblical references, by 19th century European abolitionists, may indicate that realities described of Moors may have been literary fabrications. The purpose of these apparent literary fabrications may have been to affirm their view of the Bible as being greater than the Quran and to affirm the viewpoints held by the readers of their composed works. The adoption of 19th century European abolitionists' religious polemical narrative into the present-day European Africanist paradigm may have been due to its correspondence with the established textual tradition. The use of stereotyped hypersexuality for Moors are what 19th century European abolitionists and the present-day European Africanist paradigm have in common.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Due to a lack of considerable development in field research regarding enslavement in Islamic societies, this has resulted in the present-day European Africanist paradigm relying on unreliable estimates for the trans-Saharan slave trade. However, insufficient data has also used as a justification for continued use of the faulty present-day European Africanist paradigm. Darker skinned Maghrebians, particularly in Morocco, have grown weary of the lack of discretion foreign academics have shown toward them, bear resentment toward the way they have been depicted by foreign academics, and consequently, find the intended activities of foreign academics to be predictable. Rather than continuing to rely on the faulty present-day European Africanist paradigm, Mohamed (2012) recommends revising and improving the current Africanist paradigm (e.g., critical inspection of the origins and introduction of the present characterization of the Saharan caravan; reconsideration of what makes the trans-Saharan slave trade, within its own context in Africa, distinct from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; realistic consideration of the experiences of darker-skinned Maghrebians within their own regional context).",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Merolla (2017) has indicated that the academic study of Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa by Europeans developed with North Africa being conceptually subsumed within the Middle East and Arab world, whereas, the study of Sub-Saharan Africa was viewed as conceptually distinct from North Africa, and as its own region, viewed as inherently the same. The common pattern of conceptual separation of continental Africa into two regions and the view of conceptual sameness within the region of Sub-Saharan Africa has continued until present-day. Yet, with increasing exposure of this problem, discussion about the conceptual separation of Africa has begun to develop.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Sahara has served as a trans-regional zone for peoples in Africa. Authors from various countries (e.g., Algeria, Cameroon, Sudan) in Africa have critiqued the conceptualization of the Sahara as a regional barrier, and provided counter-arguments supporting the interconnectedness of continental Africa; there are historic and cultural connections as well as trade between West Africa, North Africa, and East Africa (e.g., North Africa with Niger and Mali, North Africa with Tanzania and Sudan, major hubs of Islamic learning in Niger and Mali). Africa has been conceptually compartmentalized into meaning \"Black Africa\", \"Africa South of the Sahara\", and \"Sub-Saharan Africa.\" North Africa has been conceptually \"Orientalized\" and separated from Sub-Saharan Africa. While its historic development has occurred within a longer time frame, the epistemic development (e.g., form, content) of the present-day racialized conceptual separation of Africa came as a result of the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In African and Berber literary studies, scholarship has remained largely separate from one another. The conceptual separation of Africa in these studies may be due to how editing policies of studies in the Anglophone and Francophone world are affected by the international politics of the Anglophone and Francophone world. While studies in the Anglophone world have more clearly followed the trend of the conceptual separation of Africa, the Francophone world has been more nuanced, which may stem from imperial policies relating to French colonialism in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. As the study of North Africa has largely been initiated by the Arabophone and Francophone world, denial of the Arabic language having become Africanized throughout the centuries it has been present in Africa has shown that the conceptual separation of Africa remains pervasive in the Francophone world; this denial may stem from historic development of the characterization of an Islamic Arabia existing as a diametric binary to Europe. Among studies in the Francophone world, ties between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa have been denied or downplayed, while the ties (e.g., religious, cultural) between the regions and peoples (e.g., Arab language and literature with Berber language and literature) of the Middle East and North Africa have been established by diminishing the differences between the two and selectively focusing on the similarities between the two. In the Francophone world, construction of racialized regions, such as Black Africa (Sub-Saharan Africans) and White Africa (North Africans, e.g., Berbers and Arabs), has also developed.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Despite having invoked and used identities in reference to the racialized conceptualizations of Africa (e.g., North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa) to oppose imposed identities, Berbers have invoked North African identity to oppose Arabized and Islamicized identities, and Sub-Saharan Africans (e.g., Negritude, Black Consciousness) and the African diaspora (e.g., Black is Beautiful) have invoked and used black identity to oppose colonialism and racism. While Berber studies has largely sought to establish ties between Berbers and North Africa with Arabs and the Middle East, Merolla (2017) indicated that efforts to establish ties between Berbers and North Africa with Sub-Saharan Africans and Sub-Saharan Africa have recently started to being undertaken.",
"title": "Historiography"
}
]
| The history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans and — around 300,000–250,000 years ago — anatomically modern humans, in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. The earliest known recorded history arose in Ancient Egypt, and later in Nubia, the Sahel, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa. Following the desertification of the Sahara, North African history became entwined with the Middle East and Southern Europe while the Bantu expansion swept from modern day Cameroon across much of the sub-Saharan continent in waves between around 1000 BC and 1 AD, creating a linguistic commonality across much of the central and Southern continent. During the Middle Ages, Islam spread west from Arabia to Egypt, crossing the Maghreb and the Sahel. Some notable pre-colonial states and societies in Africa include the Ajuran Empire, Bachwezi Empire, D'mt, Adal Sultanate, Alodia, Dagbon Kingdom, Warsangali Sultanate, Buganda Kingdom, Kingdom of Nri, Nok civilization, Mali Empire, Bono State, Songhai Empire, Benin Empire, Oyo Empire, Kingdom of Lunda (Punu-yaka), Ashanti Empire, Ghana Empire, Mossi Kingdoms, Mutapa Empire, Kingdom of Mapungubwe, Kingdom of Sine, Kingdom of Sennar, Kingdom of Saloum, Kingdom of Baol, Kingdom of Cayor, Kingdom of Zimbabwe, Kingdom of Kongo, Empire of Kaabu, Ife Empire, Ancient Carthage, Numidia, Mauretania, and the Aksumite Empire. At its peak, prior to European colonialism, it is estimated that Africa had up to 10,000 different states and autonomous groups with distinct languages and customs. From the late 15th century, Europeans joined the slave trade. That includes the triangular trade, with the Portuguese initially acquiring slaves through trade and later by force as part of the Atlantic slave trade. They transported enslaved West, Central, and Southern Africans overseas. Subsequently, European colonization of Africa developed rapidly from around 10% (1870) to over 90% (1914) in the Scramble for Africa (1881–1914). However following struggles for independence in many parts of the continent, as well as a weakened Europe after the Second World War (1939–1945), decolonization took place across the continent, culminating in the 1960 Year of Africa. Disciplines such as recording of oral history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and genetics have been vital in rediscovering the great African civilizations of antiquity. | 2001-11-10T22:02:33Z | 2023-12-25T21:26:40Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Africa |
14,104 | History of Oceania | The history of Oceania includes the history of Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea, and other Pacific island nations.
The prehistory of Oceania is divided into the prehistory of each of its major areas: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and these vary greatly as to when they were first inhabited by humans — from 70,000 years ago (Near Oceania) to 3,000 years ago (Remote Oceania).
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. Indigenous Australians migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago. The Torres Strait Islanders are indigenous to the Torres Strait Islands, which are at the northernmost tip of Queensland near Papua New Guinea. The term "Aboriginal" is traditionally applied to only the indigenous inhabitants of mainland Australia and Tasmania, along with some of the adjacent islands, i.e.: the "first peoples". Indigenous Australians is an inclusive term used when referring to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders.
The earliest definite human remains found to date are that of Mungo Man, which have been dated at about 40,000 years old, but the time of arrival of the ancestors of Indigenous Australians is a matter of debate among researchers, with estimates dating back as far as 125,000 years ago. There is great diversity among different Indigenous communities and societies in Australia, each with its own unique mixture of cultures, customs and languages. In present-day Australia these groups are further divided into local communities.
The first settlers of Australia, New Guinea, and the large islands just to the east arrived between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still roamed Europe. The original inhabitants of the group of islands now named Melanesia were likely the ancestors of the present-day Papuan-speaking people. Migrating from Southeast Asia, they appear to have occupied these islands as far east as the main islands in the Solomon Islands (archipelago), including Makira and possibly the smaller islands farther to the east.
Particularly along the north coast of New Guinea and in the islands north and east of New Guinea, the Austronesian peoples, who had migrated into the area somewhat more than 3,000 years ago, came into contact with these pre-existing populations of Papuan-speaking peoples. In the late 20th century, some academics proposed a long period of interaction that led to numerous complex changes in the peoples' genetics, languages, and cultures. Kayser, et al. proposed that, from this area, a very small group of people (speaking an Austronesian language) departed to the east to become the forebears of the Polynesian people.
However, the theory is contradicted by the findings of a genetic study published by Temple University in 2008; based on genome scans and evaluation of more than 800 genetic markers among a wide variety of Pacific peoples, it found that neither Polynesians nor Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians. Both groups are strongly related genetically to East Asians, particularly Taiwanese aborigines. It appeared that, having developed their sailing outrigger canoes, the Polynesian ancestors migrated from East Asia, moved through the Melanesian area quickly on their way, and kept going to eastern areas, where they settled. They left little genetic evidence in Melanesia.
The study found a high rate of genetic differentiation and diversity among the groups living within the Melanesian islands, with the peoples distinguished by island, language, topography, and geography among the islands. Such diversity developed over their tens of thousands of years of settlement before the Polynesian ancestors ever arrived at the islands. For instance, populations developed differently in coastal areas, as opposed to those in more isolated mountainous valleys.
Additional DNA analysis has taken research into new directions, as more human species have been discovered since the late 20th century. Based on his genetic studies of the Denisova hominin, an ancient human species discovered in 2010, Svante Pääbo claims that ancient human ancestors of the Melanesians interbred in Asia with these humans. He has found that people of New Guinea share 4–6% of their genome with the Denisovans, indicating this exchange. The Denisovans are considered cousin to the Neanderthals; both groups are now understood to have migrated out of Africa, with the Neanderthals going into Europe, and the Denisovans heading east about 400,000 years ago. This is based on genetic evidence from a fossil found in Siberia. The evidence from Melanesia suggests their territory extended into south Asia, where ancestors of the Melanesians developed.
Melanesians of some islands are one of the few non-European peoples, and the only dark-skinned group of people outside Australia, known to have blond hair.
Micronesia began to be settled several millennia ago, although there are competing theories about the origin and arrival of the first settlers. There are numerous difficulties with conducting archaeological excavations in the islands, due to their size, settlement patterns and storm damage. As a result, much evidence is based on linguistic analysis. The earliest archaeological traces of civilization have been found on the island of Saipan, dated to 1500 BCE or slightly before.
The ancestors of the Micronesians settled there over 4,000 years ago. A decentralized chieftain-based system eventually evolved into a more centralized economic and religious culture centered on Yap and Pohnpei. The prehistory of many Micronesian islands such as Yap are not known very well.
On Pohnpei, pre-colonial history is divided into three eras: Mwehin Kawa or Mwehin Aramas (Period of Building, or Period of Peopling, before c. 1100); Mwehin Sau Deleur (Period of the Lord of Deleur, c. 1100 to c. 1628); and Mwehin Nahnmwarki (Period of the Nahnmwarki, c. 1628 to c. 1885). Pohnpeian legend recounts that the Saudeleur rulers, the first to bring government to Pohnpei, were of foreign origin. The Saudeleur centralized form of absolute rule is characterized in Pohnpeian legend as becoming increasingly oppressive over several generations. Arbitrary and onerous demands, as well as a reputation for offending Pohnpeian deities, sowed resentment among Pohnpeians. The Saudeleur Dynasty ended with the invasion of Isokelekel, another semi-mythical foreigner, who replaced the Saudeleur rule with the more decentralized nahnmwarki system in existence today. Isokelekel is regarded as the creator of the modern Pohnpeian nahnmwarki social system and the father of the Pompeian people.
Construction of Nan Madol, a megalithic complex made from basalt lava logs in Pohnpei began as early as 1200 CE. Nan Madol is offshore of Temwen Island near Pohnpei, consists of a series of small artificial islands linked by a network of canals, and is often called the Venice of the Pacific. It is located near the island of Pohnpei and was the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur dynasty that united Pohnpei's estimated 25,000 people until its centralized system collapsed amid the invasion of Isokelekel. Isokelekel and his descendants initially occupied the stone city, but later abandoned it.
The first people of the Northern Mariana Islands navigated to the islands at some period between 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE from Southeast Asia. They became known as the Chamorros, and spoke an Austronesian language called Chamorro. The ancient Chamorro left a number of megalithic ruins, including Latte stone. The Refaluwasch or Carolinian people came to the Marianas in the 1800s from the Caroline Islands. Micronesian colonists gradually settled the Marshall Islands during the 2nd millennium BCE, with inter-island navigation made possible using traditional stick charts.
The Polynesians are considered to be by linguistic, archaeological, and human genetic ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian peoples and tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay Archipelago, and ultimately, in Taiwan. Between about 3000 and 1000 BCE speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia, as tribes whose natives were thought to have arrived through South China about 8,000 years ago to the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, although they are different from the Han Chinese who now form the majority of people in China and Taiwan. There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000) and are as follows:
In the archaeological record there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with some certainty. It is thought that by roughly 1400 BCE, "Lapita peoples", so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence "Out of Taiwan". They had given up rice production, for instance, after encountering and adapting to breadfruit in the Bird's Head area of New Guinea. In the end, the most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far has been through work on the archaeology in Samoa. The site is at Mulifanua on Upolu. The Mulifanua site, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found and studied, has a "true" age of c. 1000 BCE based on C14 dating. A 2010 study places the beginning of the human archaeological sequences of Polynesia in Tonga at 900 BCE, the small differences in dates with Samoa being due to differences in radiocarbon dating technologies between 1989 and 2010, the Tongan site apparently predating the Samoan site by some few decades in real time.
Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BCE, the Lapita archaeological culture spread 6,000 kilometres further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. The area of Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa served as a gateway into the rest of the Pacific region known as Polynesia. Ancient Tongan mythologies recorded by early European explorers report the islands of 'Ata and Tongatapu as the first islands being hauled to the surface from the deep ocean by Maui.
The "Tuʻi Tonga Empire" or "Tongan Empire" in Oceania are descriptions sometimes given to Tongan expansionism and projected hegemony dating back to 950 CE, but at its peak during the period 1200–1500. While modern researchers and cultural experts attest to widespread Tongan influence and evidences of transoceanic trade and exchange of material and non-material cultural artifacts, empirical evidence of a true political empire ruled for any length of time by successive rulers is lacking.
Modern archeology, anthropology and linguistic studies confirm widespread Tongan cultural influence ranging widely through East 'Uvea, Rotuma, Futuna, Samoa and Niue, parts of Micronesia (Kiribati, Pohnpei), Vanuatu, and New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, and while some academics prefer the term "maritime chiefdom", others argue that, while very different from examples elsewhere, ..."empire" is probably the most convenient term.
Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled before or around 3500 to 1000 BC, although the question of Pacific migration still lingers. It is believed that the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians settled the islands first but not much is known of what became of them after the Melanesians arrived; they may have had some influence on the new culture, and archaeological evidence shows that they would have then moved on to Tonga, Samoa, and even Hawai'i.
The first settlements in Fiji were started by voyaging traders and settlers from the west about 5000 years ago. Lapita pottery shards have been found at numerous excavations around the country. Aspects of Fijian culture are similar to the Melanesian culture of the western Pacific but have a stronger connection to the older Polynesian cultures. Across 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from east to west, Fiji has been a nation of many languages. Fiji's history was one of settlement but also of mobility.
Over the centuries, a unique Fijian culture developed. Constant warfare and cannibalism between warring tribes were quite rampant and very much part of everyday life. In later centuries, the ferocity of the cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going near Fijian waters, giving Fiji the name Cannibal Isles; as a result, Fiji remained unknown to the rest of the world.
Early European visitors to Easter Island recorded the local oral traditions about the original settlers. In these traditions, Easter Islanders claimed that a chief Hotu Matuꞌa arrived on the island in one or two large canoes with his wife and extended family. They are believed to have been Polynesian. There is considerable uncertainty about the accuracy of this legend as well as the date of settlement. Published literature suggests the island was settled around 300–400 CE, or at about the time of the arrival of the earliest settlers in Hawaii.
Some scientists say that Easter Island was not inhabited until 700–800 CE. This date range is based on glottochronological calculations and on three radiocarbon dates from charcoal that appears to have been produced during forest clearance activities.
Moreover, a recent study which included radiocarbon dates from what is thought to be very early material suggests that the island was settled as recently as 1200 CE. This seems to be supported by a 2006 study of the island's deforestation, which could have started around the same time. A large now extinct palm, Paschalococos disperta, related to the Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis), was one of the dominant trees as attested by fossil evidence; this species, whose sole occurrence was Easter Island, became extinct due to deforestation by the early settlers.
Oceania was first explored by Europeans from the 16th century onwards. Portuguese navigators, between 1512 and 1526, reached the Moluccas (by António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão in 1512), Timor, the Aru Islands (Martim A. Melo Coutinho), the Tanimbar Islands, some of the Caroline Islands (by Gomes de Sequeira in 1525), and west Papua New Guinea (by Jorge de Menezes in 1526). In 1519 a Castilian ('Spanish') expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan sailed down the east coast of South America, found and sailed through the strait that bears his name and on 28 November 1520 entered the ocean which he named "Pacific". The three remaining ships, led by Magellan and his captains Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, then sailed north and caught the trade winds which carried them across the Pacific to the Philippines where Magellan was killed. One surviving ship led by Juan Sebastián Elcano returned west across the Indian Ocean and the other went north in the hope of finding the westerlies and reaching Mexico. Unable to find the right winds, it was forced to return to the East Indies. The Magellan-Elcano expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of the world and reached the Philippines, the Mariana Islands and other islands of Oceania.
From 1527 to 1595 a number of other large Spanish expeditions crossed the Pacific Ocean, leading to the discovery of the Marshall Islands and Palau in the North Pacific, as well as Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Solomon Islands archipelago, the Cook Islands and the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific.
In 1565, Spanish navigator Andrés de Urdaneta found a wind system that would allow ships to sail eastward from Asia, back to the Americas. From then until 1815 the annual Manila galleons crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and back, in the first transpacific trade route in history. Combined with the Spanish Atlantic or West Indies Fleet, the Manila galleons formed one of the first global maritime exchange in human history, linking Seville in Spain with Manila in the Philippines, via Mexico.
Later, in the quest for Terra Australis, Spanish explorers in the 17th century discovered the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos, and sailed the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, named after navigator Luís Vaz de Torres. In 1668 the Spanish founded a colony on Guam as a resting place for west-bound galleons. For a long time this was the only non-coastal European settlement in the Pacific.
The Dutch were the first non-natives to undisputedly explore and chart coastlines of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and Easter Island. Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (or VOC) was a major force behind the Golden Age of Dutch exploration (category; c. 1590s–1720s) and Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s). In the 17th century, the VOC's navigators and explorers charted almost three-quarters of the Australian coastline, except the east coast.
Abel Tasman was the first known European explorer to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and New Zealand, and to sight the Fiji islands. His navigator François Visscher, and his merchant Isaack Gilsemans, mapped substantial portions of Australia, New Zealand, Tonga and the Fijian islands.
On 24 November 1642 Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania, north of Macquarie Harbour. He named his discovery Van Diemen's Land after Antonio van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. then claimed formal possession of the land on 3 December 1642.
After some exploration, Tasman had intended to proceed in a northerly direction but as the wind was unfavourable he steered east. On 13 December they sighted land on the north-west coast of the South Island, New Zealand, becoming the first Europeans to do so. Tasman named it Staten Landt on the assumption that it was connected to an island (Staten Island, Argentina) at the south of the tip of South America. Proceeding north and then east, he stopped to gather water, but one of his boats was attacked by Māori in a double hulled waka (canoes) and four of his men were attacked and killed by mere. As Tasman sailed out of the bay he was again attacked, this time by 11 waka . The waka approached the Zeehan which fired and hit one Māori who fell down. Canister shot hit the side of a waka.
Archeological research has shown the Dutch had tried to land at a major agricultural area, which the Māori may have been trying to protect. Tasman named the bay Murderers' Bay (now known as Golden Bay) and sailed north, but mistook Cook Strait for a bight (naming it Zeehaen's Bight). Two names he gave to New Zealand landmarks still endure, Cape Maria van Diemen and Three Kings Islands, but Kaap Pieter Boreels was renamed by Cook 125 years later to Cape Egmont. En route back to Batavia, Tasman came across the Tongan archipelago on 20 January 1643. While passing the Fiji Islands Tasman's ships came close to being wrecked on the dangerous reefs of the north-eastern part of the Fiji group. He charted the eastern tip of Vanua Levu and Cikobia before making his way back into the open sea. He eventually turned north-west to New Guinea, and arrived at Batavia on 15 June 1643. For over a century after Tasman's voyages, until the era of James Cook, Tasmania and New Zealand were not visited by Europeans—mainland Australia was visited, but usually only by accident.
In 1766 the Royal Society engaged James Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. The expedition sailed from England on 26 August 1768, rounded Cape Horn and continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahiti on 13 April 1769, where the observations of the Venus Transit were made. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened the sealed orders which were additional instructions from the Admiralty for the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis.
With the help of a Tahitian named Tupaia, who had extensive knowledge of Pacific geography, Cook managed to reach New Zealand on 6 October 1769, leading only the second group of Europeans to do so (after Abel Tasman over a century earlier, in 1642). Cook mapped the complete New Zealand coastline, making only some minor errors (such as calling Banks Peninsula an island, and thinking Stewart Island/Rakiura was a peninsula of the South Island). He also identified Cook Strait, which separates the North Island from the South Island, and which Tasman had not seen.
Cook then voyaged west, reaching the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline. On 23 April he made his first recorded direct observation of indigenous Australians at Brush Island near Bawley Point, noting in his journal: "…and were so near the Shore as to distinguish several people upon the Sea beach they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not." On 29 April Cook and crew made their first landfall on the mainland of the continent at a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula. It is here that James Cook made first contact with an aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal.
After his departure from Botany Bay he continued northwards. After a grounding mishap on the Great Barrier Reef, the voyage continued, sailing through Torres Strait before returning to England via Batavia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Saint Helena.
In 1772 the Royal Society commissioned Cook to search for the hypothetical Terra Australis again. On his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger landmass to the south. Although he charted almost the entire eastern coastline of Australia, showing it to be continental in size, the Terra Australis was believed by the Royal Society to lie further south.
Cook commanded HMS Resolution on this voyage, while Tobias Furneaux commanded its companion ship, HMS Adventure. Cook's expedition circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle (17 January 1773). In the Antarctic fog, Resolution and Adventure became separated. Furneaux made his way to New Zealand, where he lost some of his men during an encounter with Māori, and eventually sailed back to Britain, while Cook continued to explore the Antarctic, reaching 71°10'S on 31 January 1774.
Cook almost encountered the mainland of Antarctica, but turned towards Tahiti to resupply his ship. He then resumed his southward course in a second fruitless attempt to find the supposed continent. On this leg of the voyage he brought a young Tahitian named Omai, who proved to be somewhat less knowledgeable about the Pacific than Tupaia had been on the first voyage. On his return voyage to New Zealand in 1774, Cook landed at the Friendly Islands, Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu.
Before returning to England, Cook made a final sweep across the South Atlantic from Cape Horn. He then turned north to South Africa, and from there continued back to England. His reports upon his return home put to rest the popular myth of Terra Australis.
On his last voyage, Cook again commanded HMS Resolution, while Captain Charles Clerke commanded HMS Discovery. The voyage was ostensibly planned to return the Pacific Islander, Omai to Tahiti, or so the public were led to believe. The trip's principal goal was to locate a North-West Passage around the American continent. After dropping Omai at Tahiti, Cook travelled north and in 1778 became the first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands. After his initial landfall in January 1778 at Waimea harbour, Kauai, Cook named the archipelago the "Sandwich Islands" after the fourth Earl of Sandwich—the acting First Lord of the Admiralty.
From the Sandwich Islands Cook sailed north and then north-east to explore the west coast of North America north of the Spanish settlements in Alta California. Cook explored and mapped the coast all the way to the Bering Strait, on the way identifying what came to be known as Cook Inlet in Alaska. In a single visit, Cook charted the majority of the North American north-west coastline on world maps for the first time, determined the extent of Alaska, and closed the gaps in Russian (from the West) and Spanish (from the South) exploratory probes of the Northern limits of the Pacific.
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. After sailing around the archipelago for some eight weeks, he made landfall at Kealakekua Bay, on 'Hawaii Island', largest island in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Cook's arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the Polynesian god Lono. Coincidentally the form of Cook's ship, HMS Resolution, or more particularly the mast formation, sails and rigging, resembled certain significant artefacts that formed part of the season of worship. Similarly, Cook's clockwise route around the island of Hawaii before making landfall resembled the processions that took place in a clockwise direction around the island during the Lono festivals. It has been argued (most extensively by Marshall Sahlins) that such coincidences were the reasons for Cook's (and to a limited extent, his crew's) initial deification by some Hawaiians who treated Cook as an incarnation of Lono. Though this view was first suggested by members of Cook's expedition, the idea that any Hawaiians understood Cook to be Lono, and the evidence presented in support of it, were challenged in 1992.
After a month's stay, Cook resumed his exploration of the Northern Pacific. Shortly after leaving Hawaii Island, however, the Resolution's foremast broke, so the ships returned to Kealakekua Bay for repairs. Tensions rose, and a number of quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians. On 14 February 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, some Hawaiians took one of Cook's small boats. As thefts were quite common in Tahiti and the other islands, Cook would have taken hostages until the stolen articles were returned. He attempted to take as hostage the King of Hawaiʻi, Kalaniʻōpuʻu. The Hawaiians prevented this, and Cook's men had to retreat to the beach. As Cook turned his back to help launch the boats, he was struck on the head by the villagers and then stabbed to death as he fell on his face in the surf. Hawaiian tradition says that he was killed by a chief named Kalaimanokahoʻowaha or Kanaʻina. The Hawaiians dragged his body away. Four of Cook's men were also killed and two others were wounded in the confrontation.
The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook's remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.
Clerke assumed leadership of the expedition. Following the death of Clerke, Resolution and Discovery returned home in October 1780 commanded by John Gore, a veteran of Cook's first voyage, and Captain James King. After their arrival in England, King completed Cook's account of the voyage.
In 1789 the Mutiny on the Bounty against William Bligh led to several of the mutineers escaping the Royal Navy and settling on Pitcairn Islands, which later became a British colony. Britain also established colonies in Australia in 1788, New Zealand in 1840 and Fiji in 1872, with much of Oceania becoming part of the British Empire.
The Gilbert Islands (now known as Kiribati) and the Ellice Islands (now known as Tuvalu) came under Britain's sphere of influence in the late 19th century. The Ellice Islands were administered as British protectorate by a Resident Commissioner from 1892 to 1916 as part of the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT), and later as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony from 1916 to 1974.
Among the last islands in Oceania to be colonised was Niue (1900). In 1887, King Fata-a-iki, who reigned Niue from 1887 to 1896, offered to cede sovereignty to the British Empire, fearing the consequences of annexation by a less benevolent colonial power. The offer was not accepted until 1900. Niue was a British protectorate, but the UK's direct involvement ended in 1901 when New Zealand annexed the island.
French Catholic missionaries arrived on Tahiti in 1834; their expulsion in 1836 caused France to send a gunboat in 1838. In 1842, Tahiti and Tahuata were declared a French protectorate, to allow Catholic missionaries to work undisturbed. The capital of Papeetē was founded in 1843. In 1880, France annexed Tahiti, changing the status from that of a protectorate to that of a colony.
On 24 September 1853, under orders from Napoleon III, Admiral Febvrier Despointes took formal possession of New Caledonia and Port-de-France (Nouméa) was founded 25 June 1854. A few dozen free settlers settled on the west coast in the following years. New Caledonia became a penal colony, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, about 22,000 criminals and political prisoners were sent to New Caledonia, among them many Communards, including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel. Between 1873 and 1876, 4,200 political prisoners were "relegated" in New Caledonia. Only forty of them settled in the colony, the rest returned to France after being granted amnesty in 1879 and 1880.
In the 1880s, France claimed the Tuamotu Archipelago, which formerly belonged to the Pōmare Dynasty, without formally annexing it. Having declared a protectorate over Tahuata in 1842, the French regarded the entire Marquesas Islands as French. In 1885, France appointed a governor and established a general council, thus giving it the proper administration for a colony. The islands of Rimatara and Rūrutu unsuccessfully lobbied for British protection in 1888, so in 1889 they were annexed by France. Postage stamps were first issued in the colony in 1892. The first official name for the colony was Établissements de l'Océanie (Settlements in Oceania); in 1903 the general council was changed to an advisory council and the colony's name was changed to Établissements Français de l'Océanie (French Settlements in Oceania).
The Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar landed in the Marshall Islands in 1529. They were later named by Krusenstern, after English explorer John Marshall, who visited them together with Thomas Gilbert in 1788, en route from Botany Bay to Canton (two ships of the First Fleet).
In November 1770, Felipe González de Ahedo commanded an expedition from the Viceroyalty of Peru that searched for Davis Land and Madre de Dios Island and looked for foreign naval activities. This expedition landed on Isla de San Carlos (Easter Island) and signed a treaty of annexion with the Rapa Nui chiefs.
In 1606 Luís Vaz de Torres explored the southern coast of New Guinea from Milne Bay to the Gulf of Papua including Orangerie Bay which he named Bahía de San Lorenzo. His expedition also discovered Basilaki Island naming it Tierra de San Buenaventura, which he claimed for Spain in July 1606. On 18 October his expedition reached the western part of the island in present-day Indonesia, and also claimed the territory for the King of Spain.
A successive European claim occurred in 1828, when the Netherlands formally claimed the western half of the island as Dutch New Guinea. In 1883, following a short-lived French annexation of New Ireland, the British colony of Queensland annexed south-eastern New Guinea. However, the Queensland government's superiors in the United Kingdom revoked the claim, and (formally) assumed direct responsibility in 1884, when Germany claimed north-eastern New Guinea as the protectorate of German New Guinea (also called Kaiser-Wilhelmsland).
The first Dutch government posts were established in 1898 and in 1902: Manokwari on the north coast, Fak-Fak in the west and Merauke in the south at the border with British New Guinea. The German, Dutch and British colonial administrators each attempted to suppress the still-widespread practices of inter-village warfare and headhunting within their respective territories.
In 1905 the British government transferred some administrative responsibility over south-east New Guinea to Australia (which renamed the area "Territory of Papua"); and in 1906, transferred all remaining responsibility to Australia. During World War I, Australian forces seized German New Guinea, which in 1920 became the Territory of New Guinea, to be administered by Australia under a League of Nations mandate. The territories under Australian administration became collectively known as The Territories of Papua and New Guinea (until February 1942).
Germany established colonies in New Guinea in 1884 and Samoa in 1900.
Following papal mediation and German compensation of $4.5 million, Spain recognized a German claim in 1885. Germany established a protectorate and set up trading stations on the islands of Jaluit and Ebon to carry out the flourishing copra (dried coconut meat) trade. Marshallese Iroij (high chiefs) continued to rule under indirect colonial German administration.
The United States also expanded into the Pacific, beginning with Baker Island and Howland Island in 1857, and with Hawaii becoming a U.S. territory in 1898. Disagreements between the US, Germany and UK over Samoa led to the Tripartite Convention of 1899.
Samoa aligned its interests with the United States in a Deed of Succession, signed by the Tui Manúʻa (supreme chief of Manúʻa) on 16 July 1904 at the Crown residence of the Tuimanuʻa called the Faleula in the place called Lalopua (from Official documents of the Tuimanuʻa government, 1893; Office of the Governor, 2004).
Cession followed the Tripartite Convention of 1899 that partitioned the eastern islands of Samoa (including Tutuila and the Manúʻa Group) from the western islands of Samoa (including ʻUpolu and Savaiʻi).
At the beginning of World War I, Japan assumed control of the Marshall Islands. The Japanese headquarters was established at the German center of administration, Jaluit. On 31 January 1944, during World War II, American forces landed on Kwajalein atoll and U.S. Marines and Army troops later took control of the islands from the Japanese on 3 February, following intense fighting on Kwajalein and Enewetak atolls. In 1947, the United States, as the occupying power, entered into an agreement with the UN Security Council to administer much of Micronesia, including the Marshall Islands, as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
During World War II, Japan colonised many Oceanic colonies by wresting control from western powers.
The Samoan Crisis was a confrontation standoff between the United States, Imperial Germany, and the British Empire from 1887 to 1889 over control of the Samoan Islands during the Samoan Civil War.
The prime minister of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Walter M. Gibson, had long aimed to establishing an empire in the Pacific. In 1887 his government sent the "homemade battleship" Kaimiloa to Samoa looking for an alliance against colonial powers. It ended in suspicions from the German Navy and embarrassment for the conduct of the crew.
The 1889 incident involved three American warships, USS Vandalia, USS Trenton and USS Nipsic and three German warships, SMS Adler, SMS Olga, and SMS Eber, keeping each other at bay over several months in Apia harbor, which was monitored by the British warship HMS Calliope.
The standoff ended on 15 and 16 March when a cyclone wrecked all six warships in the harbor. Calliope was able to escape the harbor and survived the storm. Robert Louis Stevenson witnessed the storm and its aftermath at Apia and later wrote about what he saw. The Samoan Civil War continued, involving Germany, United States, and Britain, eventually resulting, via the Tripartite Convention of 1899, in the partition of the Samoan Islands into American Samoa and German Samoa.
The Asian and Pacific Theatre of World War I was a conquest of German colonial possession in the Pacific Ocean and China. The most significant military action was the Siege of Tsingtao in what is now China, but smaller actions were also fought at Battle of Bita Paka and Siege of Toma in German New Guinea.
All other German and Austrian possessions in Asia and the Pacific fell without bloodshed. Naval warfare was common; all of the colonial powers had naval squadrons stationed in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. These fleets operated by supporting the invasions of German held territories and by destroying the East Asia Squadron.
One of the first land offensives in the Pacific theatre was the Occupation of German Samoa in August 1914 by New Zealand forces. The campaign to take Samoa ended without bloodshed after over 1,000 New Zealanders landed on the German colony, supported by an Australian and French naval squadron.
Australian forces attacked German New Guinea in September 1914: 500 Australians encountered 300 Germans and native policemen at the Battle of Bita Paka; the Allies won the day and the Germans retreated to Toma. A company of Australians and a British warship besieged the Germans and their colonial subjects, ending with a German surrender.
After the fall of Toma, only minor German forces were left in New Guinea and these generally capitulated once met by Australian forces. In December 1914, one German officer near Angorum attempted resist the occupation with thirty native police but his force deserted him after they fired on an Australian scouting party and he was subsequently captured.
German Micronesia, the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshall Islands also fell to Allied forces during the war.
The Pacific front saw major action during the Second World War, mainly between the belligerents Japan and the United States.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of 7 December 1941 (8 December in Japan). The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II.
The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in South-East Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. There were simultaneous Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
The Japanese subsequently invaded New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and other Pacific islands. The Japanese were turned back at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Kokoda Track campaign before they were finally defeated in 1945.
Some of the most prominent Oceanic battlegrounds were the Solomon Islands campaign, the Air raids on Darwin, the Kokada Track, and the Borneo campaign.
In 1940 the administration of French Polynesia recognized the Free French Forces and many Polynesians served in World War II. Unknown at the time to French and Polynesians, the Konoe Cabinet in Imperial Japan on 16 September 1940 included French Polynesia among the many territories which were to become Japanese possessions in the post-war world—though in the course of the war in the Pacific the Japanese were not able to launch an actual invasion of the French islands.
Some of the most intense fighting of the Second World War occurred in the Solomons. The most significant of the Allied Forces' operations against the Japanese Imperial Forces was launched on 7 August 1942, with simultaneous naval bombardments and amphibious landings on the Florida Islands at Tulagi and Red Beach on Guadalcanal.
The Guadalcanal Campaign became an important and bloody campaign fought in the Pacific War as the Allies began to repulse Japanese expansion. Of strategic importance during the war were the coastwatchers operating in remote locations, often on Japanese held islands, providing early warning and intelligence of Japanese naval, army and aircraft movements during the campaign.
"The Slot" was a name for New Georgia Sound, when it was used by the Tokyo Express to supply the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal. Of more than 36,000 Japanese on Guadalcanal, about 26,000 were killed or missing, 9,000 died of disease, and 1,000 were captured.
The Kokoda Track campaign was a campaign consisting of a series of battles fought between July and November 1942 between Japanese and Allied—primarily Australian—forces in what was then the Australian territory of Papua. Following a landing near Gona, on the north coast of New Guinea, Japanese forces attempted to advance south overland through the mountains of the Owen Stanley Range to seize Port Moresby as part of a strategy of isolating Australia from the United States. Initially only limited Australian forces were available to oppose them, and after making rapid progress the Japanese South Seas Force clashed with under strength Australian forces at Awala, forcing them back to Kokoda. A number of Japanese attacks were subsequently fought off by the Australian Militia, yet they began to withdraw over the Owen Stanley Range, down the Kokoda Track.
In sight of Port Moresby itself, the Japanese began to run out of momentum against the Australians who began to receive further reinforcements. Having outrun their supply lines and following the reverses suffered by the Japanese at Guadalcanal, the Japanese were now on the defensive, marking the limit of the Japanese advance southwards. The Japanese subsequently withdrew to establish a defensive position on the north coast, but they were followed by the Australians who recaptured Kokoda on 2 November. Further fighting continued into November and December as the Australian and United States forces assaulted the Japanese beachheads, in what later became known as the Battle of Buna–Gona.
Due to its low population, Oceania was a popular location for atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. Tests were conducted in various locations by the United Kingdom (Operation Grapple and Operation Antler), the United States (Bikini atoll and the Marshall Islands) and France (Moruroa), often with devastating consequences for the inhabitants.
From 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands served as the Pacific Proving Grounds for the United States, and was the site of 67 nuclear tests on various atolls. The world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed "Mike", was tested at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 November (local date) in 1952, by the United States.
In 1954, fallout from the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands was such that the inhabitants of the Rongelap Atoll were forced to abandon their island. Three years later the islanders were allowed to return, but suffered abnormally high levels of cancer. They were evacuated again in 1985 and in 1996 given $45 million in compensation.
A series of British tests were also conducted in the 1950s at Maralinga in South Australia, forcing the removal of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples from their ancestral homelands.
In 1962, France's early nuclear testing ground of Algeria became independent and the atoll of Moruroa in the Tuamotu Archipelago was selected as the new testing site. Moruroa atoll became notorious as a site of French nuclear testing, primarily because tests were carried out there after most Pacific testing had ceased. These tests were opposed by most other nations in Oceania. The last atmospheric test was conducted in 1974, and the last underground test in 1996.
French nuclear testing in the Pacific was controversial in the 1980s, in 1985 French agents caused the Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland to prevent it from arriving at the test site in Moruroa. In September 1995, France stirred up widespread protests by resuming nuclear testing at Fangataufa atoll after a three-year moratorium. The last test was on 27 January 1996. On 29 January 1996, France announced that it would accede to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and no longer test nuclear weapons.
Fiji has suffered several coups d'état: military in 1987 and 2006 and civilian in 2000. All were ultimately due to ethnic tension between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, who originally came to the islands as indentured labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 1987 coup followed the election of a multi-ethnic coalition, which Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka overthrew, claiming racial discrimination against ethnic Fijians. The coup was denounced by the United Nations and Fiji was expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations.
The 2000 coup was essentially a repeat of the 1987 affair, although it was led by civilian George Speight, apparently with military support. Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who was opposed to Speight, then took over and appointed a new Prime Minister. Speight was later tried and convicted for treason. Many indigenous Fijians were unhappy at the treatment of Speight and his supporters, feeling that the coup had been legitimate. In 2006 the Fijian parliament attempted to introduce a series of bills which would have, amongst other things, pardoned those involved in the 2000 coup. Bainimarama, concerned that the legal and racial injustices of the previous coups would be perpetuated, staged his own coup. It was internationally condemned, and Fiji again suspended from the Commonwealth.
In 2006 the then Australia Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, warned Fijian officials of an Australian Naval fleet within proximity of Fiji that would respond to any attacks against its citizens.
The Australian government estimated that anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people could have died in the Bougainville Civil War. More conservative estimates put the number of combat deaths as 1–2,000.
From 1975, there were attempts by the Bougainville Province to secede from Papua New Guinea. These were resisted by Papua New Guinea primarily because of the presence in Bougainville of the Panguna mine, which was vital to Papua New Guinea's economy. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army began attacking the mine in 1988, forcing its closure the following year. Further BRA activity led to the declaration of a state of emergency and the conflict continued until about 2005, when successionist leader and self-proclaimed King of Bougainville Francis Ona died of malaria. Peacekeeping troops led by Australia have been in the region since the late 1990s, and a referendum on independence will be held in the 2010s.
In 1946, French Polynesians were granted French citizenship and the islands' status was changed to an overseas territory; the islands' name was changed in 1957 to Polynésie Française (French Polynesia).
Australia and New Zealand became dominions in the 20th century, adopting the Statute of Westminster Act in 1942 and 1947 respectively, marking their legislative independence from the United Kingdom. Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959.
Samoa became the first pacific nation to gain independence in 1962, Fiji and Tonga became independent in 1970, with many other nations following in the 1970s and 1980s. The South Pacific Forum was founded in 1971, which became the Pacific Islands Forum in 2000. Bougainville Island, geographically part of the Solomon Islands archipelago but politically part of Papua New Guinea, tried unsuccessfully to become independent in 1975, and a civil war followed in the early 1990s, with it later being granted autonomy.
On 1 May 1979, in recognition of the evolving political status of the Marshall Islands, the United States recognized the constitution of the Marshall Islands and the establishment of the Government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The constitution incorporates both American and British constitutional concepts.
In 1852, French Polynesia was granted partial internal autonomy; in 1984, the autonomy was extended. French Polynesia became a full overseas collectivity of France in 2004.
Between 2001 and 2007 Australia's Pacific Solution policy transferred asylum seekers to several Pacific nations, including the Nauru detention centre. Australia, New Zealand and other nations took part in the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands from 2003 after a request for aid. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Oceania includes the history of Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea, and other Pacific island nations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The prehistory of Oceania is divided into the prehistory of each of its major areas: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and these vary greatly as to when they were first inhabited by humans — from 70,000 years ago (Near Oceania) to 3,000 years ago (Remote Oceania).",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. Indigenous Australians migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago. The Torres Strait Islanders are indigenous to the Torres Strait Islands, which are at the northernmost tip of Queensland near Papua New Guinea. The term \"Aboriginal\" is traditionally applied to only the indigenous inhabitants of mainland Australia and Tasmania, along with some of the adjacent islands, i.e.: the \"first peoples\". Indigenous Australians is an inclusive term used when referring to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The earliest definite human remains found to date are that of Mungo Man, which have been dated at about 40,000 years old, but the time of arrival of the ancestors of Indigenous Australians is a matter of debate among researchers, with estimates dating back as far as 125,000 years ago. There is great diversity among different Indigenous communities and societies in Australia, each with its own unique mixture of cultures, customs and languages. In present-day Australia these groups are further divided into local communities.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first settlers of Australia, New Guinea, and the large islands just to the east arrived between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still roamed Europe. The original inhabitants of the group of islands now named Melanesia were likely the ancestors of the present-day Papuan-speaking people. Migrating from Southeast Asia, they appear to have occupied these islands as far east as the main islands in the Solomon Islands (archipelago), including Makira and possibly the smaller islands farther to the east.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Particularly along the north coast of New Guinea and in the islands north and east of New Guinea, the Austronesian peoples, who had migrated into the area somewhat more than 3,000 years ago, came into contact with these pre-existing populations of Papuan-speaking peoples. In the late 20th century, some academics proposed a long period of interaction that led to numerous complex changes in the peoples' genetics, languages, and cultures. Kayser, et al. proposed that, from this area, a very small group of people (speaking an Austronesian language) departed to the east to become the forebears of the Polynesian people.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "However, the theory is contradicted by the findings of a genetic study published by Temple University in 2008; based on genome scans and evaluation of more than 800 genetic markers among a wide variety of Pacific peoples, it found that neither Polynesians nor Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians. Both groups are strongly related genetically to East Asians, particularly Taiwanese aborigines. It appeared that, having developed their sailing outrigger canoes, the Polynesian ancestors migrated from East Asia, moved through the Melanesian area quickly on their way, and kept going to eastern areas, where they settled. They left little genetic evidence in Melanesia.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The study found a high rate of genetic differentiation and diversity among the groups living within the Melanesian islands, with the peoples distinguished by island, language, topography, and geography among the islands. Such diversity developed over their tens of thousands of years of settlement before the Polynesian ancestors ever arrived at the islands. For instance, populations developed differently in coastal areas, as opposed to those in more isolated mountainous valleys.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Additional DNA analysis has taken research into new directions, as more human species have been discovered since the late 20th century. Based on his genetic studies of the Denisova hominin, an ancient human species discovered in 2010, Svante Pääbo claims that ancient human ancestors of the Melanesians interbred in Asia with these humans. He has found that people of New Guinea share 4–6% of their genome with the Denisovans, indicating this exchange. The Denisovans are considered cousin to the Neanderthals; both groups are now understood to have migrated out of Africa, with the Neanderthals going into Europe, and the Denisovans heading east about 400,000 years ago. This is based on genetic evidence from a fossil found in Siberia. The evidence from Melanesia suggests their territory extended into south Asia, where ancestors of the Melanesians developed.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Melanesians of some islands are one of the few non-European peoples, and the only dark-skinned group of people outside Australia, known to have blond hair.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Micronesia began to be settled several millennia ago, although there are competing theories about the origin and arrival of the first settlers. There are numerous difficulties with conducting archaeological excavations in the islands, due to their size, settlement patterns and storm damage. As a result, much evidence is based on linguistic analysis. The earliest archaeological traces of civilization have been found on the island of Saipan, dated to 1500 BCE or slightly before.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The ancestors of the Micronesians settled there over 4,000 years ago. A decentralized chieftain-based system eventually evolved into a more centralized economic and religious culture centered on Yap and Pohnpei. The prehistory of many Micronesian islands such as Yap are not known very well.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On Pohnpei, pre-colonial history is divided into three eras: Mwehin Kawa or Mwehin Aramas (Period of Building, or Period of Peopling, before c. 1100); Mwehin Sau Deleur (Period of the Lord of Deleur, c. 1100 to c. 1628); and Mwehin Nahnmwarki (Period of the Nahnmwarki, c. 1628 to c. 1885). Pohnpeian legend recounts that the Saudeleur rulers, the first to bring government to Pohnpei, were of foreign origin. The Saudeleur centralized form of absolute rule is characterized in Pohnpeian legend as becoming increasingly oppressive over several generations. Arbitrary and onerous demands, as well as a reputation for offending Pohnpeian deities, sowed resentment among Pohnpeians. The Saudeleur Dynasty ended with the invasion of Isokelekel, another semi-mythical foreigner, who replaced the Saudeleur rule with the more decentralized nahnmwarki system in existence today. Isokelekel is regarded as the creator of the modern Pohnpeian nahnmwarki social system and the father of the Pompeian people.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Construction of Nan Madol, a megalithic complex made from basalt lava logs in Pohnpei began as early as 1200 CE. Nan Madol is offshore of Temwen Island near Pohnpei, consists of a series of small artificial islands linked by a network of canals, and is often called the Venice of the Pacific. It is located near the island of Pohnpei and was the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur dynasty that united Pohnpei's estimated 25,000 people until its centralized system collapsed amid the invasion of Isokelekel. Isokelekel and his descendants initially occupied the stone city, but later abandoned it.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The first people of the Northern Mariana Islands navigated to the islands at some period between 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE from Southeast Asia. They became known as the Chamorros, and spoke an Austronesian language called Chamorro. The ancient Chamorro left a number of megalithic ruins, including Latte stone. The Refaluwasch or Carolinian people came to the Marianas in the 1800s from the Caroline Islands. Micronesian colonists gradually settled the Marshall Islands during the 2nd millennium BCE, with inter-island navigation made possible using traditional stick charts.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Polynesians are considered to be by linguistic, archaeological, and human genetic ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian peoples and tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay Archipelago, and ultimately, in Taiwan. Between about 3000 and 1000 BCE speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia, as tribes whose natives were thought to have arrived through South China about 8,000 years ago to the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, although they are different from the Han Chinese who now form the majority of people in China and Taiwan. There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000) and are as follows:",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the archaeological record there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with some certainty. It is thought that by roughly 1400 BCE, \"Lapita peoples\", so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence \"Out of Taiwan\". They had given up rice production, for instance, after encountering and adapting to breadfruit in the Bird's Head area of New Guinea. In the end, the most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far has been through work on the archaeology in Samoa. The site is at Mulifanua on Upolu. The Mulifanua site, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found and studied, has a \"true\" age of c. 1000 BCE based on C14 dating. A 2010 study places the beginning of the human archaeological sequences of Polynesia in Tonga at 900 BCE, the small differences in dates with Samoa being due to differences in radiocarbon dating technologies between 1989 and 2010, the Tongan site apparently predating the Samoan site by some few decades in real time.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BCE, the Lapita archaeological culture spread 6,000 kilometres further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. The area of Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa served as a gateway into the rest of the Pacific region known as Polynesia. Ancient Tongan mythologies recorded by early European explorers report the islands of 'Ata and Tongatapu as the first islands being hauled to the surface from the deep ocean by Maui.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The \"Tuʻi Tonga Empire\" or \"Tongan Empire\" in Oceania are descriptions sometimes given to Tongan expansionism and projected hegemony dating back to 950 CE, but at its peak during the period 1200–1500. While modern researchers and cultural experts attest to widespread Tongan influence and evidences of transoceanic trade and exchange of material and non-material cultural artifacts, empirical evidence of a true political empire ruled for any length of time by successive rulers is lacking.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Modern archeology, anthropology and linguistic studies confirm widespread Tongan cultural influence ranging widely through East 'Uvea, Rotuma, Futuna, Samoa and Niue, parts of Micronesia (Kiribati, Pohnpei), Vanuatu, and New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, and while some academics prefer the term \"maritime chiefdom\", others argue that, while very different from examples elsewhere, ...\"empire\" is probably the most convenient term.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled before or around 3500 to 1000 BC, although the question of Pacific migration still lingers. It is believed that the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians settled the islands first but not much is known of what became of them after the Melanesians arrived; they may have had some influence on the new culture, and archaeological evidence shows that they would have then moved on to Tonga, Samoa, and even Hawai'i.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The first settlements in Fiji were started by voyaging traders and settlers from the west about 5000 years ago. Lapita pottery shards have been found at numerous excavations around the country. Aspects of Fijian culture are similar to the Melanesian culture of the western Pacific but have a stronger connection to the older Polynesian cultures. Across 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from east to west, Fiji has been a nation of many languages. Fiji's history was one of settlement but also of mobility.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Over the centuries, a unique Fijian culture developed. Constant warfare and cannibalism between warring tribes were quite rampant and very much part of everyday life. In later centuries, the ferocity of the cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going near Fijian waters, giving Fiji the name Cannibal Isles; as a result, Fiji remained unknown to the rest of the world.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Early European visitors to Easter Island recorded the local oral traditions about the original settlers. In these traditions, Easter Islanders claimed that a chief Hotu Matuꞌa arrived on the island in one or two large canoes with his wife and extended family. They are believed to have been Polynesian. There is considerable uncertainty about the accuracy of this legend as well as the date of settlement. Published literature suggests the island was settled around 300–400 CE, or at about the time of the arrival of the earliest settlers in Hawaii.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Some scientists say that Easter Island was not inhabited until 700–800 CE. This date range is based on glottochronological calculations and on three radiocarbon dates from charcoal that appears to have been produced during forest clearance activities.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Moreover, a recent study which included radiocarbon dates from what is thought to be very early material suggests that the island was settled as recently as 1200 CE. This seems to be supported by a 2006 study of the island's deforestation, which could have started around the same time. A large now extinct palm, Paschalococos disperta, related to the Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis), was one of the dominant trees as attested by fossil evidence; this species, whose sole occurrence was Easter Island, became extinct due to deforestation by the early settlers.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Oceania was first explored by Europeans from the 16th century onwards. Portuguese navigators, between 1512 and 1526, reached the Moluccas (by António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão in 1512), Timor, the Aru Islands (Martim A. Melo Coutinho), the Tanimbar Islands, some of the Caroline Islands (by Gomes de Sequeira in 1525), and west Papua New Guinea (by Jorge de Menezes in 1526). In 1519 a Castilian ('Spanish') expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan sailed down the east coast of South America, found and sailed through the strait that bears his name and on 28 November 1520 entered the ocean which he named \"Pacific\". The three remaining ships, led by Magellan and his captains Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, then sailed north and caught the trade winds which carried them across the Pacific to the Philippines where Magellan was killed. One surviving ship led by Juan Sebastián Elcano returned west across the Indian Ocean and the other went north in the hope of finding the westerlies and reaching Mexico. Unable to find the right winds, it was forced to return to the East Indies. The Magellan-Elcano expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of the world and reached the Philippines, the Mariana Islands and other islands of Oceania.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "From 1527 to 1595 a number of other large Spanish expeditions crossed the Pacific Ocean, leading to the discovery of the Marshall Islands and Palau in the North Pacific, as well as Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Solomon Islands archipelago, the Cook Islands and the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1565, Spanish navigator Andrés de Urdaneta found a wind system that would allow ships to sail eastward from Asia, back to the Americas. From then until 1815 the annual Manila galleons crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and back, in the first transpacific trade route in history. Combined with the Spanish Atlantic or West Indies Fleet, the Manila galleons formed one of the first global maritime exchange in human history, linking Seville in Spain with Manila in the Philippines, via Mexico.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Later, in the quest for Terra Australis, Spanish explorers in the 17th century discovered the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos, and sailed the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, named after navigator Luís Vaz de Torres. In 1668 the Spanish founded a colony on Guam as a resting place for west-bound galleons. For a long time this was the only non-coastal European settlement in the Pacific.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Dutch were the first non-natives to undisputedly explore and chart coastlines of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and Easter Island. Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (or VOC) was a major force behind the Golden Age of Dutch exploration (category; c. 1590s–1720s) and Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s). In the 17th century, the VOC's navigators and explorers charted almost three-quarters of the Australian coastline, except the east coast.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Abel Tasman was the first known European explorer to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and New Zealand, and to sight the Fiji islands. His navigator François Visscher, and his merchant Isaack Gilsemans, mapped substantial portions of Australia, New Zealand, Tonga and the Fijian islands.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 24 November 1642 Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania, north of Macquarie Harbour. He named his discovery Van Diemen's Land after Antonio van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. then claimed formal possession of the land on 3 December 1642.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "After some exploration, Tasman had intended to proceed in a northerly direction but as the wind was unfavourable he steered east. On 13 December they sighted land on the north-west coast of the South Island, New Zealand, becoming the first Europeans to do so. Tasman named it Staten Landt on the assumption that it was connected to an island (Staten Island, Argentina) at the south of the tip of South America. Proceeding north and then east, he stopped to gather water, but one of his boats was attacked by Māori in a double hulled waka (canoes) and four of his men were attacked and killed by mere. As Tasman sailed out of the bay he was again attacked, this time by 11 waka . The waka approached the Zeehan which fired and hit one Māori who fell down. Canister shot hit the side of a waka.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Archeological research has shown the Dutch had tried to land at a major agricultural area, which the Māori may have been trying to protect. Tasman named the bay Murderers' Bay (now known as Golden Bay) and sailed north, but mistook Cook Strait for a bight (naming it Zeehaen's Bight). Two names he gave to New Zealand landmarks still endure, Cape Maria van Diemen and Three Kings Islands, but Kaap Pieter Boreels was renamed by Cook 125 years later to Cape Egmont. En route back to Batavia, Tasman came across the Tongan archipelago on 20 January 1643. While passing the Fiji Islands Tasman's ships came close to being wrecked on the dangerous reefs of the north-eastern part of the Fiji group. He charted the eastern tip of Vanua Levu and Cikobia before making his way back into the open sea. He eventually turned north-west to New Guinea, and arrived at Batavia on 15 June 1643. For over a century after Tasman's voyages, until the era of James Cook, Tasmania and New Zealand were not visited by Europeans—mainland Australia was visited, but usually only by accident.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1766 the Royal Society engaged James Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. The expedition sailed from England on 26 August 1768, rounded Cape Horn and continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahiti on 13 April 1769, where the observations of the Venus Transit were made. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened the sealed orders which were additional instructions from the Admiralty for the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "With the help of a Tahitian named Tupaia, who had extensive knowledge of Pacific geography, Cook managed to reach New Zealand on 6 October 1769, leading only the second group of Europeans to do so (after Abel Tasman over a century earlier, in 1642). Cook mapped the complete New Zealand coastline, making only some minor errors (such as calling Banks Peninsula an island, and thinking Stewart Island/Rakiura was a peninsula of the South Island). He also identified Cook Strait, which separates the North Island from the South Island, and which Tasman had not seen.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Cook then voyaged west, reaching the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline. On 23 April he made his first recorded direct observation of indigenous Australians at Brush Island near Bawley Point, noting in his journal: \"…and were so near the Shore as to distinguish several people upon the Sea beach they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not.\" On 29 April Cook and crew made their first landfall on the mainland of the continent at a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula. It is here that James Cook made first contact with an aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After his departure from Botany Bay he continued northwards. After a grounding mishap on the Great Barrier Reef, the voyage continued, sailing through Torres Strait before returning to England via Batavia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Saint Helena.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1772 the Royal Society commissioned Cook to search for the hypothetical Terra Australis again. On his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger landmass to the south. Although he charted almost the entire eastern coastline of Australia, showing it to be continental in size, the Terra Australis was believed by the Royal Society to lie further south.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Cook commanded HMS Resolution on this voyage, while Tobias Furneaux commanded its companion ship, HMS Adventure. Cook's expedition circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle (17 January 1773). In the Antarctic fog, Resolution and Adventure became separated. Furneaux made his way to New Zealand, where he lost some of his men during an encounter with Māori, and eventually sailed back to Britain, while Cook continued to explore the Antarctic, reaching 71°10'S on 31 January 1774.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Cook almost encountered the mainland of Antarctica, but turned towards Tahiti to resupply his ship. He then resumed his southward course in a second fruitless attempt to find the supposed continent. On this leg of the voyage he brought a young Tahitian named Omai, who proved to be somewhat less knowledgeable about the Pacific than Tupaia had been on the first voyage. On his return voyage to New Zealand in 1774, Cook landed at the Friendly Islands, Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Before returning to England, Cook made a final sweep across the South Atlantic from Cape Horn. He then turned north to South Africa, and from there continued back to England. His reports upon his return home put to rest the popular myth of Terra Australis.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On his last voyage, Cook again commanded HMS Resolution, while Captain Charles Clerke commanded HMS Discovery. The voyage was ostensibly planned to return the Pacific Islander, Omai to Tahiti, or so the public were led to believe. The trip's principal goal was to locate a North-West Passage around the American continent. After dropping Omai at Tahiti, Cook travelled north and in 1778 became the first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands. After his initial landfall in January 1778 at Waimea harbour, Kauai, Cook named the archipelago the \"Sandwich Islands\" after the fourth Earl of Sandwich—the acting First Lord of the Admiralty.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "From the Sandwich Islands Cook sailed north and then north-east to explore the west coast of North America north of the Spanish settlements in Alta California. Cook explored and mapped the coast all the way to the Bering Strait, on the way identifying what came to be known as Cook Inlet in Alaska. In a single visit, Cook charted the majority of the North American north-west coastline on world maps for the first time, determined the extent of Alaska, and closed the gaps in Russian (from the West) and Spanish (from the South) exploratory probes of the Northern limits of the Pacific.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. After sailing around the archipelago for some eight weeks, he made landfall at Kealakekua Bay, on 'Hawaii Island', largest island in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Cook's arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the Polynesian god Lono. Coincidentally the form of Cook's ship, HMS Resolution, or more particularly the mast formation, sails and rigging, resembled certain significant artefacts that formed part of the season of worship. Similarly, Cook's clockwise route around the island of Hawaii before making landfall resembled the processions that took place in a clockwise direction around the island during the Lono festivals. It has been argued (most extensively by Marshall Sahlins) that such coincidences were the reasons for Cook's (and to a limited extent, his crew's) initial deification by some Hawaiians who treated Cook as an incarnation of Lono. Though this view was first suggested by members of Cook's expedition, the idea that any Hawaiians understood Cook to be Lono, and the evidence presented in support of it, were challenged in 1992.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "After a month's stay, Cook resumed his exploration of the Northern Pacific. Shortly after leaving Hawaii Island, however, the Resolution's foremast broke, so the ships returned to Kealakekua Bay for repairs. Tensions rose, and a number of quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians. On 14 February 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, some Hawaiians took one of Cook's small boats. As thefts were quite common in Tahiti and the other islands, Cook would have taken hostages until the stolen articles were returned. He attempted to take as hostage the King of Hawaiʻi, Kalaniʻōpuʻu. The Hawaiians prevented this, and Cook's men had to retreat to the beach. As Cook turned his back to help launch the boats, he was struck on the head by the villagers and then stabbed to death as he fell on his face in the surf. Hawaiian tradition says that he was killed by a chief named Kalaimanokahoʻowaha or Kanaʻina. The Hawaiians dragged his body away. Four of Cook's men were also killed and two others were wounded in the confrontation.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook's remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Clerke assumed leadership of the expedition. Following the death of Clerke, Resolution and Discovery returned home in October 1780 commanded by John Gore, a veteran of Cook's first voyage, and Captain James King. After their arrival in England, King completed Cook's account of the voyage.",
"title": "European contact and exploration (1500s–1700s)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 1789 the Mutiny on the Bounty against William Bligh led to several of the mutineers escaping the Royal Navy and settling on Pitcairn Islands, which later became a British colony. Britain also established colonies in Australia in 1788, New Zealand in 1840 and Fiji in 1872, with much of Oceania becoming part of the British Empire.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Gilbert Islands (now known as Kiribati) and the Ellice Islands (now known as Tuvalu) came under Britain's sphere of influence in the late 19th century. The Ellice Islands were administered as British protectorate by a Resident Commissioner from 1892 to 1916 as part of the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT), and later as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony from 1916 to 1974.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Among the last islands in Oceania to be colonised was Niue (1900). In 1887, King Fata-a-iki, who reigned Niue from 1887 to 1896, offered to cede sovereignty to the British Empire, fearing the consequences of annexation by a less benevolent colonial power. The offer was not accepted until 1900. Niue was a British protectorate, but the UK's direct involvement ended in 1901 when New Zealand annexed the island.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "French Catholic missionaries arrived on Tahiti in 1834; their expulsion in 1836 caused France to send a gunboat in 1838. In 1842, Tahiti and Tahuata were declared a French protectorate, to allow Catholic missionaries to work undisturbed. The capital of Papeetē was founded in 1843. In 1880, France annexed Tahiti, changing the status from that of a protectorate to that of a colony.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On 24 September 1853, under orders from Napoleon III, Admiral Febvrier Despointes took formal possession of New Caledonia and Port-de-France (Nouméa) was founded 25 June 1854. A few dozen free settlers settled on the west coast in the following years. New Caledonia became a penal colony, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, about 22,000 criminals and political prisoners were sent to New Caledonia, among them many Communards, including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel. Between 1873 and 1876, 4,200 political prisoners were \"relegated\" in New Caledonia. Only forty of them settled in the colony, the rest returned to France after being granted amnesty in 1879 and 1880.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In the 1880s, France claimed the Tuamotu Archipelago, which formerly belonged to the Pōmare Dynasty, without formally annexing it. Having declared a protectorate over Tahuata in 1842, the French regarded the entire Marquesas Islands as French. In 1885, France appointed a governor and established a general council, thus giving it the proper administration for a colony. The islands of Rimatara and Rūrutu unsuccessfully lobbied for British protection in 1888, so in 1889 they were annexed by France. Postage stamps were first issued in the colony in 1892. The first official name for the colony was Établissements de l'Océanie (Settlements in Oceania); in 1903 the general council was changed to an advisory council and the colony's name was changed to Établissements Français de l'Océanie (French Settlements in Oceania).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar landed in the Marshall Islands in 1529. They were later named by Krusenstern, after English explorer John Marshall, who visited them together with Thomas Gilbert in 1788, en route from Botany Bay to Canton (two ships of the First Fleet).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In November 1770, Felipe González de Ahedo commanded an expedition from the Viceroyalty of Peru that searched for Davis Land and Madre de Dios Island and looked for foreign naval activities. This expedition landed on Isla de San Carlos (Easter Island) and signed a treaty of annexion with the Rapa Nui chiefs.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 1606 Luís Vaz de Torres explored the southern coast of New Guinea from Milne Bay to the Gulf of Papua including Orangerie Bay which he named Bahía de San Lorenzo. His expedition also discovered Basilaki Island naming it Tierra de San Buenaventura, which he claimed for Spain in July 1606. On 18 October his expedition reached the western part of the island in present-day Indonesia, and also claimed the territory for the King of Spain.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "A successive European claim occurred in 1828, when the Netherlands formally claimed the western half of the island as Dutch New Guinea. In 1883, following a short-lived French annexation of New Ireland, the British colony of Queensland annexed south-eastern New Guinea. However, the Queensland government's superiors in the United Kingdom revoked the claim, and (formally) assumed direct responsibility in 1884, when Germany claimed north-eastern New Guinea as the protectorate of German New Guinea (also called Kaiser-Wilhelmsland).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The first Dutch government posts were established in 1898 and in 1902: Manokwari on the north coast, Fak-Fak in the west and Merauke in the south at the border with British New Guinea. The German, Dutch and British colonial administrators each attempted to suppress the still-widespread practices of inter-village warfare and headhunting within their respective territories.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1905 the British government transferred some administrative responsibility over south-east New Guinea to Australia (which renamed the area \"Territory of Papua\"); and in 1906, transferred all remaining responsibility to Australia. During World War I, Australian forces seized German New Guinea, which in 1920 became the Territory of New Guinea, to be administered by Australia under a League of Nations mandate. The territories under Australian administration became collectively known as The Territories of Papua and New Guinea (until February 1942).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Germany established colonies in New Guinea in 1884 and Samoa in 1900.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Following papal mediation and German compensation of $4.5 million, Spain recognized a German claim in 1885. Germany established a protectorate and set up trading stations on the islands of Jaluit and Ebon to carry out the flourishing copra (dried coconut meat) trade. Marshallese Iroij (high chiefs) continued to rule under indirect colonial German administration.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The United States also expanded into the Pacific, beginning with Baker Island and Howland Island in 1857, and with Hawaii becoming a U.S. territory in 1898. Disagreements between the US, Germany and UK over Samoa led to the Tripartite Convention of 1899.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Samoa aligned its interests with the United States in a Deed of Succession, signed by the Tui Manúʻa (supreme chief of Manúʻa) on 16 July 1904 at the Crown residence of the Tuimanuʻa called the Faleula in the place called Lalopua (from Official documents of the Tuimanuʻa government, 1893; Office of the Governor, 2004).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Cession followed the Tripartite Convention of 1899 that partitioned the eastern islands of Samoa (including Tutuila and the Manúʻa Group) from the western islands of Samoa (including ʻUpolu and Savaiʻi).",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "At the beginning of World War I, Japan assumed control of the Marshall Islands. The Japanese headquarters was established at the German center of administration, Jaluit. On 31 January 1944, during World War II, American forces landed on Kwajalein atoll and U.S. Marines and Army troops later took control of the islands from the Japanese on 3 February, following intense fighting on Kwajalein and Enewetak atolls. In 1947, the United States, as the occupying power, entered into an agreement with the UN Security Council to administer much of Micronesia, including the Marshall Islands, as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "During World War II, Japan colonised many Oceanic colonies by wresting control from western powers.",
"title": "Colonialism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Samoan Crisis was a confrontation standoff between the United States, Imperial Germany, and the British Empire from 1887 to 1889 over control of the Samoan Islands during the Samoan Civil War.",
"title": "Samoan Crisis 1887–1889"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The prime minister of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Walter M. Gibson, had long aimed to establishing an empire in the Pacific. In 1887 his government sent the \"homemade battleship\" Kaimiloa to Samoa looking for an alliance against colonial powers. It ended in suspicions from the German Navy and embarrassment for the conduct of the crew.",
"title": "Samoan Crisis 1887–1889"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The 1889 incident involved three American warships, USS Vandalia, USS Trenton and USS Nipsic and three German warships, SMS Adler, SMS Olga, and SMS Eber, keeping each other at bay over several months in Apia harbor, which was monitored by the British warship HMS Calliope.",
"title": "Samoan Crisis 1887–1889"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The standoff ended on 15 and 16 March when a cyclone wrecked all six warships in the harbor. Calliope was able to escape the harbor and survived the storm. Robert Louis Stevenson witnessed the storm and its aftermath at Apia and later wrote about what he saw. The Samoan Civil War continued, involving Germany, United States, and Britain, eventually resulting, via the Tripartite Convention of 1899, in the partition of the Samoan Islands into American Samoa and German Samoa.",
"title": "Samoan Crisis 1887–1889"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Asian and Pacific Theatre of World War I was a conquest of German colonial possession in the Pacific Ocean and China. The most significant military action was the Siege of Tsingtao in what is now China, but smaller actions were also fought at Battle of Bita Paka and Siege of Toma in German New Guinea.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "All other German and Austrian possessions in Asia and the Pacific fell without bloodshed. Naval warfare was common; all of the colonial powers had naval squadrons stationed in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. These fleets operated by supporting the invasions of German held territories and by destroying the East Asia Squadron.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "One of the first land offensives in the Pacific theatre was the Occupation of German Samoa in August 1914 by New Zealand forces. The campaign to take Samoa ended without bloodshed after over 1,000 New Zealanders landed on the German colony, supported by an Australian and French naval squadron.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Australian forces attacked German New Guinea in September 1914: 500 Australians encountered 300 Germans and native policemen at the Battle of Bita Paka; the Allies won the day and the Germans retreated to Toma. A company of Australians and a British warship besieged the Germans and their colonial subjects, ending with a German surrender.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "After the fall of Toma, only minor German forces were left in New Guinea and these generally capitulated once met by Australian forces. In December 1914, one German officer near Angorum attempted resist the occupation with thirty native police but his force deserted him after they fired on an Australian scouting party and he was subsequently captured.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "German Micronesia, the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshall Islands also fell to Allied forces during the war.",
"title": "World War I"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The Pacific front saw major action during the Second World War, mainly between the belligerents Japan and the United States.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of 7 December 1941 (8 December in Japan). The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in South-East Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. There were simultaneous Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Japanese subsequently invaded New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and other Pacific islands. The Japanese were turned back at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Kokoda Track campaign before they were finally defeated in 1945.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Some of the most prominent Oceanic battlegrounds were the Solomon Islands campaign, the Air raids on Darwin, the Kokada Track, and the Borneo campaign.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In 1940 the administration of French Polynesia recognized the Free French Forces and many Polynesians served in World War II. Unknown at the time to French and Polynesians, the Konoe Cabinet in Imperial Japan on 16 September 1940 included French Polynesia among the many territories which were to become Japanese possessions in the post-war world—though in the course of the war in the Pacific the Japanese were not able to launch an actual invasion of the French islands.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Some of the most intense fighting of the Second World War occurred in the Solomons. The most significant of the Allied Forces' operations against the Japanese Imperial Forces was launched on 7 August 1942, with simultaneous naval bombardments and amphibious landings on the Florida Islands at Tulagi and Red Beach on Guadalcanal.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Guadalcanal Campaign became an important and bloody campaign fought in the Pacific War as the Allies began to repulse Japanese expansion. Of strategic importance during the war were the coastwatchers operating in remote locations, often on Japanese held islands, providing early warning and intelligence of Japanese naval, army and aircraft movements during the campaign.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "\"The Slot\" was a name for New Georgia Sound, when it was used by the Tokyo Express to supply the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal. Of more than 36,000 Japanese on Guadalcanal, about 26,000 were killed or missing, 9,000 died of disease, and 1,000 were captured.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Kokoda Track campaign was a campaign consisting of a series of battles fought between July and November 1942 between Japanese and Allied—primarily Australian—forces in what was then the Australian territory of Papua. Following a landing near Gona, on the north coast of New Guinea, Japanese forces attempted to advance south overland through the mountains of the Owen Stanley Range to seize Port Moresby as part of a strategy of isolating Australia from the United States. Initially only limited Australian forces were available to oppose them, and after making rapid progress the Japanese South Seas Force clashed with under strength Australian forces at Awala, forcing them back to Kokoda. A number of Japanese attacks were subsequently fought off by the Australian Militia, yet they began to withdraw over the Owen Stanley Range, down the Kokoda Track.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In sight of Port Moresby itself, the Japanese began to run out of momentum against the Australians who began to receive further reinforcements. Having outrun their supply lines and following the reverses suffered by the Japanese at Guadalcanal, the Japanese were now on the defensive, marking the limit of the Japanese advance southwards. The Japanese subsequently withdrew to establish a defensive position on the north coast, but they were followed by the Australians who recaptured Kokoda on 2 November. Further fighting continued into November and December as the Australian and United States forces assaulted the Japanese beachheads, in what later became known as the Battle of Buna–Gona.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Due to its low population, Oceania was a popular location for atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. Tests were conducted in various locations by the United Kingdom (Operation Grapple and Operation Antler), the United States (Bikini atoll and the Marshall Islands) and France (Moruroa), often with devastating consequences for the inhabitants.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "From 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands served as the Pacific Proving Grounds for the United States, and was the site of 67 nuclear tests on various atolls. The world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed \"Mike\", was tested at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 November (local date) in 1952, by the United States.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In 1954, fallout from the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands was such that the inhabitants of the Rongelap Atoll were forced to abandon their island. Three years later the islanders were allowed to return, but suffered abnormally high levels of cancer. They were evacuated again in 1985 and in 1996 given $45 million in compensation.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "A series of British tests were also conducted in the 1950s at Maralinga in South Australia, forcing the removal of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples from their ancestral homelands.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In 1962, France's early nuclear testing ground of Algeria became independent and the atoll of Moruroa in the Tuamotu Archipelago was selected as the new testing site. Moruroa atoll became notorious as a site of French nuclear testing, primarily because tests were carried out there after most Pacific testing had ceased. These tests were opposed by most other nations in Oceania. The last atmospheric test was conducted in 1974, and the last underground test in 1996.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "French nuclear testing in the Pacific was controversial in the 1980s, in 1985 French agents caused the Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland to prevent it from arriving at the test site in Moruroa. In September 1995, France stirred up widespread protests by resuming nuclear testing at Fangataufa atoll after a three-year moratorium. The last test was on 27 January 1996. On 29 January 1996, France announced that it would accede to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and no longer test nuclear weapons.",
"title": "Nuclear testing in Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Fiji has suffered several coups d'état: military in 1987 and 2006 and civilian in 2000. All were ultimately due to ethnic tension between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, who originally came to the islands as indentured labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 1987 coup followed the election of a multi-ethnic coalition, which Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka overthrew, claiming racial discrimination against ethnic Fijians. The coup was denounced by the United Nations and Fiji was expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations.",
"title": "Fijian coups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The 2000 coup was essentially a repeat of the 1987 affair, although it was led by civilian George Speight, apparently with military support. Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who was opposed to Speight, then took over and appointed a new Prime Minister. Speight was later tried and convicted for treason. Many indigenous Fijians were unhappy at the treatment of Speight and his supporters, feeling that the coup had been legitimate. In 2006 the Fijian parliament attempted to introduce a series of bills which would have, amongst other things, pardoned those involved in the 2000 coup. Bainimarama, concerned that the legal and racial injustices of the previous coups would be perpetuated, staged his own coup. It was internationally condemned, and Fiji again suspended from the Commonwealth.",
"title": "Fijian coups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "In 2006 the then Australia Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, warned Fijian officials of an Australian Naval fleet within proximity of Fiji that would respond to any attacks against its citizens.",
"title": "Fijian coups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Australian government estimated that anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people could have died in the Bougainville Civil War. More conservative estimates put the number of combat deaths as 1–2,000.",
"title": "Bougainville Civil War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "From 1975, there were attempts by the Bougainville Province to secede from Papua New Guinea. These were resisted by Papua New Guinea primarily because of the presence in Bougainville of the Panguna mine, which was vital to Papua New Guinea's economy. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army began attacking the mine in 1988, forcing its closure the following year. Further BRA activity led to the declaration of a state of emergency and the conflict continued until about 2005, when successionist leader and self-proclaimed King of Bougainville Francis Ona died of malaria. Peacekeeping troops led by Australia have been in the region since the late 1990s, and a referendum on independence will be held in the 2010s.",
"title": "Bougainville Civil War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "In 1946, French Polynesians were granted French citizenship and the islands' status was changed to an overseas territory; the islands' name was changed in 1957 to Polynésie Française (French Polynesia).",
"title": "Modern age"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Australia and New Zealand became dominions in the 20th century, adopting the Statute of Westminster Act in 1942 and 1947 respectively, marking their legislative independence from the United Kingdom. Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959.",
"title": "Modern age"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Samoa became the first pacific nation to gain independence in 1962, Fiji and Tonga became independent in 1970, with many other nations following in the 1970s and 1980s. The South Pacific Forum was founded in 1971, which became the Pacific Islands Forum in 2000. Bougainville Island, geographically part of the Solomon Islands archipelago but politically part of Papua New Guinea, tried unsuccessfully to become independent in 1975, and a civil war followed in the early 1990s, with it later being granted autonomy.",
"title": "Modern age"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "On 1 May 1979, in recognition of the evolving political status of the Marshall Islands, the United States recognized the constitution of the Marshall Islands and the establishment of the Government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The constitution incorporates both American and British constitutional concepts.",
"title": "Modern age"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In 1852, French Polynesia was granted partial internal autonomy; in 1984, the autonomy was extended. French Polynesia became a full overseas collectivity of France in 2004.",
"title": "Modern age"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Between 2001 and 2007 Australia's Pacific Solution policy transferred asylum seekers to several Pacific nations, including the Nauru detention centre. Australia, New Zealand and other nations took part in the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands from 2003 after a request for aid.",
"title": "Modern age"
}
]
| The history of Oceania includes the history of Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea, and other Pacific island nations. | 2001-11-08T00:28:20Z | 2023-12-26T23:56:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Oceania |
14,105 | Hanseatic League | The Hanseatic League was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the League expanded between the 13th and 15th centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries, ranging from Estonia in the north and east, to the Netherlands in the west, and Kraków, Poland, in the south.
The League originated from various loose associations of German traders and towns formed to advance mutual commercial interests, such as protection against robbers. These arrangements gradually coalesced into the Hanseatic League, whose traders enjoyed toll privileges and protection in affiliated communities and their trade routes. Economic interdependence and kinship ties between merchant families, who held important positions in towns, led to deeper political integration and the removal of obstacles to trade. Hanseatic Cities gradually developed common trade regulations.
During its heyday, the Hanseatic League dominated maritime trade in the North and Baltic Seas. It established trading posts in numerous towns and cities across Europe; some of these, like the Kontors in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, became extraterritorial entities that enjoyed considerable legal autonomy. Hanseatic merchants, called Hansards, operated in basic private companies and were widely known for their access to a variety of commodities, and enjoyed privileges and protections abroad. The collective economic power made the League capable of imposing blockades and even waging war against kingdoms and principalities.
Even at its peak, the Hanseatic League was never more than a loosely aligned confederation of city-states. It lacked a permanent administrative body, a treasury, and a standing military force. In the 14th century, the Hanseatic League instated an irregular negotiating diet (Middle Low German: dachvart or dach; German: Tagfahrt or Hansetag) that operated on deliberation and consensus. By the mid-16th century, these weak connections left the Hanseatic League vulnerable, and it gradually unraveled as members became consolidated into other realms or departed, ultimately disintegrating in 1669.
The Hanseatic League used several types of ships that sailed over seas and on rivers. The most emblematic type was the cog. Knowing great diversity in construction, it was depicted on Hanseatic seals and coats of arms. By the end of the Middle Ages, the cog was replaced by other types like the hulk, which later gave way to larger carvel types.
Hanse is the Old High German word for a band or troop. This word was applied to bands of merchants traveling between the Hanseatic cities — whether by land or by sea. Hanse in Middle Low German came to mean a society of merchants or a trader guild. That it originally meant An-See, or "on the sea", is incorrect.
Exploratory trading adventures, raids, and piracy occurred early throughout the Baltic Sea. The sailors of Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as Novgorod, which was a major trade centre of Rus'. Scandinavians led international trade in the Baltic area before the Hanseatic League, establishing major trading hubs at Birka, Haithabu, and Schleswig by the 9th century CE. The later Hanseatic ports between Mecklenburg and Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) originally formed part of the Scandinavian-led Baltic trade-system.
The Hanseatic League was never formally founded, so it lacks a date of founding. Historians traditionally traced its origins to the rebuilding of the north German town of Lübeck in 1159 by the powerful Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, after he had captured the area from Adolf II, Count of Schauenburg and Holstein. More recent scholarship has deemphasized the focus on Lübeck, viewing it as one of several regional trading centers, and presenting the League as the combination of a north German trading system oriented on the Baltic and a Rhinelandic trading system targeting England and Flanders.
German cities achieved domination of trade in the Baltic with striking speed during the 13th century, and Lübeck became a central node in the seaborne trade that linked the areas around the North and Baltic seas. The hegemony of Lübeck peaked during the 15th century.
Well before the term Hanse appeared in a document in 1267, merchants in different cities began to form guilds, or hansas, with the intention of trading with towns overseas, especially in the economically less-developed eastern Baltic. This area could supply timber, wax, amber, resins, and furs, along with rye and wheat brought down on barges from the hinterland to port markets. Merchant guilds formed in both hometowns and destination ports as medieval corporations (universitates mercatorum), and despite competition would increasingly cooperate to coalesce into the Hanseatic network of merchant guilds. The dominant language of trade was Middle Low German, which had significant impact on the languages spoken in the area, particularly the larger Scandinavian languages, Estonian, and Latvian.
Lübeck soon became a base for merchants from Saxony and Westphalia trading eastward and northward; for them, because of its shorter and easier access route and better legal protections, it was a more attractive port than Schleswig. It became a transshipment port for trade between the North Sea and the Baltic too. In addition, Lübeck granted extensive trade privileges to Russian and Scandinavian traders. It was also the main supply port for the Northern Crusades, improving its relations with the Pope. Lübeck gained imperial privileges to become a free imperial city in 1226, under Valdemar II of Denmark during the Danish dominion, as had Hamburg in 1189. Also in this period Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund and Danzig received city charters.
Visby, on the island of Gotland, functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a trading post at Novgorod called Gutagard (also known as Gotenhof) in 1080. Gotland became separate from Sweden after 1120 and allowed traders from the south and west. Merchants from northern Germany from then on stayed there in the early period of the Gotlander settlement, through a treaty with the Visby Hansa. Later, in the first half of the 13th century, they established their own trading station or Kontor in Novgorod, known as the Peterhof, further up the river Volkhov.
Hansa societies worked to remove restrictions on trade for their members. The earliest extant documentary mention (although without a name) of a specific German commercial federation dates between 1173 and 1175 (but commonly misdated to 1157) in London. That year, the merchants of the Hansa in Cologne convinced King Henry II of England to exempt them from all tolls in London and to grant protection to merchants and goods throughout England.
German colonists in the 12th and 13th centuries settled in numerous cities on and near the east Baltic coast, such as Elbing (Elbląg), Thorn (Toruń), Reval (Tallinn), Riga, and Dorpat (Tartu), which became members of the Hanseatic League, and some of which still retain many Hansa buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days. Most were granted Lübeck law, after the league's most prominent town. The law provided that they had to appeal in all legal matters to Lübeck's city council. Others, like Danzig from 1295, had Magdeburg law or its derivative Culm law. Later the Livonian Confederation of 1435 to c. 1582 incorporated modern-day Estonia and parts of Latvia; all of its major towns were members of the Hanseatic League.
Over the 13th century, older and wealthier long-distance traders increasingly settled in their hometowns as senior trade partners, while they previously became landowners. Already in older times merchants had often begun partnerships or private companies. Factors, who were junior partners or associates, were instead sent to foreign places and settled on location. By the end of the century foreign long-distance trade had developed a division of labor with three roles: the settled senior merchant, the transporter (skipper, carrier or land carter) and the factor abroad. But inside the area of Hanseatic towns travelling representatives were sent on individual trade expeditions. The larger number of settled merchants allowed long-distance traders to influence town policy more, combined with an increased presence of the ministerial class this raised the rank of merchants and enabled them to dominate more cities. This decentralised arrangement was fostered by slow travel speeds, going from Reval to Lübeck took between 4 weeks and, in winter, 4 months.
In 1241 Lübeck, which had access to the Baltic and North seas' fishing grounds, formed an alliance—a precursor to the League—with Hamburg, another trading city, which controlled access to salt-trade routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities gained control over most of the salt-fish trade, especially the Scania Market; Cologne joined them in the Diet of 1260. The towns raised their own armies, with each guild required to provide levies when needed. The Hanseatic cities came to the aid of one another, and commercial ships often had to be used to carry soldiers and their arms. Over the period, a network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities.
In the West, cities of the Rhineland like Cologne enjoyed trading privileges in Flanders and England. In 1266 King Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, initially causing competition with the Westphalians. But the Cologne Hansa and the Wendish Hansa joined in 1282 to form the Hanseatic colony in London, although they didn't completely merge until the 15th century.There were blockades against Novgorod in 1268 and 1277/1278. Nonetheless Westphalian traders continued to dominate trade on London and also Ipswich and Colchester, while Baltic and Wendish traders concentrated between King's Lynn and Newcastle upon Tyne. Much of the drive for co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial governments, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years, the merchant Hansa solidified with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. Cities not only from the east modern day Low Countries, but also Utrecht, Holland, Zealand, Brabant, Namur and modern Limburg began to participate from the thirteenth century. This network of Hanseatic trading guilds is called the Kaufmannshanse in the historiography.
The League succeeded in establishing additional Kontors in Bruges (Flanders), Bryggen in Bergen (Norway), and London (England) beside the Peterhof in Novgorod. These trading posts were institutionalised by the first half of the 14th century at the latest (for Bergen and Bruges) and, except for the Kontor of Bruges, became significant enclaves. The London Kontor, the Steelyard (Middle Low German stâlhof, German Stahlhof), stood west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street, on the site now occupied by Cannon Street station. It grew into a significant walled community with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses, reflecting the importance and scale of trading activity on the premises.
In addition to the major Kontors, individual ports with Hanseatic trading outposts or factories had a representative merchant and warehouse. Often they were not permanently manned. In Scania, Denmark, there were around 30 Hanseatic seasonal factories for traders in salted herring, these were called vitten and were granted considerable legal autonomy to the extent that Burkhardt argues that they resembled a fifth kontor and would be seen as such if not for their early decline. The Scanian herring fairs drew large numbers from the Wendish towns, who consolidated the herring trade through an integral approach where they supplied their own salt, but also traders from elsewhere in Scandinavia or from the lands around the North Sea attended. In England there were factories in Boston (the outpost was also called the Stalhof), Bristol, Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn, which features the sole remaining Hanseatic warehouse in England), Hull, Ipswich, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Scarborough, Yarmouth (now Great Yarmouth), and York, many of which were important for the Baltic trade and become centres of cloth industry in the late 14th century. Hansards and cloth manufacturers coordinated to make fabrics meet local demand and fashion in the traders' hometowns. Outposts in Lisbon, Bordeaux, Bourgneuf, La Rochelle and Nantes offered the cheaper Bay salt. Ships that plied this trade sailed home in the salt fleet. There were also trading posts in Flanders, Denmark-Norway, the Baltic interior, Upper Germany, Iceland and Venice.
Starting with trade in coarse woollen fabrics, the Hanseatic League had the effect of bringing both commerce and industry to northern Germany. As trade increased, newer and finer woollen and linen fabrics, and even silks, were manufactured in northern Germany. The same refinement of products out of cottage industry occurred in other fields, e.g. etching, wood carving, armour production, engraving of metals, and wood-turning.
The league primarily traded beeswax, furs, timber, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat, and rye from the east to Flanders and England with cloth, in particular broadcloth, (and, increasingly, manufactured goods) going in the other direction. Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring came southwards from Sweden, the Carpathians were another important source of copper and iron, often sold in Thorn. Lubeck also had a vital role in the salt trade; salt was acquired in Lunenburg or shipped from France and Portugal and sold on Central European markets, taken to Scania for salting herring or exported to Russia. Stockfish was traded from Bergen in exchange for grain; Hanseatic grain inflows allowed more permanent settlements further north in Norway. The league also traded in beer, with beer from Hanseatic towns the most valued, and Wendish cities like Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Rostock developed export breweries for hopped beer.
Hanseatic trade was not exclusively maritime trade, or even overwater trade. Most Hanseatic towns did not have immediate access to the sea and there were many that were linked to partners by river trade or even generally expensive land trade. These combined into an integrated network and many smaller Hanseatic towns had their main trading activity in subregional trade. Internal Hanseatic trade was in fact the Hanse's quantitatively most voluminous and important business. Trade over rivers and land was not tied to specific Hanseatic privileges, but sea ports like Bremen, Hamburg and Riga managed to dominate trade on their rivers. This was not possible for the Rhine where trade retained an open character. Digging canals for trade routes was very uncommon, but the Stecknitz Canal was built between Lübeck and Lauenburg from 1391 to 1398.
The Hanseatic League, at first the merchant hansas and eventually its cities, relied on power to secure protection and gain and preserve privileges. Bandits and pirates were also persistent problems, during wars these could be joined by privateers. Traders could be arrested abroad and their goods could be confiscated. The league sought to codify protection; internal treaties established mutual defence and external treaties codified privileges.
Many locals, merchant and noble alike, envied the power of the League and tried to diminish it. For example, in London, the local merchants exerted continuing pressure for the revocation of privileges. Most foreign cities confined the Hanseatic traders to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. The refusal of the Hansa to offer reciprocal arrangements to their counterparts exacerbated the tension.
The merchants of the Hanseatic League succeeded in using their economic power to pressure cities and rulers. It could call embargoes, redirect trade away from towns and even boycott entire countries. There were blockades against Novgorod in 1268 and 1277/1278. Bruges was pressured by temporarily moving the Hanseatic emporium to Aardenburg from 1280 to 1282, from 1307 or 1308 to 1310 and in 1350, to Dordt in 1358 and 1388, and to Antwerp in 1436. Boycotts against Norway in 1284 and Flanders in 1358 almost caused famines there. They sometimes resorted to their military might, several Hanseatic cities maintained their own warships and in times of need merchant ships could be repurposed. But military action against political powers often didn't involve the entire league. Instead an ad hoc coalition of stakeholders, called an alliance (tohopesate), was often formed.
As an essential part of protecting their investment in ships and their cargoes, League members trained pilots and erected lighthouses, like the still working Kõpu Lighthouse, and other lights. Lübeck also erected in 1202 what's claimed to be the first lighthouse proper in northern Europe in Falsterbo. There were by 1600 at least 15 lights erected along the German and Scandinavian coasts making it the best lighted sea area then in the world, largely thanks to the Hansa.
The weakening of imperial power and imperial protection for merchants under the late Hohenstaufen dynasty forced the Hanseatic League to institutionalise into a cooperating network of cities with a fluid structure, called the Städtehanse in the historiography, but it never became a closely managed formal organisation and the Kaufmannshanse continued to exist by its side. This development was delayed by the conquest of many Wendish cities by the Danish king Eric VI Menved or by their feudal overlords between 1306 and 1319 and the restriction of their autonomy. Assemblies of the Hanse towns met irregularly in Lübeck for a Hansetag (Hanseatic Diet), some argue from about 1300, while others date the first diet to 1356. But many towns chose not to attend nor to send representatives, and decisions were not binding on individual cities if their delegates were not included in the recesses; representatives would sometimes leave the Diet prematurely in an attempt to give their towns an excuse not to ratify decisions. Only a very small number of Hanseatic cities were free imperial cities or enjoyed comparable autonomy and liberties, but many cities temporarily gained limited autonomy from their overlords.
Between 1361 and 1370 members of the league waged war against Denmark. Initially unsuccessful with a Wendish offensive, Prussian, Dutch and eventually Wendish towns in 1368 allied in the Confederation of Cologne, sacked Copenhagen and Helsingborg, and forced Valdemar IV, King of Denmark, and his son-in-law Haakon VI, King of Norway, to grant considerable incomes and influence over Øresund fortresses for 15 years in the subsequent peace treaty of Stralsund in 1370. It extended privileges in Scania to the wider Hanseatic League, too, including the towns of Holland and Zeeland. This favourable treaty marked the height of Hanseatic influence; for this period the Hanseatic League has in the past been called a "Northern European great power". The Confederation of Cologne lasted until 1385, the Øresund fortresses were returned to Denmark the same year.
After Valdemar's heir Olav died, a succession dispute erupted over Denmark and Norway between Albert of Mecklenburg, King of Sweden and Margaret I, Queen of Denmark. This was further complicated when Swedish nobles rebelled against Albert and invited Margaret. Albert hired privateers in 1392, the Victual Brothers. They and their descendants threatened maritime trade of the league between 1392 and the 1430s with their raids. From 1395 to 1398 Stockholm was ruled by a consortium of 7 Hanseatic cities under the release agreement for Albert of Mecklenburg, and enjoyed full Hanseatic trading privileges. The Victual Brothers still controlled Gotland in 1398, when it was conquered by the Teutonic Order with support from the Prussian towns; Gotland was transferred to Denmark in 1408. The grandmaster of the Teutonic Order was often seen as head of the Hanse (caput Hansae), not only abroad.
In the 15th century the League became more formally institutionalised and more regionalised. This was in part a response to challenges in governance or competition with rivals, but also a result of changes in trade. A slow shift occurred from Hanseatic cities' loose participation to formal recognition of membership, but only if a city's use of the Hanseatic privileges was controversial.
Russian principalities gained trading privileges in 1392 in Livonia and on Gotland in exchange for renewing the German privileges, after conflict since the 1380s. English traders also received trade privileges in Prussia with the treaties of Marienburg and became prominent in the trade there, after extended conflicts from the 1370s till the early 1400s. The importance of Hanseatic trade in England decreased during the 15th century.
The Hanseatic cities of Holland and Zealandic had participated in the Hansa as late as 1394, but in 1395 they were prevented from cooperation by feudal obligations to Albert I, Duke of Bavaria who warred against the Frisians. Their Hanseatic ties weakened and their economies started to develop in another direction. The economic reorientation was even more drastic when Holland and Zealand became between 1417 and 1432 slowly part of the Burgundian State.
In the 15th century, tensions between the Prussian region and the "Wendish" cities (Lübeck and its eastern neighbours) increased. Lübeck was dependent on its role as centre of the Hansa, being on the shore of the sea without a major river. It was on the entrance of the land route to Hamburg, but this land route could be bypassed by sea travel around Denmark and through the Kattegat. Prussia's main interest, on the other hand, was the export of bulk products like grain and timber, which were very important for England, the Low Countries, and, later on, also for Spain and Italy.
Lübeck was in financial troubles from 1403 and dissenting craftsmen established in 1405 a supervising committee of 60. A constitutional crisis broke out in 1408 when the committee of 60 rebelled and put a new town council in place. Similar revolts broke out in Wismar and Rostock and new town councils were establisged in 1410. The crisis was only ended in 1418 by compromise.
Eric of Pomerania succeeded Margaret of Denmark in 1412, sought to expand into Schleswig and Holstein and levied tolls at the Øresund. Hanseatic cities were divided initially, Lübeck tried to appease Eric while Hamburg supported the Schauenburg counts of Holstein. The Danish-Hanseatic War eventually began in 1426. After the Bombardment of Copenhagen, the Treaty of Vordingborg renewed the commercial privileges in 1435 but the Øresund tolls continued. Eric of Pomerania was deposed in 1438 or 1439 by Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In 1438 Lübeck took control of the Øresund toll for a while. This caused tension with Holland and Zeeland. The Sound tolls, and the later attempt of Lübeck to exclude the English and Dutch merchants from Scania, harmed the Scanian herring trade in the long term when the excluded regions began to develop their own herring industries.
In the Dutch–Hanseatic War (1438–1441), a privateer war mostly waged by Wendish towns, the merchants of Amsterdam sought and eventually won free access to the Baltic. Although the blockade of the grain trade hurt Holland and Zeeland more than Hanseatic cities, it was against Prussian interest to maintain it.
The economic crises of the late 15th century did not spare the Hansa. Nevertheless, its eventual rivals emerged in the form of the territorial states, whether new or revived. New vehicles of credit were imported from Italy.
A general trend over the 15th century was that the Hanseatic hometowns increasingly introduced new statures into the kontors' legislation, especially after 1474. Only the Bergen kontor grew more independent in this period.
Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg, tried to assert authority over the Hanseatic towns Berlin and Cölln in 1442 and blocked all towns of Brandenburg from participating in Hanseatic diets. For some but not all Brandenburg towns this was the end of their Hanseatic involvement. In 1488 John Cicero, Elector of Brandenburg did the same to Stendal and Salzwedel in the Altmark.
In 1454, the year of the marriage of Elisabeth of Austria to King-Grand Duke Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland-Lithuania, the towns of the Prussian Confederation rose up against the dominance of the Teutonic Order and asked Casimir IV for help. Gdańsk (Danzig), Thorn and Elbing became part of the Kingdom of Poland, (from 1466 to 1569 referred to as Royal Prussia, region of Poland) by the Second Peace of Thorn.
Poland in turn was heavily supported by the Holy Roman Empire through family connections and by military assistance under the Habsburgs. Kraków, then the capital of Poland, had a loose association with the Hansa. The lack of customs borders on the River Vistula after 1466 helped to gradually increase Polish grain exports, transported to the sea down the Vistula, from 10,000 short tons (9,100 t) per year, in the late 15th century, to over 200,000 short tons (180,000 t) in the 17th century. The Hansa-dominated maritime grain trade made Poland one of the main areas of its activity, helping Danzig to become the Hansa's largest city. The Polish kings soon began to reduce the towns' political freedoms.
The Griffin dukes of Pomerania from the middle of the fifteenth century began constant conflicts to bring the Pomeranian Hanseatic towns under their control. This was not very successful at first, but Bogislav X subjugated Stettin and Köslin and harmed the economy and restricted the independence of many other towns.
A major economic advantage for the Hansa was its control of the shipbuilding market, mainly in Lübeck and Danzig. The League sold ships throughout Europe.
When Flanders and Holland became part of the Duchy of Burgundy, Burgund Dutch and Prussian cities increasingly excluded Lübeck from their grain trade in the 15th and 16th century. Burgund Dutch demand for Prussian and Livonian grain grew in the late 15th century. These trade interests differed from Wendish interests, threatening political unity, but it also showed a trade where the Hanseatic system was unpractical. Hollandish freight costs were much lower than those of the Hansa, and the Hansa were excluded as middlemen. After several naval wars between Burgundy and the Hanseatic fleets, Amsterdam gained the position of leading port for Polish and Baltic grain from the late 15th century onwards.
Nuremberg in Franconia developed an overland route to sell formerly Hansa-monopolised products from Frankfurt via Nuremberg and Leipzig to Poland and Russia, trading Flemish cloth and French wine in exchange for grain and furs from the east. The Hansa profited from the Nuremberg trade by allowing Nurembergers to settle in Hanseatic towns, which the Franconians exploited by taking over trade with Sweden as well. The Nuremberger merchant Albrecht Moldenhauer was influential in developing the trade with Sweden and Norway, and his sons Wolf Moldenhauer and Burghard Moldenhauer established themselves in Bergen and Stockholm, becoming leaders of the local Hanseatic activities.
King Edward IV of England reconfirmed the league's privileges in the Treaty of Utrecht despite the latent hostility, in part thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made to the Yorkist side during the Wars of the Roses of 1455–1487. Tsar Ivan III of Russia closed the Hanseatic Kontor at Novgorod in 1494 and deported its merchants to Moscow, in an attempt to reduce Hanseatic influence on Russian trade. At the time only 49 traders were at the Peterhof. The fur trade was redirected to Leipzig, taking out the Hansards; while the Hanseatic trade with Russia moved to Riga, Reval and Pleskau. When the Peterhof reopened in 1514, Novgorod wasn't a trade hub any longer. In the same period the burghers of Bergen tried to develop an independent intermediate trade with the northern population, against the Hansards' obstruction. The very existence of the League and its privileges and monopolies created economic and social tensions that often crept over into rivalries between League members.
The development of the Transatlantic trade after the discovery of the Americas caused the remaining kontors' decline, especially in Bruges, because it centred on other ports. It also changed business practice to short-term contracts and made the Hanseatic model of privileged guaranteed trade outdated.
The trends of local feudal lords asserting control over towns and suppressing their autonomy, and of foreign rulers repressing Hanseatic traders continued in the next century.
In the Swedish War of Liberation 1521–1523 the Hanseatic League was successful in opposition in an economic conflict it had over the trade, mining and metal industry in Bergslagen (the main mining area of Sweden in the 16th century) with Jakob Fugger (early extremely rich industrialist in the mining and metal industry on the continent) and his unfriendly business take-over attempt. Fugger allied with his financially dependent pope Leo X, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Christian II of Denmark/Norway. Both sides made huge costly investments in support of larger amounts of expensive hired mercenaries to win the war. After the war Gustav Vasa's Sweden and Frederick I's Denmark pursued independent policies and didn't support Lübeck's effort against Dutch trade.
However, Lübeck under Jürgen Wullenwever overextended in the Count's Feud in Scania and Denmark and lost influence in 1536 after Christian III's victory. Lübeck's attempts at forcing competitors out of the Sound eventually alienated even Gustav Vasa. Its influence in the Nordic countries began to decline.
The Hanseatic towns of Guelders were obstructed in the 1530s by Charles II, Duke of Guelders. The strict Catholic Charles objected to the Lutheranism, in his words "Lutheran heresy", of Lübeck and other north German cities. This frustrated but did not end the towns' Hanseatic trade and there was a small resurgence later.
Later in the 16th century, Denmark-Norway took control of much of the Baltic Sea. Sweden had regained control over its own trade, the Kontor in Novgorod had closed, and the Kontor in Bruges had become effectively moribund because the Zwin inlet was closing up. Finally, the growing political authority of the German princes constrained the independence of the Hanse's towns.
The league attempted to deal with some of these issues: it created the post of syndic in 1556 and elected Heinrich Sudermann to the position, who worked to protect and extend the diplomatic agreements of the member towns. In 1557 and 1579 revised agreements spelled out the duties of towns and some progress was made. The Bruges Kontor moved to Antwerp in 1520 and the Hansa attempted to pioneer new routes. However the league proved unable to prevent the growing mercantile competition.
In 1567, a Hanseatic League agreement reconfirmed previous obligations and rights of league members, such as common protection and defense against enemies. The Prussian Quartier cities of Thorn, Elbing, Königsberg and Riga and Dorpat also signed. When pressed by the King of Poland–Lithuania, Danzig remained neutral and would not allow ships running for Poland into its territory. They had to anchor somewhere else, such as at Pautzke (Puck).
The Antwerp Kontor, moribund after the Fall of Antwerp, closed in 1593. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth of England expelled the League from London, and the Steelyard closed and sequestered in 1598. The Kontor was returned in 1606 under King James but it couldn't recover. The Bergen Kontor continued until 1754; of all the Kontore, only its buildings, the Bryggen, survive.
Not all states tried to suppress their cities' former Hanseatic links; the Dutch Republic encouraged its eastern former members to maintain ties with the remaining Hanseatic League. The States-General relied on those cities in diplomacy at the time of the Kalmar War.
The Thirty Years War was destructive for the Hanseatic League and members suffered heavily from both the imperials, the Danes and the Swedes. At the beginning, Saxon and Wendish faced attacks because of the desire of Christian IV of Denmark to control the Elbe and Weser. Pomerania had a very strong population decline. Sweden took Bremen-Verden (excluding the city of Bremen), Swedish Pomerania (including Stralsund, Greifswald, Rostock) and Swedish Wismar, preventing their cities from participating in the League, and controlled the Oder, Weser and Elbe, and could levy tolls on their traffic. The league became increasingly irrelevant despite its inclusion in the Peace of Westphalia.
In 1666, the Steelyard in London was burned down by the Great Fire of London. The Kontor-manager sent a letter to Lübeck appealing for immediate financial assistance for a reconstruction. Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck called for a Hanseatic Day in 1669. Only a few cities participated and those who came were very reluctant to contribute financially to the reconstruction. It was the last formal meeting, without any of the parties knowing it would be the last. This date is often taken in retrospect as the effective end date of the Hansa, but the Hansa was never formally disbanded. It simply disintegrated and petered out silently.
The Hanseatic League, however, lived on in the public mind. Leopold I even requested Lübeck to call a Tagfahrt to rally support for him against the Turks.
Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen continued to attempt common diplomacy, although interests had already diverged by the Peace of Ryswick. Nonetheless, the Hanseatic Republics were able to jointly perform some diplomacy, such as a joint delegation to the United States in 1827, led by Vincent Rumpff; later the U.S. established a consulate to the Hanseatic and Free Cities from 1857 to 1862. Britain maintained diplomats to the Hanseatic Cities until the unification of Germany in 1871. The three cities also had a common "Hanseatic" representation in Berlin until 1920.
Three kontors also remained as, often unused, Hanseatic property after the League's effective disbandment, as the Peterhof was already closed in the 16th century. Bryggen was sold to Norwegian owners in 1754. The Steelyard in London and the Oostershuis in Antwerp were long impossible to sell. The Steelyard was finally sold in 1852 and the Oostershuis, closed in 1593, was sold in 1862.
Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck remained as the only members until the League's formal end in 1862, on the eve of the 1867 founding of the North German Confederation and the 1871 founding of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I. Despite its collapse, they still cherished the link to the Hanseatic League. Until German reunification, these three cities were the only ones that retained the words "Hanseatic City" in their official German names. Hamburg and Bremen continue to style themselves officially as "free Hanseatic cities", with Lübeck named "Hanseatic City". For Lübeck in particular, this anachronistic tie to a glorious past remained important in the 20th century. In 1937, the Nazi Party revoked its imperial immediacy through the Greater Hamburg Act. Since 1990, 24 other German cities have adopted this title.
The Hanseatic League was a complex and loose-jointed constellation of protagonists pursuing their own interests, which coincided in a shared program of economic domination in the Baltic region, and by no means a monolithic organization or a 'state within a state'. It gradually grew from a network of merchant guilds to develop a more formal association of cities and was never even formed into a legal person.
The members of the Hanseatic League were Low German speaking merchants, with the exception of Dinant, whose towns were where these merchants held citizenship. Not all towns with Low German merchant communities were members of the league (e.g., Emden, Memel (today Klaipėda), Viborg (today Vyborg) and Narva never joined). However, Hansards could also come from settlements without German town law—the premise for league membership was birth to German parents, subjection to German law, and a commercial education. The league served to advance and defend the common interests of its heterogeneous members: commercial ambitions such as enhancement of trade, and political ambitions such as ensuring maximum independence from the noble territorial rulers.
Decisions and actions of the Hanseatic League were the result of a consensus-based procedure. If an issue arose, the league's members were invited to participate in a central meeting, the Tagfahrt (Hanseatic Diet, "meeting ride", sometimes also referred to as Hansetag), that some argue already happened around 1300 but were formalised since 1358; some date the first diet to 1356. The member communities then chose envoys (Ratssendeboten) to represent their local consensus on the issue at the Diet. Not every community sent an envoy; delegates were often entitled to represent a set of communities. Consensus-building on local and Tagfahrt levels followed the Low Saxon tradition of Einung, where consensus was defined as absence of protest: after a discussion, the proposals which gained sufficient support were dictated aloud to the scribe and passed as binding Rezess if the attendees did not object; those favouring alternative proposals unlikely to get sufficient support were obliged to remain silent during this procedure. If consensus could not be established on a certain issue, it was found instead in the appointment of a number of league members who were then empowered to work out a compromise.
The Hanseatic League was characterised by legal pluralism and the diets could not issue laws. But the cities cooperated to achieve limited trade regulation, like measures against fraud, or worked together on a regional level. There was also interest in harmonising maritime law, a long series of ordinances on maritime law was issued in the 15th and 16th centuries. The most extensive maritime ordinance was the Ship Ordinance and Sea Law of 1614, but it's dubious that it was ever enforced.
The Hanseatic Kontore, which operated like an early stock exchange, were settlements of Hansards and organised in the mid 14th century as private corporations that each had their own treasury, court, legislation and seal.They were probably established first to provide security, but also served to secure privileges and engage in diplomacy. The quality of goods was also examined at kontors, increasing the efficiency of trade, and the kontors served as bases to develop connections with local rulers and as sources of economic and political information. Most kontors were also physical locations containing several buildings, that were integrated and segregated from citylife to different degrees. The kontor of Bruges was an exception, it didn't acquire any buildings until the 15th century. Like the guilds, the Kontore were usually led by Ältermänner ("eldermen", or English aldermen). The Stalhof, as a special case, had a Hanseatic and an English alderman. In Novgorod the aldermen were replaced by a hofknecht in the 15th century. The kontors' statutes were read aloud to the present merchants once a year.
In 1347 the Kontor of Bruges modified its statute to ensure an equal representation of the league's members. To that end, member communities from different regions were pooled into three circles (Drittel ("third [part]"): the Wendish and Saxon Drittel, the Westphalian and Prussian Drittel as well as the Gothlandian, Livonian and Swedish Drittel). The merchants from their respective Drittel would then each choose two aldermen and six members of the Eighteen Men's Council (Achtzehnmännerrat) to administer the Kontor for a set period of time.
In 1356, during a Hanseatic meeting in preparation of the first Tagfahrt, or one of the first, the league confirmed this statute. All trader settlements including the Kontors were subordinated to the Diet's decisions around this time, and their envoys also received the right to attend and speak at Diets but they lacked voting power.
The league in general gradually adopted and institutionalized the division into Drittel (see table).
The Hansetag was the only central institution of the Hanseatic League. However, with the division into Drittel ("thirds"), the members of the respective subdivisions frequently held a Dritteltage ("Drittel meeting") to work out common positions which could then be presented at a Hansetag. On a more local level, league members also met, and while such regional meetings were never formalized into a Hanseatic institution, they gradually gained importance in the process of preparing and implementing a Diet's decisions.
From 1554, the division into Drittel was modified to reduce the circles' heterogeneity, to enhance the collaboration of the members on a regional level and thus to make the League's decision-making process more efficient. The number of circles rose to four, so they were called Quartiere (quarters):
This division was however not adopted by the Kontore, who, for their purposes (like Ältermänner elections), grouped the league members in different ways (e.g., the division adopted by the Stalhof in London in 1554 grouped the league members into Dritteln, whereby Lübeck merchants represented the Wendish, Pomeranian Saxon and several Westphalian towns, Cologne merchants represented the Cleves, Mark, Berg and Dutch towns, while Danzig merchants represented the Prussian and Livonian towns).
A number of different types of ships was used in the Hanseatic League for transport over sea and inland waters.
The type that was the most used by the Hansa, and the most emblematic, was the cog. The cog was a multi-purpose clinker-built ship with carvel bottom, a stern rudder and a square rigged mast. Most cogs were privately owned merchant ships, but they were also used as warships. It was built in a variety of sizes and specifications and was used to navigate seas and rivers. They could be outfitted with castles starting from the thirteenth century. The cog was depicted on many seals and several coats of arms of Hanseatic cities, like Stralsund, Elbląg and Wismar. Several ship wrecks of cogs have been found. The most famous one is the well preserved Bremen cog. It could carry a cargo of about 125 tons. The hulk began to replace the cog by 1400 and cogs lost their dominance to them around 1450.
The hulk was a bulkier ship that could carry larger loads; Elbl estimates they could carry up to 500 tons by the 15th century. It could be clinker or carvel-built. No archeological evidence of a hulk has been found.
In 1464 Danzig acquired a French carvel ship through a legal dispute and renamed it the Peter von Danzig. It was 40 m long and had three masts, being one of the largest ships of its time. Danzig adopted carvel construction around 1470, other cities also shifted to carvel type starting from this time. An example is the Jesus of Lübeck, later sold to England for use as a warship and slave ship.
The galleonlike carvel warship Adler von Lübeck was constructed by Lübeck for military use against Sweden during the Northern Seven Years' War (1563–70), launched in 1566, but was never put to military use after the Treaty of Stettin. It was the biggest ship of its day at 78 m long and had four masts, including a bonaventure mizzen. It served as a merchant ship until it was damaged in 1581 on a return voyage from Lisbon and broken up in 1588.
In the hidden table below, the names listed in the column labelled Quarter have been summarised as follows:
The remaining column headings are as follows:
The kontore were the major foreign trading posts of the League, not cities that were Hanseatic members, and are listed in the hidden table below.
The vitten were significant foreign trading posts of the League in Scania, not cities that were Hanseatic members, they are argued by some to have been similar in status to the kontors, and are listed in the hidden table below.
Academic historiography of the Hanseatic League is considered to begin with Georg Sartorius, who started writing his first work in 1795 and founded the liberal historiographical tradition about the Hanseatic League. The German conservative nationalist historiographical tradition was first published with F.W. Barthold's Geschichte der Deutschen Hansa of 1853/1854. The conservative view was associated with Little German ideology and came to predominate from the 1850s until the end of the First World War. Hanseatic history was used to justify a stronger German navy and conservative historians drew a link between the League and the rise of Prussia as the leading German state. This climate deeply influenced the historiography of the Baltic trade for long.
Issues of social, cultural and economic history became more important in German research after the First World War. But a leading historian like Fritz Rörig also promoted a National Socialist perspective. After the Second World War the conservative nationalist view was forsaken, allowing exchanges between German, Swedish and Norwegian historians on the Hanseatic League's role in Sweden and Norway. Views on the League were very negative in those countries, as they still are in Denmark. Philippe Dollinger's book The German Hansa became the standard work in the 1960s. From that time on, the dominant perspective has been of loosely aligned trading network bridging several northern European markets. Marxist historians in the GDR were split on whether the League was a "late feudal" or "proto-capitalist" phenomenon.
There are two museums in Europe dedicated specifically to the history of the Hanseatic League: the European Hansemuseum in Lübeck and the Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene in Bergen.
From the 19th century Hanseatic history was often used to promote a national cause in Germany. German liberals built a fictional literature around Jürgen Wullenwever, that contained fierce anti-Danish sentiment. Hanseatic subjects were used to propagate nation building, colonialism, fleet building and warfare, and the League was presented as a bringer of culture and pioneer of German expansion.
The preoccupation with a strong navy motivated German painters since the 19th century to paint supposedly Hanseatic ships. They used the traditions of maritime paintings and, not wanting Hanseatic ships to look unimpressive, ignored historical evidence to fictionalise cogs into tall two- or three-masted ships. The depictions were widely reproduced, like on plates of Norddeutscher Lloyd. This misleading artistic tradition influenced public perception for the entire 20th century.
In the late 19th century, a social-critical view developed, where opponents of the League like the likedeelers were presented as heroes and liberators from economic oppression. This was very popular from the end of the First World War into the 30s, and lives on in the Störtebeker Festival on Rügen, founded as the Rügenfestspiele by the GDR.
From the late 1970s, the Europeanness and cooperation of the Hanseatic League has come to prominence in popular culture. It also is associated with innovation, entrepreneurism and internationalness in economic circles. In this way it often used for tourism, city branding and commercial marketing. The League's unique governance structure has been identified as a precursor to the supranational model of the European Union.
In 1979 Zwolle invited over 40 cities from West Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway with historic links to the Hanseatic League to sign the recesses of 1669, at Zwolle's 750 year city rights' anniversary in August of the next year. In 1980, those cities established a "new Hanse" in Zwolle, named Städtebund Die Hanse (Union of Cities THE HANSA) in German and reinstituted the Hanseatic diets. This league is open to all former Hanseatic League members and cities that share a Hanseatic heritage.
In 2012 the city league had 187 members. This includes twelve Russian cities, most notably Novgorod, and 21 Polish cities. No Danish cities have joined the Union of Cities. The "new Hanse" fosters business links, tourism and cultural exchange.
The headquarters of the New Hansa is in Lübeck, Germany. The current President of the Hanseatic League of New Time is Jan Lindenau, Mayor of Lübeck.
Dutch cities including Groningen, Deventer, Kampen, Zutphen and Zwolle, and a number of German cities including Bremen, Buxtehude, Demmin, Greifswald, Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Salzwedel, Stade, Stendal, Stralsund, Uelzen and Wismar now call themselves Hanse cities (the German cities' car license plates are prefixed H, e.g. –HB– for "Hansestadt Bremen").
Each year one of the member cities of the New Hansa hosts the Hanseatic Days of New Time international festival.
In 2006, King's Lynn became the first English member of the union of cities. It was joined by Hull in 2012 and Boston in 2016.
The New Hanseatic League was established in February 2018 by finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a foundational document which set out the countries' "shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of the EMU".
The legacy of the Hansa is remembered today in several names: the German airline Lufthansa (lit. "Air Hansa"); F.C. Hansa Rostock, nickamed the Kogge or Hansa-Kogge; Hansa-Park, one of the biggest theme parks in Germany; Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, Netherlands; Hanze oil production platform, Netherlands; the Hansa Brewery in Bergen and the Hanse Sail in Rostock; Hanseatic Trade Center in Hamburg; DDG Hansa, which was a major German shipping company from 1881 until its bankruptcy and takeover by Hapag-Lloyd in 1980; and Hansabank in Estonia, which has been rebranded into Swedbank. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Hanseatic League was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the League expanded between the 13th and 15th centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries, ranging from Estonia in the north and east, to the Netherlands in the west, and Kraków, Poland, in the south.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The League originated from various loose associations of German traders and towns formed to advance mutual commercial interests, such as protection against robbers. These arrangements gradually coalesced into the Hanseatic League, whose traders enjoyed toll privileges and protection in affiliated communities and their trade routes. Economic interdependence and kinship ties between merchant families, who held important positions in towns, led to deeper political integration and the removal of obstacles to trade. Hanseatic Cities gradually developed common trade regulations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "During its heyday, the Hanseatic League dominated maritime trade in the North and Baltic Seas. It established trading posts in numerous towns and cities across Europe; some of these, like the Kontors in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, became extraterritorial entities that enjoyed considerable legal autonomy. Hanseatic merchants, called Hansards, operated in basic private companies and were widely known for their access to a variety of commodities, and enjoyed privileges and protections abroad. The collective economic power made the League capable of imposing blockades and even waging war against kingdoms and principalities.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Even at its peak, the Hanseatic League was never more than a loosely aligned confederation of city-states. It lacked a permanent administrative body, a treasury, and a standing military force. In the 14th century, the Hanseatic League instated an irregular negotiating diet (Middle Low German: dachvart or dach; German: Tagfahrt or Hansetag) that operated on deliberation and consensus. By the mid-16th century, these weak connections left the Hanseatic League vulnerable, and it gradually unraveled as members became consolidated into other realms or departed, ultimately disintegrating in 1669.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hanseatic League used several types of ships that sailed over seas and on rivers. The most emblematic type was the cog. Knowing great diversity in construction, it was depicted on Hanseatic seals and coats of arms. By the end of the Middle Ages, the cog was replaced by other types like the hulk, which later gave way to larger carvel types.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hanse is the Old High German word for a band or troop. This word was applied to bands of merchants traveling between the Hanseatic cities — whether by land or by sea. Hanse in Middle Low German came to mean a society of merchants or a trader guild. That it originally meant An-See, or \"on the sea\", is incorrect.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Exploratory trading adventures, raids, and piracy occurred early throughout the Baltic Sea. The sailors of Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as Novgorod, which was a major trade centre of Rus'. Scandinavians led international trade in the Baltic area before the Hanseatic League, establishing major trading hubs at Birka, Haithabu, and Schleswig by the 9th century CE. The later Hanseatic ports between Mecklenburg and Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) originally formed part of the Scandinavian-led Baltic trade-system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Hanseatic League was never formally founded, so it lacks a date of founding. Historians traditionally traced its origins to the rebuilding of the north German town of Lübeck in 1159 by the powerful Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, after he had captured the area from Adolf II, Count of Schauenburg and Holstein. More recent scholarship has deemphasized the focus on Lübeck, viewing it as one of several regional trading centers, and presenting the League as the combination of a north German trading system oriented on the Baltic and a Rhinelandic trading system targeting England and Flanders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "German cities achieved domination of trade in the Baltic with striking speed during the 13th century, and Lübeck became a central node in the seaborne trade that linked the areas around the North and Baltic seas. The hegemony of Lübeck peaked during the 15th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Well before the term Hanse appeared in a document in 1267, merchants in different cities began to form guilds, or hansas, with the intention of trading with towns overseas, especially in the economically less-developed eastern Baltic. This area could supply timber, wax, amber, resins, and furs, along with rye and wheat brought down on barges from the hinterland to port markets. Merchant guilds formed in both hometowns and destination ports as medieval corporations (universitates mercatorum), and despite competition would increasingly cooperate to coalesce into the Hanseatic network of merchant guilds. The dominant language of trade was Middle Low German, which had significant impact on the languages spoken in the area, particularly the larger Scandinavian languages, Estonian, and Latvian.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Lübeck soon became a base for merchants from Saxony and Westphalia trading eastward and northward; for them, because of its shorter and easier access route and better legal protections, it was a more attractive port than Schleswig. It became a transshipment port for trade between the North Sea and the Baltic too. In addition, Lübeck granted extensive trade privileges to Russian and Scandinavian traders. It was also the main supply port for the Northern Crusades, improving its relations with the Pope. Lübeck gained imperial privileges to become a free imperial city in 1226, under Valdemar II of Denmark during the Danish dominion, as had Hamburg in 1189. Also in this period Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund and Danzig received city charters.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Visby, on the island of Gotland, functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a trading post at Novgorod called Gutagard (also known as Gotenhof) in 1080. Gotland became separate from Sweden after 1120 and allowed traders from the south and west. Merchants from northern Germany from then on stayed there in the early period of the Gotlander settlement, through a treaty with the Visby Hansa. Later, in the first half of the 13th century, they established their own trading station or Kontor in Novgorod, known as the Peterhof, further up the river Volkhov.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Hansa societies worked to remove restrictions on trade for their members. The earliest extant documentary mention (although without a name) of a specific German commercial federation dates between 1173 and 1175 (but commonly misdated to 1157) in London. That year, the merchants of the Hansa in Cologne convinced King Henry II of England to exempt them from all tolls in London and to grant protection to merchants and goods throughout England.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "German colonists in the 12th and 13th centuries settled in numerous cities on and near the east Baltic coast, such as Elbing (Elbląg), Thorn (Toruń), Reval (Tallinn), Riga, and Dorpat (Tartu), which became members of the Hanseatic League, and some of which still retain many Hansa buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days. Most were granted Lübeck law, after the league's most prominent town. The law provided that they had to appeal in all legal matters to Lübeck's city council. Others, like Danzig from 1295, had Magdeburg law or its derivative Culm law. Later the Livonian Confederation of 1435 to c. 1582 incorporated modern-day Estonia and parts of Latvia; all of its major towns were members of the Hanseatic League.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Over the 13th century, older and wealthier long-distance traders increasingly settled in their hometowns as senior trade partners, while they previously became landowners. Already in older times merchants had often begun partnerships or private companies. Factors, who were junior partners or associates, were instead sent to foreign places and settled on location. By the end of the century foreign long-distance trade had developed a division of labor with three roles: the settled senior merchant, the transporter (skipper, carrier or land carter) and the factor abroad. But inside the area of Hanseatic towns travelling representatives were sent on individual trade expeditions. The larger number of settled merchants allowed long-distance traders to influence town policy more, combined with an increased presence of the ministerial class this raised the rank of merchants and enabled them to dominate more cities. This decentralised arrangement was fostered by slow travel speeds, going from Reval to Lübeck took between 4 weeks and, in winter, 4 months.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1241 Lübeck, which had access to the Baltic and North seas' fishing grounds, formed an alliance—a precursor to the League—with Hamburg, another trading city, which controlled access to salt-trade routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities gained control over most of the salt-fish trade, especially the Scania Market; Cologne joined them in the Diet of 1260. The towns raised their own armies, with each guild required to provide levies when needed. The Hanseatic cities came to the aid of one another, and commercial ships often had to be used to carry soldiers and their arms. Over the period, a network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the West, cities of the Rhineland like Cologne enjoyed trading privileges in Flanders and England. In 1266 King Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, initially causing competition with the Westphalians. But the Cologne Hansa and the Wendish Hansa joined in 1282 to form the Hanseatic colony in London, although they didn't completely merge until the 15th century.There were blockades against Novgorod in 1268 and 1277/1278. Nonetheless Westphalian traders continued to dominate trade on London and also Ipswich and Colchester, while Baltic and Wendish traders concentrated between King's Lynn and Newcastle upon Tyne. Much of the drive for co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial governments, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years, the merchant Hansa solidified with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. Cities not only from the east modern day Low Countries, but also Utrecht, Holland, Zealand, Brabant, Namur and modern Limburg began to participate from the thirteenth century. This network of Hanseatic trading guilds is called the Kaufmannshanse in the historiography.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The League succeeded in establishing additional Kontors in Bruges (Flanders), Bryggen in Bergen (Norway), and London (England) beside the Peterhof in Novgorod. These trading posts were institutionalised by the first half of the 14th century at the latest (for Bergen and Bruges) and, except for the Kontor of Bruges, became significant enclaves. The London Kontor, the Steelyard (Middle Low German stâlhof, German Stahlhof), stood west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street, on the site now occupied by Cannon Street station. It grew into a significant walled community with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses, reflecting the importance and scale of trading activity on the premises.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In addition to the major Kontors, individual ports with Hanseatic trading outposts or factories had a representative merchant and warehouse. Often they were not permanently manned. In Scania, Denmark, there were around 30 Hanseatic seasonal factories for traders in salted herring, these were called vitten and were granted considerable legal autonomy to the extent that Burkhardt argues that they resembled a fifth kontor and would be seen as such if not for their early decline. The Scanian herring fairs drew large numbers from the Wendish towns, who consolidated the herring trade through an integral approach where they supplied their own salt, but also traders from elsewhere in Scandinavia or from the lands around the North Sea attended. In England there were factories in Boston (the outpost was also called the Stalhof), Bristol, Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn, which features the sole remaining Hanseatic warehouse in England), Hull, Ipswich, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Scarborough, Yarmouth (now Great Yarmouth), and York, many of which were important for the Baltic trade and become centres of cloth industry in the late 14th century. Hansards and cloth manufacturers coordinated to make fabrics meet local demand and fashion in the traders' hometowns. Outposts in Lisbon, Bordeaux, Bourgneuf, La Rochelle and Nantes offered the cheaper Bay salt. Ships that plied this trade sailed home in the salt fleet. There were also trading posts in Flanders, Denmark-Norway, the Baltic interior, Upper Germany, Iceland and Venice.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Starting with trade in coarse woollen fabrics, the Hanseatic League had the effect of bringing both commerce and industry to northern Germany. As trade increased, newer and finer woollen and linen fabrics, and even silks, were manufactured in northern Germany. The same refinement of products out of cottage industry occurred in other fields, e.g. etching, wood carving, armour production, engraving of metals, and wood-turning.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The league primarily traded beeswax, furs, timber, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat, and rye from the east to Flanders and England with cloth, in particular broadcloth, (and, increasingly, manufactured goods) going in the other direction. Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring came southwards from Sweden, the Carpathians were another important source of copper and iron, often sold in Thorn. Lubeck also had a vital role in the salt trade; salt was acquired in Lunenburg or shipped from France and Portugal and sold on Central European markets, taken to Scania for salting herring or exported to Russia. Stockfish was traded from Bergen in exchange for grain; Hanseatic grain inflows allowed more permanent settlements further north in Norway. The league also traded in beer, with beer from Hanseatic towns the most valued, and Wendish cities like Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Rostock developed export breweries for hopped beer.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hanseatic trade was not exclusively maritime trade, or even overwater trade. Most Hanseatic towns did not have immediate access to the sea and there were many that were linked to partners by river trade or even generally expensive land trade. These combined into an integrated network and many smaller Hanseatic towns had their main trading activity in subregional trade. Internal Hanseatic trade was in fact the Hanse's quantitatively most voluminous and important business. Trade over rivers and land was not tied to specific Hanseatic privileges, but sea ports like Bremen, Hamburg and Riga managed to dominate trade on their rivers. This was not possible for the Rhine where trade retained an open character. Digging canals for trade routes was very uncommon, but the Stecknitz Canal was built between Lübeck and Lauenburg from 1391 to 1398.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Hanseatic League, at first the merchant hansas and eventually its cities, relied on power to secure protection and gain and preserve privileges. Bandits and pirates were also persistent problems, during wars these could be joined by privateers. Traders could be arrested abroad and their goods could be confiscated. The league sought to codify protection; internal treaties established mutual defence and external treaties codified privileges.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Many locals, merchant and noble alike, envied the power of the League and tried to diminish it. For example, in London, the local merchants exerted continuing pressure for the revocation of privileges. Most foreign cities confined the Hanseatic traders to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. The refusal of the Hansa to offer reciprocal arrangements to their counterparts exacerbated the tension.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The merchants of the Hanseatic League succeeded in using their economic power to pressure cities and rulers. It could call embargoes, redirect trade away from towns and even boycott entire countries. There were blockades against Novgorod in 1268 and 1277/1278. Bruges was pressured by temporarily moving the Hanseatic emporium to Aardenburg from 1280 to 1282, from 1307 or 1308 to 1310 and in 1350, to Dordt in 1358 and 1388, and to Antwerp in 1436. Boycotts against Norway in 1284 and Flanders in 1358 almost caused famines there. They sometimes resorted to their military might, several Hanseatic cities maintained their own warships and in times of need merchant ships could be repurposed. But military action against political powers often didn't involve the entire league. Instead an ad hoc coalition of stakeholders, called an alliance (tohopesate), was often formed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "As an essential part of protecting their investment in ships and their cargoes, League members trained pilots and erected lighthouses, like the still working Kõpu Lighthouse, and other lights. Lübeck also erected in 1202 what's claimed to be the first lighthouse proper in northern Europe in Falsterbo. There were by 1600 at least 15 lights erected along the German and Scandinavian coasts making it the best lighted sea area then in the world, largely thanks to the Hansa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The weakening of imperial power and imperial protection for merchants under the late Hohenstaufen dynasty forced the Hanseatic League to institutionalise into a cooperating network of cities with a fluid structure, called the Städtehanse in the historiography, but it never became a closely managed formal organisation and the Kaufmannshanse continued to exist by its side. This development was delayed by the conquest of many Wendish cities by the Danish king Eric VI Menved or by their feudal overlords between 1306 and 1319 and the restriction of their autonomy. Assemblies of the Hanse towns met irregularly in Lübeck for a Hansetag (Hanseatic Diet), some argue from about 1300, while others date the first diet to 1356. But many towns chose not to attend nor to send representatives, and decisions were not binding on individual cities if their delegates were not included in the recesses; representatives would sometimes leave the Diet prematurely in an attempt to give their towns an excuse not to ratify decisions. Only a very small number of Hanseatic cities were free imperial cities or enjoyed comparable autonomy and liberties, but many cities temporarily gained limited autonomy from their overlords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Between 1361 and 1370 members of the league waged war against Denmark. Initially unsuccessful with a Wendish offensive, Prussian, Dutch and eventually Wendish towns in 1368 allied in the Confederation of Cologne, sacked Copenhagen and Helsingborg, and forced Valdemar IV, King of Denmark, and his son-in-law Haakon VI, King of Norway, to grant considerable incomes and influence over Øresund fortresses for 15 years in the subsequent peace treaty of Stralsund in 1370. It extended privileges in Scania to the wider Hanseatic League, too, including the towns of Holland and Zeeland. This favourable treaty marked the height of Hanseatic influence; for this period the Hanseatic League has in the past been called a \"Northern European great power\". The Confederation of Cologne lasted until 1385, the Øresund fortresses were returned to Denmark the same year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "After Valdemar's heir Olav died, a succession dispute erupted over Denmark and Norway between Albert of Mecklenburg, King of Sweden and Margaret I, Queen of Denmark. This was further complicated when Swedish nobles rebelled against Albert and invited Margaret. Albert hired privateers in 1392, the Victual Brothers. They and their descendants threatened maritime trade of the league between 1392 and the 1430s with their raids. From 1395 to 1398 Stockholm was ruled by a consortium of 7 Hanseatic cities under the release agreement for Albert of Mecklenburg, and enjoyed full Hanseatic trading privileges. The Victual Brothers still controlled Gotland in 1398, when it was conquered by the Teutonic Order with support from the Prussian towns; Gotland was transferred to Denmark in 1408. The grandmaster of the Teutonic Order was often seen as head of the Hanse (caput Hansae), not only abroad.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the 15th century the League became more formally institutionalised and more regionalised. This was in part a response to challenges in governance or competition with rivals, but also a result of changes in trade. A slow shift occurred from Hanseatic cities' loose participation to formal recognition of membership, but only if a city's use of the Hanseatic privileges was controversial.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Russian principalities gained trading privileges in 1392 in Livonia and on Gotland in exchange for renewing the German privileges, after conflict since the 1380s. English traders also received trade privileges in Prussia with the treaties of Marienburg and became prominent in the trade there, after extended conflicts from the 1370s till the early 1400s. The importance of Hanseatic trade in England decreased during the 15th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Hanseatic cities of Holland and Zealandic had participated in the Hansa as late as 1394, but in 1395 they were prevented from cooperation by feudal obligations to Albert I, Duke of Bavaria who warred against the Frisians. Their Hanseatic ties weakened and their economies started to develop in another direction. The economic reorientation was even more drastic when Holland and Zealand became between 1417 and 1432 slowly part of the Burgundian State.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the 15th century, tensions between the Prussian region and the \"Wendish\" cities (Lübeck and its eastern neighbours) increased. Lübeck was dependent on its role as centre of the Hansa, being on the shore of the sea without a major river. It was on the entrance of the land route to Hamburg, but this land route could be bypassed by sea travel around Denmark and through the Kattegat. Prussia's main interest, on the other hand, was the export of bulk products like grain and timber, which were very important for England, the Low Countries, and, later on, also for Spain and Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Lübeck was in financial troubles from 1403 and dissenting craftsmen established in 1405 a supervising committee of 60. A constitutional crisis broke out in 1408 when the committee of 60 rebelled and put a new town council in place. Similar revolts broke out in Wismar and Rostock and new town councils were establisged in 1410. The crisis was only ended in 1418 by compromise.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Eric of Pomerania succeeded Margaret of Denmark in 1412, sought to expand into Schleswig and Holstein and levied tolls at the Øresund. Hanseatic cities were divided initially, Lübeck tried to appease Eric while Hamburg supported the Schauenburg counts of Holstein. The Danish-Hanseatic War eventually began in 1426. After the Bombardment of Copenhagen, the Treaty of Vordingborg renewed the commercial privileges in 1435 but the Øresund tolls continued. Eric of Pomerania was deposed in 1438 or 1439 by Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In 1438 Lübeck took control of the Øresund toll for a while. This caused tension with Holland and Zeeland. The Sound tolls, and the later attempt of Lübeck to exclude the English and Dutch merchants from Scania, harmed the Scanian herring trade in the long term when the excluded regions began to develop their own herring industries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the Dutch–Hanseatic War (1438–1441), a privateer war mostly waged by Wendish towns, the merchants of Amsterdam sought and eventually won free access to the Baltic. Although the blockade of the grain trade hurt Holland and Zeeland more than Hanseatic cities, it was against Prussian interest to maintain it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The economic crises of the late 15th century did not spare the Hansa. Nevertheless, its eventual rivals emerged in the form of the territorial states, whether new or revived. New vehicles of credit were imported from Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "A general trend over the 15th century was that the Hanseatic hometowns increasingly introduced new statures into the kontors' legislation, especially after 1474. Only the Bergen kontor grew more independent in this period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg, tried to assert authority over the Hanseatic towns Berlin and Cölln in 1442 and blocked all towns of Brandenburg from participating in Hanseatic diets. For some but not all Brandenburg towns this was the end of their Hanseatic involvement. In 1488 John Cicero, Elector of Brandenburg did the same to Stendal and Salzwedel in the Altmark.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1454, the year of the marriage of Elisabeth of Austria to King-Grand Duke Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland-Lithuania, the towns of the Prussian Confederation rose up against the dominance of the Teutonic Order and asked Casimir IV for help. Gdańsk (Danzig), Thorn and Elbing became part of the Kingdom of Poland, (from 1466 to 1569 referred to as Royal Prussia, region of Poland) by the Second Peace of Thorn.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Poland in turn was heavily supported by the Holy Roman Empire through family connections and by military assistance under the Habsburgs. Kraków, then the capital of Poland, had a loose association with the Hansa. The lack of customs borders on the River Vistula after 1466 helped to gradually increase Polish grain exports, transported to the sea down the Vistula, from 10,000 short tons (9,100 t) per year, in the late 15th century, to over 200,000 short tons (180,000 t) in the 17th century. The Hansa-dominated maritime grain trade made Poland one of the main areas of its activity, helping Danzig to become the Hansa's largest city. The Polish kings soon began to reduce the towns' political freedoms.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Griffin dukes of Pomerania from the middle of the fifteenth century began constant conflicts to bring the Pomeranian Hanseatic towns under their control. This was not very successful at first, but Bogislav X subjugated Stettin and Köslin and harmed the economy and restricted the independence of many other towns.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "A major economic advantage for the Hansa was its control of the shipbuilding market, mainly in Lübeck and Danzig. The League sold ships throughout Europe.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "When Flanders and Holland became part of the Duchy of Burgundy, Burgund Dutch and Prussian cities increasingly excluded Lübeck from their grain trade in the 15th and 16th century. Burgund Dutch demand for Prussian and Livonian grain grew in the late 15th century. These trade interests differed from Wendish interests, threatening political unity, but it also showed a trade where the Hanseatic system was unpractical. Hollandish freight costs were much lower than those of the Hansa, and the Hansa were excluded as middlemen. After several naval wars between Burgundy and the Hanseatic fleets, Amsterdam gained the position of leading port for Polish and Baltic grain from the late 15th century onwards.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Nuremberg in Franconia developed an overland route to sell formerly Hansa-monopolised products from Frankfurt via Nuremberg and Leipzig to Poland and Russia, trading Flemish cloth and French wine in exchange for grain and furs from the east. The Hansa profited from the Nuremberg trade by allowing Nurembergers to settle in Hanseatic towns, which the Franconians exploited by taking over trade with Sweden as well. The Nuremberger merchant Albrecht Moldenhauer was influential in developing the trade with Sweden and Norway, and his sons Wolf Moldenhauer and Burghard Moldenhauer established themselves in Bergen and Stockholm, becoming leaders of the local Hanseatic activities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "King Edward IV of England reconfirmed the league's privileges in the Treaty of Utrecht despite the latent hostility, in part thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made to the Yorkist side during the Wars of the Roses of 1455–1487. Tsar Ivan III of Russia closed the Hanseatic Kontor at Novgorod in 1494 and deported its merchants to Moscow, in an attempt to reduce Hanseatic influence on Russian trade. At the time only 49 traders were at the Peterhof. The fur trade was redirected to Leipzig, taking out the Hansards; while the Hanseatic trade with Russia moved to Riga, Reval and Pleskau. When the Peterhof reopened in 1514, Novgorod wasn't a trade hub any longer. In the same period the burghers of Bergen tried to develop an independent intermediate trade with the northern population, against the Hansards' obstruction. The very existence of the League and its privileges and monopolies created economic and social tensions that often crept over into rivalries between League members.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The development of the Transatlantic trade after the discovery of the Americas caused the remaining kontors' decline, especially in Bruges, because it centred on other ports. It also changed business practice to short-term contracts and made the Hanseatic model of privileged guaranteed trade outdated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The trends of local feudal lords asserting control over towns and suppressing their autonomy, and of foreign rulers repressing Hanseatic traders continued in the next century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In the Swedish War of Liberation 1521–1523 the Hanseatic League was successful in opposition in an economic conflict it had over the trade, mining and metal industry in Bergslagen (the main mining area of Sweden in the 16th century) with Jakob Fugger (early extremely rich industrialist in the mining and metal industry on the continent) and his unfriendly business take-over attempt. Fugger allied with his financially dependent pope Leo X, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Christian II of Denmark/Norway. Both sides made huge costly investments in support of larger amounts of expensive hired mercenaries to win the war. After the war Gustav Vasa's Sweden and Frederick I's Denmark pursued independent policies and didn't support Lübeck's effort against Dutch trade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "However, Lübeck under Jürgen Wullenwever overextended in the Count's Feud in Scania and Denmark and lost influence in 1536 after Christian III's victory. Lübeck's attempts at forcing competitors out of the Sound eventually alienated even Gustav Vasa. Its influence in the Nordic countries began to decline.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Hanseatic towns of Guelders were obstructed in the 1530s by Charles II, Duke of Guelders. The strict Catholic Charles objected to the Lutheranism, in his words \"Lutheran heresy\", of Lübeck and other north German cities. This frustrated but did not end the towns' Hanseatic trade and there was a small resurgence later.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Later in the 16th century, Denmark-Norway took control of much of the Baltic Sea. Sweden had regained control over its own trade, the Kontor in Novgorod had closed, and the Kontor in Bruges had become effectively moribund because the Zwin inlet was closing up. Finally, the growing political authority of the German princes constrained the independence of the Hanse's towns.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The league attempted to deal with some of these issues: it created the post of syndic in 1556 and elected Heinrich Sudermann to the position, who worked to protect and extend the diplomatic agreements of the member towns. In 1557 and 1579 revised agreements spelled out the duties of towns and some progress was made. The Bruges Kontor moved to Antwerp in 1520 and the Hansa attempted to pioneer new routes. However the league proved unable to prevent the growing mercantile competition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 1567, a Hanseatic League agreement reconfirmed previous obligations and rights of league members, such as common protection and defense against enemies. The Prussian Quartier cities of Thorn, Elbing, Königsberg and Riga and Dorpat also signed. When pressed by the King of Poland–Lithuania, Danzig remained neutral and would not allow ships running for Poland into its territory. They had to anchor somewhere else, such as at Pautzke (Puck).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Antwerp Kontor, moribund after the Fall of Antwerp, closed in 1593. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth of England expelled the League from London, and the Steelyard closed and sequestered in 1598. The Kontor was returned in 1606 under King James but it couldn't recover. The Bergen Kontor continued until 1754; of all the Kontore, only its buildings, the Bryggen, survive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Not all states tried to suppress their cities' former Hanseatic links; the Dutch Republic encouraged its eastern former members to maintain ties with the remaining Hanseatic League. The States-General relied on those cities in diplomacy at the time of the Kalmar War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Thirty Years War was destructive for the Hanseatic League and members suffered heavily from both the imperials, the Danes and the Swedes. At the beginning, Saxon and Wendish faced attacks because of the desire of Christian IV of Denmark to control the Elbe and Weser. Pomerania had a very strong population decline. Sweden took Bremen-Verden (excluding the city of Bremen), Swedish Pomerania (including Stralsund, Greifswald, Rostock) and Swedish Wismar, preventing their cities from participating in the League, and controlled the Oder, Weser and Elbe, and could levy tolls on their traffic. The league became increasingly irrelevant despite its inclusion in the Peace of Westphalia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 1666, the Steelyard in London was burned down by the Great Fire of London. The Kontor-manager sent a letter to Lübeck appealing for immediate financial assistance for a reconstruction. Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck called for a Hanseatic Day in 1669. Only a few cities participated and those who came were very reluctant to contribute financially to the reconstruction. It was the last formal meeting, without any of the parties knowing it would be the last. This date is often taken in retrospect as the effective end date of the Hansa, but the Hansa was never formally disbanded. It simply disintegrated and petered out silently.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Hanseatic League, however, lived on in the public mind. Leopold I even requested Lübeck to call a Tagfahrt to rally support for him against the Turks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen continued to attempt common diplomacy, although interests had already diverged by the Peace of Ryswick. Nonetheless, the Hanseatic Republics were able to jointly perform some diplomacy, such as a joint delegation to the United States in 1827, led by Vincent Rumpff; later the U.S. established a consulate to the Hanseatic and Free Cities from 1857 to 1862. Britain maintained diplomats to the Hanseatic Cities until the unification of Germany in 1871. The three cities also had a common \"Hanseatic\" representation in Berlin until 1920.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Three kontors also remained as, often unused, Hanseatic property after the League's effective disbandment, as the Peterhof was already closed in the 16th century. Bryggen was sold to Norwegian owners in 1754. The Steelyard in London and the Oostershuis in Antwerp were long impossible to sell. The Steelyard was finally sold in 1852 and the Oostershuis, closed in 1593, was sold in 1862.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck remained as the only members until the League's formal end in 1862, on the eve of the 1867 founding of the North German Confederation and the 1871 founding of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I. Despite its collapse, they still cherished the link to the Hanseatic League. Until German reunification, these three cities were the only ones that retained the words \"Hanseatic City\" in their official German names. Hamburg and Bremen continue to style themselves officially as \"free Hanseatic cities\", with Lübeck named \"Hanseatic City\". For Lübeck in particular, this anachronistic tie to a glorious past remained important in the 20th century. In 1937, the Nazi Party revoked its imperial immediacy through the Greater Hamburg Act. Since 1990, 24 other German cities have adopted this title.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Hanseatic League was a complex and loose-jointed constellation of protagonists pursuing their own interests, which coincided in a shared program of economic domination in the Baltic region, and by no means a monolithic organization or a 'state within a state'. It gradually grew from a network of merchant guilds to develop a more formal association of cities and was never even formed into a legal person.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The members of the Hanseatic League were Low German speaking merchants, with the exception of Dinant, whose towns were where these merchants held citizenship. Not all towns with Low German merchant communities were members of the league (e.g., Emden, Memel (today Klaipėda), Viborg (today Vyborg) and Narva never joined). However, Hansards could also come from settlements without German town law—the premise for league membership was birth to German parents, subjection to German law, and a commercial education. The league served to advance and defend the common interests of its heterogeneous members: commercial ambitions such as enhancement of trade, and political ambitions such as ensuring maximum independence from the noble territorial rulers.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Decisions and actions of the Hanseatic League were the result of a consensus-based procedure. If an issue arose, the league's members were invited to participate in a central meeting, the Tagfahrt (Hanseatic Diet, \"meeting ride\", sometimes also referred to as Hansetag), that some argue already happened around 1300 but were formalised since 1358; some date the first diet to 1356. The member communities then chose envoys (Ratssendeboten) to represent their local consensus on the issue at the Diet. Not every community sent an envoy; delegates were often entitled to represent a set of communities. Consensus-building on local and Tagfahrt levels followed the Low Saxon tradition of Einung, where consensus was defined as absence of protest: after a discussion, the proposals which gained sufficient support were dictated aloud to the scribe and passed as binding Rezess if the attendees did not object; those favouring alternative proposals unlikely to get sufficient support were obliged to remain silent during this procedure. If consensus could not be established on a certain issue, it was found instead in the appointment of a number of league members who were then empowered to work out a compromise.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Hanseatic League was characterised by legal pluralism and the diets could not issue laws. But the cities cooperated to achieve limited trade regulation, like measures against fraud, or worked together on a regional level. There was also interest in harmonising maritime law, a long series of ordinances on maritime law was issued in the 15th and 16th centuries. The most extensive maritime ordinance was the Ship Ordinance and Sea Law of 1614, but it's dubious that it was ever enforced.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Hanseatic Kontore, which operated like an early stock exchange, were settlements of Hansards and organised in the mid 14th century as private corporations that each had their own treasury, court, legislation and seal.They were probably established first to provide security, but also served to secure privileges and engage in diplomacy. The quality of goods was also examined at kontors, increasing the efficiency of trade, and the kontors served as bases to develop connections with local rulers and as sources of economic and political information. Most kontors were also physical locations containing several buildings, that were integrated and segregated from citylife to different degrees. The kontor of Bruges was an exception, it didn't acquire any buildings until the 15th century. Like the guilds, the Kontore were usually led by Ältermänner (\"eldermen\", or English aldermen). The Stalhof, as a special case, had a Hanseatic and an English alderman. In Novgorod the aldermen were replaced by a hofknecht in the 15th century. The kontors' statutes were read aloud to the present merchants once a year.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 1347 the Kontor of Bruges modified its statute to ensure an equal representation of the league's members. To that end, member communities from different regions were pooled into three circles (Drittel (\"third [part]\"): the Wendish and Saxon Drittel, the Westphalian and Prussian Drittel as well as the Gothlandian, Livonian and Swedish Drittel). The merchants from their respective Drittel would then each choose two aldermen and six members of the Eighteen Men's Council (Achtzehnmännerrat) to administer the Kontor for a set period of time.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1356, during a Hanseatic meeting in preparation of the first Tagfahrt, or one of the first, the league confirmed this statute. All trader settlements including the Kontors were subordinated to the Diet's decisions around this time, and their envoys also received the right to attend and speak at Diets but they lacked voting power.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The league in general gradually adopted and institutionalized the division into Drittel (see table).",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Hansetag was the only central institution of the Hanseatic League. However, with the division into Drittel (\"thirds\"), the members of the respective subdivisions frequently held a Dritteltage (\"Drittel meeting\") to work out common positions which could then be presented at a Hansetag. On a more local level, league members also met, and while such regional meetings were never formalized into a Hanseatic institution, they gradually gained importance in the process of preparing and implementing a Diet's decisions.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "From 1554, the division into Drittel was modified to reduce the circles' heterogeneity, to enhance the collaboration of the members on a regional level and thus to make the League's decision-making process more efficient. The number of circles rose to four, so they were called Quartiere (quarters):",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "This division was however not adopted by the Kontore, who, for their purposes (like Ältermänner elections), grouped the league members in different ways (e.g., the division adopted by the Stalhof in London in 1554 grouped the league members into Dritteln, whereby Lübeck merchants represented the Wendish, Pomeranian Saxon and several Westphalian towns, Cologne merchants represented the Cleves, Mark, Berg and Dutch towns, while Danzig merchants represented the Prussian and Livonian towns).",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "A number of different types of ships was used in the Hanseatic League for transport over sea and inland waters.",
"title": "Hanseatic ships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The type that was the most used by the Hansa, and the most emblematic, was the cog. The cog was a multi-purpose clinker-built ship with carvel bottom, a stern rudder and a square rigged mast. Most cogs were privately owned merchant ships, but they were also used as warships. It was built in a variety of sizes and specifications and was used to navigate seas and rivers. They could be outfitted with castles starting from the thirteenth century. The cog was depicted on many seals and several coats of arms of Hanseatic cities, like Stralsund, Elbląg and Wismar. Several ship wrecks of cogs have been found. The most famous one is the well preserved Bremen cog. It could carry a cargo of about 125 tons. The hulk began to replace the cog by 1400 and cogs lost their dominance to them around 1450.",
"title": "Hanseatic ships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The hulk was a bulkier ship that could carry larger loads; Elbl estimates they could carry up to 500 tons by the 15th century. It could be clinker or carvel-built. No archeological evidence of a hulk has been found.",
"title": "Hanseatic ships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1464 Danzig acquired a French carvel ship through a legal dispute and renamed it the Peter von Danzig. It was 40 m long and had three masts, being one of the largest ships of its time. Danzig adopted carvel construction around 1470, other cities also shifted to carvel type starting from this time. An example is the Jesus of Lübeck, later sold to England for use as a warship and slave ship.",
"title": "Hanseatic ships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The galleonlike carvel warship Adler von Lübeck was constructed by Lübeck for military use against Sweden during the Northern Seven Years' War (1563–70), launched in 1566, but was never put to military use after the Treaty of Stettin. It was the biggest ship of its day at 78 m long and had four masts, including a bonaventure mizzen. It served as a merchant ship until it was damaged in 1581 on a return voyage from Lisbon and broken up in 1588.",
"title": "Hanseatic ships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the hidden table below, the names listed in the column labelled Quarter have been summarised as follows:",
"title": "Lists of former Hanseatic cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The remaining column headings are as follows:",
"title": "Lists of former Hanseatic cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The kontore were the major foreign trading posts of the League, not cities that were Hanseatic members, and are listed in the hidden table below.",
"title": "Lists of former Hanseatic cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The vitten were significant foreign trading posts of the League in Scania, not cities that were Hanseatic members, they are argued by some to have been similar in status to the kontors, and are listed in the hidden table below.",
"title": "Lists of former Hanseatic cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Academic historiography of the Hanseatic League is considered to begin with Georg Sartorius, who started writing his first work in 1795 and founded the liberal historiographical tradition about the Hanseatic League. The German conservative nationalist historiographical tradition was first published with F.W. Barthold's Geschichte der Deutschen Hansa of 1853/1854. The conservative view was associated with Little German ideology and came to predominate from the 1850s until the end of the First World War. Hanseatic history was used to justify a stronger German navy and conservative historians drew a link between the League and the rise of Prussia as the leading German state. This climate deeply influenced the historiography of the Baltic trade for long.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Issues of social, cultural and economic history became more important in German research after the First World War. But a leading historian like Fritz Rörig also promoted a National Socialist perspective. After the Second World War the conservative nationalist view was forsaken, allowing exchanges between German, Swedish and Norwegian historians on the Hanseatic League's role in Sweden and Norway. Views on the League were very negative in those countries, as they still are in Denmark. Philippe Dollinger's book The German Hansa became the standard work in the 1960s. From that time on, the dominant perspective has been of loosely aligned trading network bridging several northern European markets. Marxist historians in the GDR were split on whether the League was a \"late feudal\" or \"proto-capitalist\" phenomenon.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "There are two museums in Europe dedicated specifically to the history of the Hanseatic League: the European Hansemuseum in Lübeck and the Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene in Bergen.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "From the 19th century Hanseatic history was often used to promote a national cause in Germany. German liberals built a fictional literature around Jürgen Wullenwever, that contained fierce anti-Danish sentiment. Hanseatic subjects were used to propagate nation building, colonialism, fleet building and warfare, and the League was presented as a bringer of culture and pioneer of German expansion.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The preoccupation with a strong navy motivated German painters since the 19th century to paint supposedly Hanseatic ships. They used the traditions of maritime paintings and, not wanting Hanseatic ships to look unimpressive, ignored historical evidence to fictionalise cogs into tall two- or three-masted ships. The depictions were widely reproduced, like on plates of Norddeutscher Lloyd. This misleading artistic tradition influenced public perception for the entire 20th century.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In the late 19th century, a social-critical view developed, where opponents of the League like the likedeelers were presented as heroes and liberators from economic oppression. This was very popular from the end of the First World War into the 30s, and lives on in the Störtebeker Festival on Rügen, founded as the Rügenfestspiele by the GDR.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "From the late 1970s, the Europeanness and cooperation of the Hanseatic League has come to prominence in popular culture. It also is associated with innovation, entrepreneurism and internationalness in economic circles. In this way it often used for tourism, city branding and commercial marketing. The League's unique governance structure has been identified as a precursor to the supranational model of the European Union.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In 1979 Zwolle invited over 40 cities from West Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway with historic links to the Hanseatic League to sign the recesses of 1669, at Zwolle's 750 year city rights' anniversary in August of the next year. In 1980, those cities established a \"new Hanse\" in Zwolle, named Städtebund Die Hanse (Union of Cities THE HANSA) in German and reinstituted the Hanseatic diets. This league is open to all former Hanseatic League members and cities that share a Hanseatic heritage.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "In 2012 the city league had 187 members. This includes twelve Russian cities, most notably Novgorod, and 21 Polish cities. No Danish cities have joined the Union of Cities. The \"new Hanse\" fosters business links, tourism and cultural exchange.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The headquarters of the New Hansa is in Lübeck, Germany. The current President of the Hanseatic League of New Time is Jan Lindenau, Mayor of Lübeck.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Dutch cities including Groningen, Deventer, Kampen, Zutphen and Zwolle, and a number of German cities including Bremen, Buxtehude, Demmin, Greifswald, Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Salzwedel, Stade, Stendal, Stralsund, Uelzen and Wismar now call themselves Hanse cities (the German cities' car license plates are prefixed H, e.g. –HB– for \"Hansestadt Bremen\").",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Each year one of the member cities of the New Hansa hosts the Hanseatic Days of New Time international festival.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In 2006, King's Lynn became the first English member of the union of cities. It was joined by Hull in 2012 and Boston in 2016.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The New Hanseatic League was established in February 2018 by finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a foundational document which set out the countries' \"shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of the EMU\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The legacy of the Hansa is remembered today in several names: the German airline Lufthansa (lit. \"Air Hansa\"); F.C. Hansa Rostock, nickamed the Kogge or Hansa-Kogge; Hansa-Park, one of the biggest theme parks in Germany; Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, Netherlands; Hanze oil production platform, Netherlands; the Hansa Brewery in Bergen and the Hanse Sail in Rostock; Hanseatic Trade Center in Hamburg; DDG Hansa, which was a major German shipping company from 1881 until its bankruptcy and takeover by Hapag-Lloyd in 1980; and Hansabank in Estonia, which has been rebranded into Swedbank.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| The Hanseatic League was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the League expanded between the 13th and 15th centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries, ranging from Estonia in the north and east, to the Netherlands in the west, and Kraków, Poland, in the south. The League originated from various loose associations of German traders and towns formed to advance mutual commercial interests, such as protection against robbers. These arrangements gradually coalesced into the Hanseatic League, whose traders enjoyed toll privileges and protection in affiliated communities and their trade routes. Economic interdependence and kinship ties between merchant families, who held important positions in towns, led to deeper political integration and the removal of obstacles to trade. Hanseatic Cities gradually developed common trade regulations. During its heyday, the Hanseatic League dominated maritime trade in the North and Baltic Seas. It established trading posts in numerous towns and cities across Europe; some of these, like the Kontors in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, became extraterritorial entities that enjoyed considerable legal autonomy. Hanseatic merchants, called Hansards, operated in basic private companies and were widely known for their access to a variety of commodities, and enjoyed privileges and protections abroad. The collective economic power made the League capable of imposing blockades and even waging war against kingdoms and principalities. Even at its peak, the Hanseatic League was never more than a loosely aligned confederation of city-states. It lacked a permanent administrative body, a treasury, and a standing military force. In the 14th century, the Hanseatic League instated an irregular negotiating diet that operated on deliberation and consensus. By the mid-16th century, these weak connections left the Hanseatic League vulnerable, and it gradually unraveled as members became consolidated into other realms or departed, ultimately disintegrating in 1669. The Hanseatic League used several types of ships that sailed over seas and on rivers. The most emblematic type was the cog. Knowing great diversity in construction, it was depicted on Hanseatic seals and coats of arms. By the end of the Middle Ages, the cog was replaced by other types like the hulk, which later gave way to larger carvel types. | 2001-11-10T03:52:23Z | 2023-12-31T05:39:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League |
14,107 | Harvard (disambiguation) | Harvard University is a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Harvard may also refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harvard University is a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Harvard may also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Harvard University is a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Harvard may also refer to: | 2023-01-12T18:32:57Z | [
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"Template:Wiktionary",
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_(disambiguation) |
|
14,108 | Historical African place names | This is a list of historical African place names. The names on the left are linked to the corresponding subregion(s) from History of Africa. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "This is a list of historical African place names. The names on the left are linked to the corresponding subregion(s) from History of Africa.",
"title": ""
}
]
| This is a list of historical African place names. The names on the left are linked to the corresponding subregion(s) from History of Africa. Axum - Eritrea and Ethiopia
Africa (province) - Tunisia
Barbary Coast - Algeria
Bechuanaland - Botswana
Belgian Congo - Democratic Republic of the Congo
Carthage - Tunisia
Central African Empire - Central African Republic
Congo Free State - Democratic Republic of the Congo
Dahomey - Benin
Equatoria - Sudan and Uganda
Fernando Pó - Bioko
French Congo - Gabon and Republic of the Congo
French Equatorial Africa - Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon, Republic of the Congo
French Sudan - Mali
French West Africa - Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Benin
German East Africa - Tanzania and Zanzibar
German South-West Africa - Namibia
The Gold Coast - Ghana
Guinea
Grain Coast or Pepper Coast - Liberia
Malagasy Republic - Madagascar
Mauritania Tingitana-Morocco
Mdre Bahri -Eritrea
Monomotapa - Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and parts of Namibia and Botswana
Middle Congo - Republic of the Congo
Nubia - Sudan and Egypt
Numidia - Algeria, Libya and Tunisia
Nyasaland - Malawi
Western Pentapolis - Libya
Portuguese Guinea - Guinea-Bissau
Rhodesia - Rwanda-Urundi - Rwanda and Burundi
The Slave Coast - Benin
Somaliland - Somalia
South-West Africa - Namibia
Spanish Sahara - Western Sahara
Swaziland - Eswatini
French Upper Volta - Republic of Upper Volta - Burkina Faso
Zaire - Republic of the Congo - Democratic Republic of the Congo | 2023-07-13T00:56:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_African_place_names |
|
14,109 | Horror fiction | Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.
Prevalent elements include ghosts, demons, vampires, monsters, zombies, werewolves, the Devil, serial killers, extraterrestrial life, killer toys, psychopaths, sexual deviancy, rape, gore, torture, evil clowns, cults, cannibalism, vicious animals, the apocalypse, evil witches, dystopia, and human-made or natural disasters.
The horror genre has ancient origins, with roots in folklore and religious traditions focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic and the principle of the thing embodied in the person. These manifested in stories of beings such as demons, witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts. European horror-fiction became established through works of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans. Mary Shelley's well-known 1818 novel about Frankenstein was greatly influenced by the story of Hippolytus, whom Asclepius revives from death. Euripides wrote plays based on the story, Hippolytos Kalyptomenos and Hippolytus. In Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in the account of Cimon, the author describes the spirit of a murderer, Damon, who himself was murdered in a bathhouse in Chaeronea.
Pliny the Younger (61 to c. 113) tells the tale of Athenodorus Cananites, who bought a haunted house in Athens. Athenodorus was cautious since the house seemed inexpensive. While writing a book on philosophy, he was visited by a ghostly figure bound in chains. The figure disappeared in the courtyard; the following day, the magistrates dug in the courtyard and found an unmarked grave.
Elements of the horror genre also occur in Biblical texts, notably in the Book of Revelation.
The Witch of Berkeley by William of Malmesbury has been viewed as an early horror story. Werewolf stories were popular in medieval French literature. One of Marie de France's twelve lais is a werewolf story titled "Bisclavret".
The Countess Yolande commissioned a werewolf story titled "Guillaume de Palerme". Anonymous writers penned two werewolf stories, "Biclarel" and "Melion".
Much horror fiction derives from the cruellest personages of the 15th century. Dracula can be traced to the Prince of Wallachia Vlad III, whose alleged war crimes were published in German pamphlets. A 1499 pamphlet was published by Markus Ayrer, which is most notable for its woodcut imagery. The alleged serial-killer sprees of Gilles de Rais have been seen as the inspiration for "Bluebeard". The motif of the vampiress is most notably derived from the real-life noblewoman and murderer, Elizabeth Bathory, and helped usher in the emergence of horror fiction in the 18th century, such as through László Turóczi's 1729 book Tragica Historia.
The 18th century saw the gradual development of Romanticism and the Gothic horror genre. It drew on the written and material heritage of the Late Middle Ages, finding its form with Horace Walpole's seminal and controversial 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto. In fact, the first edition was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy, discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. Once revealed as modern, many found it anachronistic, reactionary, or simply in poor taste but it proved immediately popular. Otranto inspired Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Lewis. A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed towards a female audience, a typical scenario of the novels being a resourceful female menaced in a gloomy castle.
The Gothic tradition blossomed into the genre that modern readers today call horror literature in the 19th century. Influential works and characters that continue resonating in fiction and film today saw their genesis in the Brothers Grimm's "Hänsel und Gretel" (1812), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Thomas Peckett Prest's Varney the Vampire (1847), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Each of these works created an enduring icon of horror seen in later re-imaginings on the page, stage, and screen.
A proliferation of cheap periodicals around the turn of the century led to a boom in horror writing. For example, Gaston Leroux serialized his Le Fantôme de l'Opéra before it became a novel in 1910. One writer who specialized in horror fiction for mainstream pulps, such as All-Story Magazine, was Tod Robbins, whose fiction deals with themes of madness and cruelty. In Russia, the writer Alexander Belyaev popularized these themes in his story Professor Dowell's Head (1925), in which a mad doctor performs experimental head transplants and reanimations on bodies stolen from the morgue, and which was first published as a magazine serial before being turned into a novel. Later, specialist publications emerged to give horror writers an outlet, prominent among them was Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds.
Influential horror writers of the early 20th century made inroads in these mediums. Particularly, the venerated horror author H. P. Lovecraft, and his enduring Cthulhu Mythos transformed and popularized the genre of cosmic horror, and M. R. James is credited with redefining the ghost story in that era.
The serial murderer became a recurring theme. Yellow journalism and sensationalism of various murderers, such as Jack the Ripper, and lesser so, Carl Panzram, Fritz Haarman, and Albert Fish, all perpetuated this phenomenon. The trend continued in the postwar era, partly renewed after the murders committed by Ed Gein. In 1959, Robert Bloch, inspired by the murders, wrote Psycho. The crimes committed in 1969 by the Manson Family influenced the slasher theme in horror fiction of the 1970s. In 1981, Thomas Harris wrote Red Dragon, introducing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. In 1988, the sequel to that novel, The Silence of the Lambs, was published.
Early cinema was inspired by many aspects of horror literature, and started a strong tradition of horror films and subgenres that continues to this day. Up until the graphic depictions of violence and gore on the screen commonly associated with 1960s and 1970s slasher films and splatter films, comic books such as those published by EC Comics (most notably Tales From The Crypt) in the 1950s satisfied readers' quests for horror imagery that the silver screen could not provide. This imagery made these comics controversial, and as a consequence, they were frequently censored.
The modern zombie tale dealing with the motif of the living dead harks back to works including H. P. Lovecraft's stories "Cool Air" (1925), "In The Vault" (1926), and "The Outsider" (1926), and Dennis Wheatley's "Strange Conflict" (1941). Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) influenced an entire genre of apocalyptic zombie fiction emblematized by the films of George A. Romero.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the enormous commercial success of three books - Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, and The Other by Thomas Tryon - encouraged publishers to begin releasing numerous other horror novels, thus creating a "horror boom".
One of the best-known late-20th century horror writers is Stephen King, known for Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, and several dozen other novels and about 200 short stories. Beginning in the 1970s, King's stories have attracted a large audience, for which he was awarded by the U.S. National Book Foundation in 2003. Other popular horror authors of the period included Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Peter Straub.
Best-selling book series of contemporary times exist in genres related to horror fiction, such as the werewolf fiction urban fantasy Kitty Norville books by Carrie Vaughn (2005 onward). Horror elements continue to expand outside the genre. The alternate history of more traditional historical horror in Dan Simmons's 2007 novel The Terror sits on bookstore shelves next to genre mash ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), and historical fantasy and horror comics such as Hellblazer (1993 onward) and Mike Mignola's Hellboy (1993 onward). Horror also serves as one of the central genres in more complex modern works such as Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award. There are many horror novels for children and teens, such as R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series or The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey. Additionally, many movies for young audiences, particularly animated ones, use horror aesthetics and conventions (for example, ParaNorman). These are what can be collectively referred to as "children's horror". Although it is unknown for sure why children enjoy these movies (as it seems counter-intuitive), it is theorized that it is, in part, grotesque monsters that fascinate kids. Tangential to this, the internalized impact of horror television programs and films on children is rather under-researched, especially when compared to the research done on the similar subject of violence in TV and film's impact on the young mind. What little research there is tends to be inconclusive on the impact that viewing such media has.
One defining trait of the horror genre is that it provokes an emotional, psychological, or physical response within readers that causes them to react with fear. One of H. P. Lovecraft's most famous quotes about the genre is that: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." the first sentence from his seminal essay, "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Science fiction historian Darrell Schweitzer has stated, "In the simplest sense, a horror story is one that scares us" and "the true horror story requires a sense of evil, not in necessarily in a theological sense; but the menaces must be truly menacing, life-destroying, and antithetical to happiness."
In her essay "Elements of Aversion", Elizabeth Barrette articulates the need by some for horror tales in a modern world:
The old "fight or flight" reaction of our evolutionary heritage once played a major role in the life of every human. Our ancestors lived and died by it. Then someone invented the fascinating game of civilization, and things began to calm down. Development pushed wilderness back from settled lands. War, crime, and other forms of social violence came with civilization and humans started preying on each other, but by and large daily life calmed down. We began to feel restless, to feel something missing: the excitement of living on the edge, the tension between hunter and hunted. So we told each other stories through the long, dark nights. when the fires burned low, we did our best to scare the daylights out of each other. The rush of adrenaline feels good. Our hearts pound, our breath quickens, and we can imagine ourselves on the edge. Yet we also appreciate the insightful aspects of horror. Sometimes a story intends to shock and disgust, but the best horror intends to rattle our cages and shake us out of our complacency. It makes us think, forces us to confront ideas we might rather ignore, and challenges preconceptions of all kinds. Horror reminds us that the world is not always as safe as it seems, which exercises our mental muscles and reminds us to keep a little healthy caution close at hand.
In a sense similar to the reason a person seeks out the controlled thrill of a roller coaster, readers in the modern era seek out feelings of horror and terror to feel a sense of excitement. However, Barrette adds that horror fiction is one of the few mediums where readers seek out a form of art that forces themselves to confront ideas and images they "might rather ignore to challenge preconceptions of all kinds."
One can see the confrontation of ideas that readers and characters would "rather ignore" throughout literature in famous moments such as Hamlet's musings about the skull of Yorick, its implications of the mortality of humanity, and the gruesome end that bodies inevitably come to. In horror fiction, the confrontation with the gruesome is often a metaphor for the problems facing the current generation of the author.
There are many theories as to why people enjoy being scared. For example, "people who like horror films are more likely to score highly for openness to experience, a personality trait linked to intellect and imagination."
It is a now commonly accepted view that the horror elements of Dracula's portrayal of vampirism are metaphors for sexuality in a repressed Victorian era. But this is merely one of many interpretations of the metaphor of Dracula. Jack Halberstam postulates many of these in his essay Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula. He writes:
[The] image of dusty and unused gold, coins from many nations and old unworn jewels, immediately connects Dracula to the old money of a corrupt class, to a kind of piracy of nations and to the worst excesses of the aristocracy.
Halberstram articulates a view of Dracula as manifesting the growing perception of the aristocracy as an evil and outdated notion to be defeated. The depiction of a multinational band of protagonists using the latest technologies (such as a telegraph) to quickly share, collate, and act upon new information is what leads to the destruction of the vampire. This is one of many interpretations of the metaphor of only one central figure of the canon of horror fiction, as over a dozen possible metaphors are referenced in the analysis, from the religious to the antisemitic.
Noël Carroll's Philosophy of Horror postulates that a modern piece of horror fiction's "monster", villain, or a more inclusive menace must exhibit the following two traits:
In addition to those essays and articles shown above, scholarship on horror fiction is almost as old as horror fiction itself. In 1826, the gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe published an essay distinguishing two elements of horror fiction, "terror" and "horror." Whereas terror is a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is a feeling of revulsion or disgust after an event has happened. Radcliffe describes terror as that which "expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life," whereas horror is described as that which "freezes and nearly annihilates them."
Modern scholarship on horror fiction draws upon a range of sources. In their historical studies of the gothic novel, both Devendra Varma and S.L. Varnado make reference to the theologian Rudolf Otto, whose concept of the "numinous" was originally used to describe religious experience.
A recent survey reports how often horror media is consumed:
To assess frequency of horror consumption, we asked respondents the following question: "In the past year, about how often have you used horror media (for example, horror literature, film, and video games) for entertainment?" 11.3% said "Never," 7.5% "Once," 28.9% "Several times," 14.1% "Once a month," 20.8% "Several times a month," 7.3% "Once a week," and 10.2% "Several times a week." Evidently, then, most respondents (81.3%) claimed to use horror media several times a year or more often. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between liking and frequency of use (r=.79, p<.0001).
Achievements in horror fiction are recognized by numerous awards. The Horror Writers Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror novel Dracula. The Australian Horror Writers Association presents annual Australian Shadows Awards. The International Horror Guild Award was presented annually to works of horror and dark fantasy from 1995 to 2008. The Shirley Jackson Awards are literary awards for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic works. Other important awards for horror literature are included as subcategories within general awards for fantasy and science fiction in such awards as the Aurealis Award.
Some writers of fiction normally classified as "horror" tend to dislike the term, considering it too lurid. They instead use the terms dark fantasy or Gothic fantasy for supernatural horror, or "psychological thriller" for non-supernatural horror. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as \"a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing\". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Prevalent elements include ghosts, demons, vampires, monsters, zombies, werewolves, the Devil, serial killers, extraterrestrial life, killer toys, psychopaths, sexual deviancy, rape, gore, torture, evil clowns, cults, cannibalism, vicious animals, the apocalypse, evil witches, dystopia, and human-made or natural disasters.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The horror genre has ancient origins, with roots in folklore and religious traditions focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic and the principle of the thing embodied in the person. These manifested in stories of beings such as demons, witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts. European horror-fiction became established through works of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans. Mary Shelley's well-known 1818 novel about Frankenstein was greatly influenced by the story of Hippolytus, whom Asclepius revives from death. Euripides wrote plays based on the story, Hippolytos Kalyptomenos and Hippolytus. In Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in the account of Cimon, the author describes the spirit of a murderer, Damon, who himself was murdered in a bathhouse in Chaeronea.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Pliny the Younger (61 to c. 113) tells the tale of Athenodorus Cananites, who bought a haunted house in Athens. Athenodorus was cautious since the house seemed inexpensive. While writing a book on philosophy, he was visited by a ghostly figure bound in chains. The figure disappeared in the courtyard; the following day, the magistrates dug in the courtyard and found an unmarked grave.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Elements of the horror genre also occur in Biblical texts, notably in the Book of Revelation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Witch of Berkeley by William of Malmesbury has been viewed as an early horror story. Werewolf stories were popular in medieval French literature. One of Marie de France's twelve lais is a werewolf story titled \"Bisclavret\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Countess Yolande commissioned a werewolf story titled \"Guillaume de Palerme\". Anonymous writers penned two werewolf stories, \"Biclarel\" and \"Melion\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Much horror fiction derives from the cruellest personages of the 15th century. Dracula can be traced to the Prince of Wallachia Vlad III, whose alleged war crimes were published in German pamphlets. A 1499 pamphlet was published by Markus Ayrer, which is most notable for its woodcut imagery. The alleged serial-killer sprees of Gilles de Rais have been seen as the inspiration for \"Bluebeard\". The motif of the vampiress is most notably derived from the real-life noblewoman and murderer, Elizabeth Bathory, and helped usher in the emergence of horror fiction in the 18th century, such as through László Turóczi's 1729 book Tragica Historia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The 18th century saw the gradual development of Romanticism and the Gothic horror genre. It drew on the written and material heritage of the Late Middle Ages, finding its form with Horace Walpole's seminal and controversial 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto. In fact, the first edition was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy, discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. Once revealed as modern, many found it anachronistic, reactionary, or simply in poor taste but it proved immediately popular. Otranto inspired Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Lewis. A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed towards a female audience, a typical scenario of the novels being a resourceful female menaced in a gloomy castle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Gothic tradition blossomed into the genre that modern readers today call horror literature in the 19th century. Influential works and characters that continue resonating in fiction and film today saw their genesis in the Brothers Grimm's \"Hänsel und Gretel\" (1812), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), John Polidori's \"The Vampyre\" (1819), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Washington Irving's \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow\" (1820), Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Thomas Peckett Prest's Varney the Vampire (1847), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Each of these works created an enduring icon of horror seen in later re-imaginings on the page, stage, and screen.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A proliferation of cheap periodicals around the turn of the century led to a boom in horror writing. For example, Gaston Leroux serialized his Le Fantôme de l'Opéra before it became a novel in 1910. One writer who specialized in horror fiction for mainstream pulps, such as All-Story Magazine, was Tod Robbins, whose fiction deals with themes of madness and cruelty. In Russia, the writer Alexander Belyaev popularized these themes in his story Professor Dowell's Head (1925), in which a mad doctor performs experimental head transplants and reanimations on bodies stolen from the morgue, and which was first published as a magazine serial before being turned into a novel. Later, specialist publications emerged to give horror writers an outlet, prominent among them was Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Influential horror writers of the early 20th century made inroads in these mediums. Particularly, the venerated horror author H. P. Lovecraft, and his enduring Cthulhu Mythos transformed and popularized the genre of cosmic horror, and M. R. James is credited with redefining the ghost story in that era.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The serial murderer became a recurring theme. Yellow journalism and sensationalism of various murderers, such as Jack the Ripper, and lesser so, Carl Panzram, Fritz Haarman, and Albert Fish, all perpetuated this phenomenon. The trend continued in the postwar era, partly renewed after the murders committed by Ed Gein. In 1959, Robert Bloch, inspired by the murders, wrote Psycho. The crimes committed in 1969 by the Manson Family influenced the slasher theme in horror fiction of the 1970s. In 1981, Thomas Harris wrote Red Dragon, introducing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. In 1988, the sequel to that novel, The Silence of the Lambs, was published.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Early cinema was inspired by many aspects of horror literature, and started a strong tradition of horror films and subgenres that continues to this day. Up until the graphic depictions of violence and gore on the screen commonly associated with 1960s and 1970s slasher films and splatter films, comic books such as those published by EC Comics (most notably Tales From The Crypt) in the 1950s satisfied readers' quests for horror imagery that the silver screen could not provide. This imagery made these comics controversial, and as a consequence, they were frequently censored.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The modern zombie tale dealing with the motif of the living dead harks back to works including H. P. Lovecraft's stories \"Cool Air\" (1925), \"In The Vault\" (1926), and \"The Outsider\" (1926), and Dennis Wheatley's \"Strange Conflict\" (1941). Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) influenced an entire genre of apocalyptic zombie fiction emblematized by the films of George A. Romero.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the enormous commercial success of three books - Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, and The Other by Thomas Tryon - encouraged publishers to begin releasing numerous other horror novels, thus creating a \"horror boom\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "One of the best-known late-20th century horror writers is Stephen King, known for Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, and several dozen other novels and about 200 short stories. Beginning in the 1970s, King's stories have attracted a large audience, for which he was awarded by the U.S. National Book Foundation in 2003. Other popular horror authors of the period included Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Peter Straub.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Best-selling book series of contemporary times exist in genres related to horror fiction, such as the werewolf fiction urban fantasy Kitty Norville books by Carrie Vaughn (2005 onward). Horror elements continue to expand outside the genre. The alternate history of more traditional historical horror in Dan Simmons's 2007 novel The Terror sits on bookstore shelves next to genre mash ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), and historical fantasy and horror comics such as Hellblazer (1993 onward) and Mike Mignola's Hellboy (1993 onward). Horror also serves as one of the central genres in more complex modern works such as Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award. There are many horror novels for children and teens, such as R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series or The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey. Additionally, many movies for young audiences, particularly animated ones, use horror aesthetics and conventions (for example, ParaNorman). These are what can be collectively referred to as \"children's horror\". Although it is unknown for sure why children enjoy these movies (as it seems counter-intuitive), it is theorized that it is, in part, grotesque monsters that fascinate kids. Tangential to this, the internalized impact of horror television programs and films on children is rather under-researched, especially when compared to the research done on the similar subject of violence in TV and film's impact on the young mind. What little research there is tends to be inconclusive on the impact that viewing such media has.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "One defining trait of the horror genre is that it provokes an emotional, psychological, or physical response within readers that causes them to react with fear. One of H. P. Lovecraft's most famous quotes about the genre is that: \"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.\" the first sentence from his seminal essay, \"Supernatural Horror in Literature\". Science fiction historian Darrell Schweitzer has stated, \"In the simplest sense, a horror story is one that scares us\" and \"the true horror story requires a sense of evil, not in necessarily in a theological sense; but the menaces must be truly menacing, life-destroying, and antithetical to happiness.\"",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In her essay \"Elements of Aversion\", Elizabeth Barrette articulates the need by some for horror tales in a modern world:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The old \"fight or flight\" reaction of our evolutionary heritage once played a major role in the life of every human. Our ancestors lived and died by it. Then someone invented the fascinating game of civilization, and things began to calm down. Development pushed wilderness back from settled lands. War, crime, and other forms of social violence came with civilization and humans started preying on each other, but by and large daily life calmed down. We began to feel restless, to feel something missing: the excitement of living on the edge, the tension between hunter and hunted. So we told each other stories through the long, dark nights. when the fires burned low, we did our best to scare the daylights out of each other. The rush of adrenaline feels good. Our hearts pound, our breath quickens, and we can imagine ourselves on the edge. Yet we also appreciate the insightful aspects of horror. Sometimes a story intends to shock and disgust, but the best horror intends to rattle our cages and shake us out of our complacency. It makes us think, forces us to confront ideas we might rather ignore, and challenges preconceptions of all kinds. Horror reminds us that the world is not always as safe as it seems, which exercises our mental muscles and reminds us to keep a little healthy caution close at hand.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In a sense similar to the reason a person seeks out the controlled thrill of a roller coaster, readers in the modern era seek out feelings of horror and terror to feel a sense of excitement. However, Barrette adds that horror fiction is one of the few mediums where readers seek out a form of art that forces themselves to confront ideas and images they \"might rather ignore to challenge preconceptions of all kinds.\"",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "One can see the confrontation of ideas that readers and characters would \"rather ignore\" throughout literature in famous moments such as Hamlet's musings about the skull of Yorick, its implications of the mortality of humanity, and the gruesome end that bodies inevitably come to. In horror fiction, the confrontation with the gruesome is often a metaphor for the problems facing the current generation of the author.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There are many theories as to why people enjoy being scared. For example, \"people who like horror films are more likely to score highly for openness to experience, a personality trait linked to intellect and imagination.\"",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It is a now commonly accepted view that the horror elements of Dracula's portrayal of vampirism are metaphors for sexuality in a repressed Victorian era. But this is merely one of many interpretations of the metaphor of Dracula. Jack Halberstam postulates many of these in his essay Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula. He writes:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "[The] image of dusty and unused gold, coins from many nations and old unworn jewels, immediately connects Dracula to the old money of a corrupt class, to a kind of piracy of nations and to the worst excesses of the aristocracy.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Halberstram articulates a view of Dracula as manifesting the growing perception of the aristocracy as an evil and outdated notion to be defeated. The depiction of a multinational band of protagonists using the latest technologies (such as a telegraph) to quickly share, collate, and act upon new information is what leads to the destruction of the vampire. This is one of many interpretations of the metaphor of only one central figure of the canon of horror fiction, as over a dozen possible metaphors are referenced in the analysis, from the religious to the antisemitic.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Noël Carroll's Philosophy of Horror postulates that a modern piece of horror fiction's \"monster\", villain, or a more inclusive menace must exhibit the following two traits:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In addition to those essays and articles shown above, scholarship on horror fiction is almost as old as horror fiction itself. In 1826, the gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe published an essay distinguishing two elements of horror fiction, \"terror\" and \"horror.\" Whereas terror is a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is a feeling of revulsion or disgust after an event has happened. Radcliffe describes terror as that which \"expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,\" whereas horror is described as that which \"freezes and nearly annihilates them.\"",
"title": "Scholarship and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Modern scholarship on horror fiction draws upon a range of sources. In their historical studies of the gothic novel, both Devendra Varma and S.L. Varnado make reference to the theologian Rudolf Otto, whose concept of the \"numinous\" was originally used to describe religious experience.",
"title": "Scholarship and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A recent survey reports how often horror media is consumed:",
"title": "Scholarship and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "To assess frequency of horror consumption, we asked respondents the following question: \"In the past year, about how often have you used horror media (for example, horror literature, film, and video games) for entertainment?\" 11.3% said \"Never,\" 7.5% \"Once,\" 28.9% \"Several times,\" 14.1% \"Once a month,\" 20.8% \"Several times a month,\" 7.3% \"Once a week,\" and 10.2% \"Several times a week.\" Evidently, then, most respondents (81.3%) claimed to use horror media several times a year or more often. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between liking and frequency of use (r=.79, p<.0001).",
"title": "Scholarship and criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Achievements in horror fiction are recognized by numerous awards. The Horror Writers Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror novel Dracula. The Australian Horror Writers Association presents annual Australian Shadows Awards. The International Horror Guild Award was presented annually to works of horror and dark fantasy from 1995 to 2008. The Shirley Jackson Awards are literary awards for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic works. Other important awards for horror literature are included as subcategories within general awards for fantasy and science fiction in such awards as the Aurealis Award.",
"title": "Awards and associations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Some writers of fiction normally classified as \"horror\" tend to dislike the term, considering it too lurid. They instead use the terms dark fantasy or Gothic fantasy for supernatural horror, or \"psychological thriller\" for non-supernatural horror.",
"title": "Alternative terms"
}
]
| Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society. Prevalent elements include ghosts, demons, vampires, monsters, zombies, werewolves, the Devil, serial killers, extraterrestrial life, killer toys, psychopaths, sexual deviancy, rape, gore, torture, evil clowns, cults, cannibalism, vicious animals, the apocalypse, evil witches, dystopia, and human-made or natural disasters. | 2001-07-17T14:16:46Z | 2023-12-19T02:58:30Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_fiction |
14,110 | Holomorphic function | In mathematics, a holomorphic function is a complex-valued function of one or more complex variables that is complex differentiable in a neighbourhood of each point in a domain in complex coordinate space C. The existence of a complex derivative in a neighbourhood is a very strong condition: it implies that a holomorphic function is infinitely differentiable and locally equal to its own Taylor series (analytic). Holomorphic functions are the central objects of study in complex analysis.
Though the term analytic function is often used interchangeably with "holomorphic function", the word "analytic" is defined in a broader sense to denote any function (real, complex, or of more general type) that can be written as a convergent power series in a neighbourhood of each point in its domain. That all holomorphic functions are complex analytic functions, and vice versa, is a major theorem in complex analysis.
Holomorphic functions are also sometimes referred to as regular functions. A holomorphic function whose domain is the whole complex plane is called an entire function. The phrase "holomorphic at a point z0" means not just differentiable at z0, but differentiable everywhere within some neighbourhood of z0 in the complex plane.
Given a complex-valued function f of a single complex variable, the derivative of f at a point z0 in its domain is defined as the limit
This is the same definition as for the derivative of a real function, except that all quantities are complex. In particular, the limit is taken as the complex number z tends to z0, and this means that the same value is obtained for any sequence of complex values for z that tends to z0. If the limit exists, f is said to be complex differentiable at z0. This concept of complex differentiability shares several properties with real differentiability: it is linear and obeys the product rule, quotient rule, and chain rule.
A function is holomorphic on an open set U if it is complex differentiable at every point of U. A function f is holomorphic at a point z0 if it is holomorphic on some neighbourhood of z0. A function is holomorphic on some non-open set A if it is holomorphic at every point of A.
A function may be complex differentiable at a point but not holomorphic at this point. For example, the function f ( z ) = | z | 2 = z z ¯ {\displaystyle f(z)=|z|^{2}=z{\overline {z}}} is complex differentiable at 0, but not complex differentiable elsewhere (see the Cauchy–Riemann equations, below). So, it is not holomorphic at 0.
The relationship between real differentiability and complex differentiability is the following: If a complex function f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y) is holomorphic, then u and v have first partial derivatives with respect to x and y, and satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations:
or, equivalently, the Wirtinger derivative of f with respect to z ¯ , {\displaystyle {\bar {z}},} the complex conjugate of z , {\displaystyle z,} is zero:
which is to say that, roughly, f is functionally independent from z ¯ , {\displaystyle {\bar {z}},} the complex conjugate of z.
If continuity is not given, the converse is not necessarily true. A simple converse is that if u and v have continuous first partial derivatives and satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations, then f is holomorphic. A more satisfying converse, which is much harder to prove, is the Looman–Menchoff theorem: if f is continuous, u and v have first partial derivatives (but not necessarily continuous), and they satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations, then f is holomorphic.
The term holomorphic was introduced in 1875 by Charles Briot and Jean-Claude Bouquet, two of Augustin-Louis Cauchy's students, and derives from the Greek ὅλος (hólos) meaning "whole", and μορφή (morphḗ) meaning "form" or "appearance" or "type", in contrast to the term meromorphic derived from μέρος (méros) meaning "part". A holomorphic function resembles an entire function ("whole") in a domain of the complex plane while a meromorphic function (defined to mean holomorphic except at certain isolated poles), resembles a rational fraction ("part") of entire functions in a domain of the complex plane. Cauchy had instead used the term synectic.
Today, the term "holomorphic function" is sometimes preferred to "analytic function". An important result in complex analysis is that every holomorphic function is complex analytic, a fact that does not follow obviously from the definitions. The term "analytic" is however also in wide use.
Because complex differentiation is linear and obeys the product, quotient, and chain rules, the sums, products and compositions of holomorphic functions are holomorphic, and the quotient of two holomorphic functions is holomorphic wherever the denominator is not zero. That is, if functions f and g are holomorphic in a domain U, then so are f + g, f − g, f g, and f ∘ g. Furthermore, f / g is holomorphic if g has no zeros in U, or is meromorphic otherwise.
If one identifies C with the real plane R, then the holomorphic functions coincide with those functions of two real variables with continuous first derivatives which solve the Cauchy–Riemann equations, a set of two partial differential equations.
Every holomorphic function can be separated into its real and imaginary parts f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y), and each of these is a harmonic function on R (each satisfies Laplace's equation ∇ u = ∇ v = 0), with v the harmonic conjugate of u. Conversely, every harmonic function u(x, y) on a simply connected domain Ω ⊂ R is the real part of a holomorphic function: If v is the harmonic conjugate of u, unique up to a constant, then f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y) is holomorphic.
Cauchy's integral theorem implies that the contour integral of every holomorphic function along a loop vanishes:
Here γ is a rectifiable path in a simply connected complex domain U ⊂ C whose start point is equal to its end point, and f : U → C is a holomorphic function.
Cauchy's integral formula states that every function holomorphic inside a disk is completely determined by its values on the disk's boundary. Furthermore: Suppose U ⊂ C is a complex domain, f : U → C is a holomorphic function and the closed disk D = {z : |z − z0| ≤ r} is completely contained in U. Let γ be the circle forming the boundary of D. Then for every a in the interior of D:
where the contour integral is taken counter-clockwise.
The derivative f′(a) can be written as a contour integral using Cauchy's differentiation formula:
for any simple loop positively winding once around a, and
for infinitesimal positive loops γ around a.
In regions where the first derivative is not zero, holomorphic functions are conformal: they preserve angles and the shape (but not size) of small figures.
Every holomorphic function is analytic. That is, a holomorphic function f has derivatives of every order at each point a in its domain, and it coincides with its own Taylor series at a in a neighbourhood of a. In fact, f coincides with its Taylor series at a in any disk centred at that point and lying within the domain of the function.
From an algebraic point of view, the set of holomorphic functions on an open set is a commutative ring and a complex vector space. Additionally, the set of holomorphic functions in an open set U is an integral domain if and only if the open set U is connected. In fact, it is a locally convex topological vector space, with the seminorms being the suprema on compact subsets.
From a geometric perspective, a function f is holomorphic at z0 if and only if its exterior derivative df in a neighbourhood U of z0 is equal to f′(z) dz for some continuous function f′. It follows from
that df′ is also proportional to dz, implying that the derivative f′ is itself holomorphic and thus that f is infinitely differentiable. Similarly, d(f dz) = f′ dz ∧ dz = 0 implies that any function f that is holomorphic on the simply connected region U is also integrable on U.
(For a path γ from z0 to z lying entirely in U, define F γ ( z ) = F 0 + ∫ γ f d z ; {\textstyle F_{\gamma }(z)=F_{0}+\int _{\gamma }f\,dz;} in light of the Jordan curve theorem and the generalized Stokes' theorem, Fγ(z) is independent of the particular choice of path γ, and thus F(z) is a well-defined function on U having F(z0) = F0 and dF = f dz.)
All polynomial functions in z with complex coefficients are entire functions (holomorphic in the whole complex plane C), and so are the exponential function exp z and the trigonometric functions cos z = 1 2 ( exp ( i z ) + exp ( − i z ) ) {\textstyle \cos {z}={\tfrac {1}{2}}{\bigl (}\exp(iz)+\exp(-iz){\bigr )}} and sin z = − 1 2 i ( exp ( i z ) − exp ( − i z ) ) {\textstyle \sin {z}=-{\tfrac {1}{2}}i{\bigl (}\exp(iz)-\exp(-iz){\bigr )}} (cf. Euler's formula). The principal branch of the complex logarithm function log z is holomorphic on the domain C ∖ {z ∈ R : z ≤ 0}. The square root function can be defined as z = exp ( 1 2 log z ) {\textstyle {\sqrt {z}}=\exp {\bigl (}{\tfrac {1}{2}}\log z{\bigr )}} and is therefore holomorphic wherever the logarithm log z is. The reciprocal function 1 / z is holomorphic on C ∖ {0}. (The reciprocal function, and any other rational function, is meromorphic on C.)
As a consequence of the Cauchy–Riemann equations, any real-valued holomorphic function must be constant. Therefore, the absolute value |z |, the argument arg (z), the real part Re (z) and the imaginary part Im (z) are not holomorphic. Another typical example of a continuous function which is not holomorphic is the complex conjugate z ¯ . {\displaystyle {\bar {z}}.} (The complex conjugate is antiholomorphic.)
The definition of a holomorphic function generalizes to several complex variables in a straightforward way. A function f : ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z n ) ↦ f ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z n ) {\displaystyle f:(z_{1},z_{2},\ldots ,z_{n})\mapsto f(z_{1},z_{2},\ldots ,z_{n})} in n complex variables is analytic at a point p if there exists a neighbourhood of p in which f is equal to a convergent power series in n complex variables; the function f is holomorphic in an open subset U of C if it is analytic at each point in U. Osgood's lemma shows (using the multivariate Cauchy integral formula) that, for a continuous function f, this is equivalent to f being holomorphic in each variable separately (meaning that if any n − 1 coordinates are fixed, then the restriction of f is a holomorphic function of the remaining coordinate). The much deeper Hartogs' theorem proves that the continuity assumption is unnecessary: f is holomorphic if and only if it is holomorphic in each variable separately.
More generally, a function of several complex variables that is square integrable over every compact subset of its domain is analytic if and only if it satisfies the Cauchy–Riemann equations in the sense of distributions.
Functions of several complex variables are in some basic ways more complicated than functions of a single complex variable. For example, the region of convergence of a power series is not necessarily an open ball; these regions are logarithmically-convex Reinhardt domains, the simplest example of which is a polydisk. However, they also come with some fundamental restrictions. Unlike functions of a single complex variable, the possible domains on which there are holomorphic functions that cannot be extended to larger domains are highly limited. Such a set is called a domain of holomorphy.
A complex differential (p, 0)-form α is holomorphic if and only if its antiholomorphic Dolbeault derivative is zero: ∂α = 0.
The concept of a holomorphic function can be extended to the infinite-dimensional spaces of functional analysis. For instance, the Fréchet or Gateaux derivative can be used to define a notion of a holomorphic function on a Banach space over the field of complex numbers. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics, a holomorphic function is a complex-valued function of one or more complex variables that is complex differentiable in a neighbourhood of each point in a domain in complex coordinate space C. The existence of a complex derivative in a neighbourhood is a very strong condition: it implies that a holomorphic function is infinitely differentiable and locally equal to its own Taylor series (analytic). Holomorphic functions are the central objects of study in complex analysis.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Though the term analytic function is often used interchangeably with \"holomorphic function\", the word \"analytic\" is defined in a broader sense to denote any function (real, complex, or of more general type) that can be written as a convergent power series in a neighbourhood of each point in its domain. That all holomorphic functions are complex analytic functions, and vice versa, is a major theorem in complex analysis.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Holomorphic functions are also sometimes referred to as regular functions. A holomorphic function whose domain is the whole complex plane is called an entire function. The phrase \"holomorphic at a point z0\" means not just differentiable at z0, but differentiable everywhere within some neighbourhood of z0 in the complex plane.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Given a complex-valued function f of a single complex variable, the derivative of f at a point z0 in its domain is defined as the limit",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "This is the same definition as for the derivative of a real function, except that all quantities are complex. In particular, the limit is taken as the complex number z tends to z0, and this means that the same value is obtained for any sequence of complex values for z that tends to z0. If the limit exists, f is said to be complex differentiable at z0. This concept of complex differentiability shares several properties with real differentiability: it is linear and obeys the product rule, quotient rule, and chain rule.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A function is holomorphic on an open set U if it is complex differentiable at every point of U. A function f is holomorphic at a point z0 if it is holomorphic on some neighbourhood of z0. A function is holomorphic on some non-open set A if it is holomorphic at every point of A.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A function may be complex differentiable at a point but not holomorphic at this point. For example, the function f ( z ) = | z | 2 = z z ¯ {\\displaystyle f(z)=|z|^{2}=z{\\overline {z}}} is complex differentiable at 0, but not complex differentiable elsewhere (see the Cauchy–Riemann equations, below). So, it is not holomorphic at 0.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The relationship between real differentiability and complex differentiability is the following: If a complex function f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y) is holomorphic, then u and v have first partial derivatives with respect to x and y, and satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "or, equivalently, the Wirtinger derivative of f with respect to z ¯ , {\\displaystyle {\\bar {z}},} the complex conjugate of z , {\\displaystyle z,} is zero:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "which is to say that, roughly, f is functionally independent from z ¯ , {\\displaystyle {\\bar {z}},} the complex conjugate of z.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "If continuity is not given, the converse is not necessarily true. A simple converse is that if u and v have continuous first partial derivatives and satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations, then f is holomorphic. A more satisfying converse, which is much harder to prove, is the Looman–Menchoff theorem: if f is continuous, u and v have first partial derivatives (but not necessarily continuous), and they satisfy the Cauchy–Riemann equations, then f is holomorphic.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The term holomorphic was introduced in 1875 by Charles Briot and Jean-Claude Bouquet, two of Augustin-Louis Cauchy's students, and derives from the Greek ὅλος (hólos) meaning \"whole\", and μορφή (morphḗ) meaning \"form\" or \"appearance\" or \"type\", in contrast to the term meromorphic derived from μέρος (méros) meaning \"part\". A holomorphic function resembles an entire function (\"whole\") in a domain of the complex plane while a meromorphic function (defined to mean holomorphic except at certain isolated poles), resembles a rational fraction (\"part\") of entire functions in a domain of the complex plane. Cauchy had instead used the term synectic.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Today, the term \"holomorphic function\" is sometimes preferred to \"analytic function\". An important result in complex analysis is that every holomorphic function is complex analytic, a fact that does not follow obviously from the definitions. The term \"analytic\" is however also in wide use.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Because complex differentiation is linear and obeys the product, quotient, and chain rules, the sums, products and compositions of holomorphic functions are holomorphic, and the quotient of two holomorphic functions is holomorphic wherever the denominator is not zero. That is, if functions f and g are holomorphic in a domain U, then so are f + g, f − g, f g, and f ∘ g. Furthermore, f / g is holomorphic if g has no zeros in U, or is meromorphic otherwise.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "If one identifies C with the real plane R, then the holomorphic functions coincide with those functions of two real variables with continuous first derivatives which solve the Cauchy–Riemann equations, a set of two partial differential equations.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Every holomorphic function can be separated into its real and imaginary parts f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y), and each of these is a harmonic function on R (each satisfies Laplace's equation ∇ u = ∇ v = 0), with v the harmonic conjugate of u. Conversely, every harmonic function u(x, y) on a simply connected domain Ω ⊂ R is the real part of a holomorphic function: If v is the harmonic conjugate of u, unique up to a constant, then f(x + i y) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y) is holomorphic.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Cauchy's integral theorem implies that the contour integral of every holomorphic function along a loop vanishes:",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Here γ is a rectifiable path in a simply connected complex domain U ⊂ C whose start point is equal to its end point, and f : U → C is a holomorphic function.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Cauchy's integral formula states that every function holomorphic inside a disk is completely determined by its values on the disk's boundary. Furthermore: Suppose U ⊂ C is a complex domain, f : U → C is a holomorphic function and the closed disk D = {z : |z − z0| ≤ r} is completely contained in U. Let γ be the circle forming the boundary of D. Then for every a in the interior of D:",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "where the contour integral is taken counter-clockwise.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The derivative f′(a) can be written as a contour integral using Cauchy's differentiation formula:",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "for any simple loop positively winding once around a, and",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "for infinitesimal positive loops γ around a.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In regions where the first derivative is not zero, holomorphic functions are conformal: they preserve angles and the shape (but not size) of small figures.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Every holomorphic function is analytic. That is, a holomorphic function f has derivatives of every order at each point a in its domain, and it coincides with its own Taylor series at a in a neighbourhood of a. In fact, f coincides with its Taylor series at a in any disk centred at that point and lying within the domain of the function.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "From an algebraic point of view, the set of holomorphic functions on an open set is a commutative ring and a complex vector space. Additionally, the set of holomorphic functions in an open set U is an integral domain if and only if the open set U is connected. In fact, it is a locally convex topological vector space, with the seminorms being the suprema on compact subsets.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "From a geometric perspective, a function f is holomorphic at z0 if and only if its exterior derivative df in a neighbourhood U of z0 is equal to f′(z) dz for some continuous function f′. It follows from",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "that df′ is also proportional to dz, implying that the derivative f′ is itself holomorphic and thus that f is infinitely differentiable. Similarly, d(f dz) = f′ dz ∧ dz = 0 implies that any function f that is holomorphic on the simply connected region U is also integrable on U.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "(For a path γ from z0 to z lying entirely in U, define F γ ( z ) = F 0 + ∫ γ f d z ; {\\textstyle F_{\\gamma }(z)=F_{0}+\\int _{\\gamma }f\\,dz;} in light of the Jordan curve theorem and the generalized Stokes' theorem, Fγ(z) is independent of the particular choice of path γ, and thus F(z) is a well-defined function on U having F(z0) = F0 and dF = f dz.)",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "All polynomial functions in z with complex coefficients are entire functions (holomorphic in the whole complex plane C), and so are the exponential function exp z and the trigonometric functions cos z = 1 2 ( exp ( i z ) + exp ( − i z ) ) {\\textstyle \\cos {z}={\\tfrac {1}{2}}{\\bigl (}\\exp(iz)+\\exp(-iz){\\bigr )}} and sin z = − 1 2 i ( exp ( i z ) − exp ( − i z ) ) {\\textstyle \\sin {z}=-{\\tfrac {1}{2}}i{\\bigl (}\\exp(iz)-\\exp(-iz){\\bigr )}} (cf. Euler's formula). The principal branch of the complex logarithm function log z is holomorphic on the domain C ∖ {z ∈ R : z ≤ 0}. The square root function can be defined as z = exp ( 1 2 log z ) {\\textstyle {\\sqrt {z}}=\\exp {\\bigl (}{\\tfrac {1}{2}}\\log z{\\bigr )}} and is therefore holomorphic wherever the logarithm log z is. The reciprocal function 1 / z is holomorphic on C ∖ {0}. (The reciprocal function, and any other rational function, is meromorphic on C.)",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As a consequence of the Cauchy–Riemann equations, any real-valued holomorphic function must be constant. Therefore, the absolute value |z |, the argument arg (z), the real part Re (z) and the imaginary part Im (z) are not holomorphic. Another typical example of a continuous function which is not holomorphic is the complex conjugate z ¯ . {\\displaystyle {\\bar {z}}.} (The complex conjugate is antiholomorphic.)",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The definition of a holomorphic function generalizes to several complex variables in a straightforward way. A function f : ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z n ) ↦ f ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z n ) {\\displaystyle f:(z_{1},z_{2},\\ldots ,z_{n})\\mapsto f(z_{1},z_{2},\\ldots ,z_{n})} in n complex variables is analytic at a point p if there exists a neighbourhood of p in which f is equal to a convergent power series in n complex variables; the function f is holomorphic in an open subset U of C if it is analytic at each point in U. Osgood's lemma shows (using the multivariate Cauchy integral formula) that, for a continuous function f, this is equivalent to f being holomorphic in each variable separately (meaning that if any n − 1 coordinates are fixed, then the restriction of f is a holomorphic function of the remaining coordinate). The much deeper Hartogs' theorem proves that the continuity assumption is unnecessary: f is holomorphic if and only if it is holomorphic in each variable separately.",
"title": "Several variables"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "More generally, a function of several complex variables that is square integrable over every compact subset of its domain is analytic if and only if it satisfies the Cauchy–Riemann equations in the sense of distributions.",
"title": "Several variables"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Functions of several complex variables are in some basic ways more complicated than functions of a single complex variable. For example, the region of convergence of a power series is not necessarily an open ball; these regions are logarithmically-convex Reinhardt domains, the simplest example of which is a polydisk. However, they also come with some fundamental restrictions. Unlike functions of a single complex variable, the possible domains on which there are holomorphic functions that cannot be extended to larger domains are highly limited. Such a set is called a domain of holomorphy.",
"title": "Several variables"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "A complex differential (p, 0)-form α is holomorphic if and only if its antiholomorphic Dolbeault derivative is zero: ∂α = 0.",
"title": "Several variables"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The concept of a holomorphic function can be extended to the infinite-dimensional spaces of functional analysis. For instance, the Fréchet or Gateaux derivative can be used to define a notion of a holomorphic function on a Banach space over the field of complex numbers.",
"title": "Extension to functional analysis"
}
]
| In mathematics, a holomorphic function is a complex-valued function of one or more complex variables that is complex differentiable in a neighbourhood of each point in a domain in complex coordinate space Cn. The existence of a complex derivative in a neighbourhood is a very strong condition: it implies that a holomorphic function is infinitely differentiable and locally equal to its own Taylor series (analytic). Holomorphic functions are the central objects of study in complex analysis. Though the term analytic function is often used interchangeably with "holomorphic function", the word "analytic" is defined in a broader sense to denote any function that can be written as a convergent power series in a neighbourhood of each point in its domain. That all holomorphic functions are complex analytic functions, and vice versa, is a major theorem in complex analysis. Holomorphic functions are also sometimes referred to as regular functions. A holomorphic function whose domain is the whole complex plane is called an entire function. The phrase "holomorphic at a point z0" means not just differentiable at z0, but differentiable everywhere within some neighbourhood of z0 in the complex plane. | 2001-11-10T15:34:28Z | 2023-12-02T00:14:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holomorphic_function |
14,113 | History of Algeria | Much of the history of Algeria has taken place on the fertile coastal plain of North Africa, which is often called the Maghreb (or Maghreb). North Africa served as a transit region for people moving towards Europe or the Middle East, thus, the region's inhabitants have been influenced by populations from other areas, including the Carthaginians, Romans, and Vandals. The region was conquered by the Muslims in the early 8th century AD, but broke off from the Umayyad Caliphate after the Berber Revolt of 740. During the Ottoman period, Algeria became an important state in the Mediterranean sea which led to many naval conflicts. The last significant events in the country's recent history have been the Algerian War and Algerian Civil War.
Evidence of the early human occupation of Algeria is demonstrated by the discovery of 1.8 million year old Oldowan stone tools found at Ain Hanech in 1992. In 1954 fossilised Homo erectus bones were discovered by C. Arambourg at Ternefine that are 700,000 years old. Neolithic civilization (marked by animal domestication and subsistence agriculture) developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean Maghrib between 6000 and 2000 BC. This type of economy, richly depicted in the Tassili n'Ajjer cave paintings in southeastern Algeria, predominated in the Maghrib until the classical period.
Numidia (Berber: Inumiden; 202–40 BC) was the ancient kingdom of the Numidians located in northwest Africa, initially comprising the territory that now makes up modern-day Algeria, but later expanding across what is today known as Tunisia, Libya, and some parts of Morocco. The polity was originally divided between the Massylii in the east and the Masaesyli in the west. During the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), Masinissa, king of the Massylii, defeated Syphax of the Masaesyli to unify Numidia into one kingdom. The kingdom began as a sovereign state and later alternated between being a Roman province and a Roman client state.
Numidia, at its largest extent, was bordered by Mauretania to the west, at the Moulouya River, Africa to the east (also exercising control over Tripolitania), the Mediterranean Sea to the north, and the Sahara to the south. It was one of the first major states in the history of Algeria and the Berbers.
By 112 BC, Jugurtha resumed his war with Adherbal. He incurred the wrath of Rome in the process by killing some Roman businessmen who were aiding Adherbal. After a brief war with Rome, Jugurtha surrendered and received a highly favourable peace treaty, which raised suspicions of bribery once more. The local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges brought by his political rival Gaius Memmius. Jugurtha was also forced to come to Rome to testify against the Roman commander, where Jugurtha was completely discredited once his violent and ruthless past became widely known, and after he had been suspected of murdering a Numidian rival.
War broke out between Numidia and the Roman Republic and several legions were dispatched to North Africa under the command of the Consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. The war dragged out into a long and seemingly endless campaign as the Romans tried to defeat Jugurtha decisively. Frustrated at the apparent lack of action, Metellus' lieutenant Gaius Marius returned to Rome to seek election as Consul. Marius was elected, and then returned to Numidia to take control of the war. He sent his Quaestor Sulla to neighbouring Mauretania in order to eliminate their support for Jugurtha. With the help of Bocchus I of Mauretania, Sulla captured Jugurtha and brought the war to a conclusive end. Jugurtha was brought to Rome in chains and was placed in the Tullianum.
Jugurtha was executed by the Romans in 104 BC, after being paraded through the streets in Gaius Marius' Triumph.
The Greek historians referred to these peoples as "Νομάδες" (i.e. Nomads), which by Latin interpretation became "Numidae" (but cf. also the correct use of Nomades). Historian Gabriel Camps, however, disputes this claim, favoring instead an African origin for the term.
The name appears first in Polybius (second century BC) to indicate the peoples and territory west of Carthage including the entire north of Algeria as far as the river Mulucha (Muluya), about 160 kilometres (100 mi) west of Oran.
The Numidians were composed of two great tribal groups: the Massylii in eastern Numidia, and the Masaesyli in the west. During the first part of the Second Punic War, the eastern Massylii, under their king Gala, were allied with Carthage, while the western Masaesyli, under king Syphax, were allied with Rome. The Kingdom of Masaesyli under Syphax extended from the Moulouya river to Oued Rhumel.
However, in 206 BC, the new king of the eastern Massylii, Masinissa, allied himself with Rome, and Syphax of the Masaesyli switched his allegiance to the Carthaginian side. At the end of the war, the victorious Romans gave all of Numidia to Masinissa of the Massylii. At the time of his death in 148 BC, Masinissa's territory extended from the Moulouya to the boundary of the Carthaginian territory, and also southeast as far as Cyrenaica to the gulf of Sirte, so that Numidia entirely surrounded Carthage (Appian, Punica, 106) except towards the sea. Furthermore, after the capture of Syphax the king in modern day Morocco with his capital based in Tingis, Bokkar, had become a vassal of Massinissa. Massinissa had also penetrated as far south beyond the Atlas to the Gaetuli and Fezzan was part of his domain.
In 179 B.C. Masinissa had received a golden crown from the inhabitants of Delos as he had offered them a shipload of grain. A statue of Masinissa was set up in Delos in honour of him as well as an inscription dedicated to him in Delos by a native from Rhodes. His sons too had statues of them erected on the island of Delos and the King of Bithynia, Nicomedes, had also dedicated a statue to Masinissa.
After the death of the long-lived Masinissa around 148 BC, he was succeeded by his son Micipsa. When Micipsa died in 118 BC, he was succeeded jointly by his two sons Hiempsal I and Adherbal and Masinissa's illegitimate grandson, Jugurtha, who was very popular among the Numidians. Hiempsal and Jugurtha quarrelled immediately after the death of Micipsa. Jugurtha had Hiempsal killed, which led to open war with Adherbal.
Phoenician traders arrived on the North African coast around 900 BC and established Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) around 800 BC. During the classical period, Berber civilization was already at a stage in which agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and political organization supported several states. Trade links between Carthage and the Berbers in the interior grew, but territorial expansion also resulted in the enslavement or military recruitment of some Berbers and in the extraction of tribute from others.
The Carthaginian state declined because of successive defeats by the Romans in the Punic Wars, and in 146 BC, the city of Carthage was destroyed. As Carthaginian power waned, the influence of Berber leaders in the hinterland grew.
By the 2nd century BC, several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. After that, king Masinissa managed to unify Numidia under his rule.
Christianity arrived in the 2nd century. By the end of the 4th century, the settled areas had become Christianized, and some Berber tribes had converted en masse.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Algeria came under the control of the Vandal Kingdom. Later, the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire) conquered Algeria from the Vandals, incorporating it into the Praetorian prefecture of Africa and later the Exarchate of Africa.
From the 8th century Umayyad conquest of North Africa led by Musa bin Nusayr, Arab colonization started. The 11th century invasion of migrants from the Arabian peninsula brought oriental tribal customs. The introduction of Islam and Arabic had a profound impact on North Africa. The new religion and language introduced changes in social and economic relations, and established links with the Arab world through acculturation and assimilation.
The second Arab military expeditions into the Maghreb, between 642 and 669, resulted in the spread of Islam. The Umayyads (a Muslim dynasty based in Damascus from 661 to 750) recognised that the strategic necessity of dominating the Mediterranean dictated a concerted military effort on the North African front. By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam had conquered all of North Africa. In 750 the Abbasids succeeded the Umayyads as Muslim rulers and moved the caliphate to Baghdad. Under the Abbasids, Berber Kharijites Sufri Banu Ifran were opposed to Umayyad and Abbasids. After, the Rustumids (761–909) actually ruled most of the central Maghrib from Tahirt, southwest of Algiers. The imams gained a reputation for honesty, piety, and justice, and the court of Tahirt was noted for its support of scholarship. The Rustumid imams failed, however, to organise a reliable standing army, which opened the way for Tahirt's demise under the assault of the Fatimid dynasty.
The Fatimids left the rule of most of Algeria to the Zirids and Hammadid (972–1148), a Berber dynasty that centered significant local power in Algeria for the first time, but who were still at war with Banu Ifran (kingdom of Tlemcen) and Maghraoua (942-1068). This period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline. Following a large incursion of Arab Bedouin from Egypt beginning in the first half of the 11th century, the use of Arabic spread to the countryside, and sedentary Berbers were gradually Arabised.
The Almoravid ("those who have made a religious retreat") movement developed early in the 11th century among the Sanhaja Berbers of southern Morocco. The movement's initial impetus was religious, an attempt by a tribal leader to impose moral discipline and strict adherence to Islamic principles on followers. But the Almoravid movement shifted to engaging in military conquest after 1054. By 1106, the Almoravids had conquered the Maghreb as far east as Algiers and Morocco, and Spain up to the Ebro River.
Like the Almoravids, the Almohads ("unitarians") found their inspiration in Islamic reform. The Almohads took control of Morocco by 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib. The zenith of Almohad power occurred between 1163 and 1199. For the first time, the Maghrib was united under a local regime, but the continuing wars in Spain overtaxed the resources of the Almohads, and in the Maghrib their position was compromised by factional strife and a renewal of tribal warfare.
In the central Maghrib, the Abdalwadid founded a dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Tlemcen in Algeria. For more than 300 years, until the region came under Ottoman suzerainty in the 16th century, the Zayanids kept a tenuous hold in the central Maghrib. Many coastal cities asserted their autonomy as municipal republics governed by merchant oligarchies, tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or the privateers who operated out of their ports. Nonetheless, Tlemcen, the "pearl of the Maghrib," prospered as a commercial center.
According to historians of the Middle Ages, the Berbers were divided into two branches, both going back to their ancestors Mazigh. The two branches, called Botr and Barnès were divided into tribes, and each Maghreb region is made up of several tribes. The large Berber tribes or peoples are Sanhaja, Houara, Zenata, Masmuda, Kutama, Awarba, Barghawata ... etc. Each tribe is divided into sub tribes. All these tribes had independent and territorial decisions.
Several Berber dynasties emerged during the Middle Ages: - In North and West Africa, in Spain (al-Andalus), Sicily, Egypt, as well as in the southern part of the Sahara, in modern-day Mali, Niger, and Senegal. The medieval historian Ibn Khaldun described the follying Berber dynasties: Zirid, Banu Ifran, Maghrawa, Almoravid, Hammadid, Almohad Caliphate, Marinid, Zayyanid, Wattasid, Meknes, Hafsid dynasty, Fatimids.
The invasion of the Banu Hilal Arab tribes in the 11th century sacked Kairouan, and the area under Zirid control was reduced to the coastal region, and the Arab conquests fragmented into petty Bedouin emirates.
The Maghrawa or Meghrawa (Arabic: المغراويون) were a large Zenata Berber tribal confederation whose cradle and seat of power was the territory located on the Chlef in the north-western part of today's Algeria, bounded by the Ouarsenis to the south, the Mediterranean Sea to the north and Tlemcen to the west. They ruled these areas on behalf of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba at the end of the 10th century and during the first half of the 11th century. The Maghrawa confederation of zanata Berbers supposedly originated in the region of modern Algeria between Tlemcen and Tenes.
The confederation of Maghrawa were the majority people of the central Maghreb among the Zenata (Gaetuli). Both nomadic and sedentary, the Maghrawa lived under the command of Maghrawa chiefs or Zenata. Algiers has been the territory of the Maghrawa since ancient times. The name Maghrawa was transcribed into Greek by historians. The great kingdom of the Maghrawa was located between Algiers, Cherchell, Ténès, Chlef, Miliana and Médéa. The Maghrawa imposed their domination in the Aurès. Chlef and its surroundings were populated by the Maghrawa according to Ibn Khaldun. The Maghrawa settled and extended their domination throughout the Dahra and beyond Miliana to the Tafna wadi near Tlemcen, and were found as far away as Mali.
The Maghrawa were one of the first Berber tribes to submit to Islam in the 7th century. They supported Uqba ibn Nafi in his campaign to the Atlantic in 683. They defected from Sunni Islam and became Kharijite Muslims from the 8th century, and allied first with the Idrisids, and, from the 10th century on, with the Umayyads of Córdoba in Al-Andalus. As a result, they were caught up in the Umayyad-Fatimid conflict in Morocco and Algeria. Although they won a victory over the allies of the Fatimids in 924, they soon allied with them. When they switched back to the side of Córdoba, the Zirids briefly took control over most of Morocco, and ruled on behalf of the Fatimids. In 976/977 the Maghrawa conquered Sijilmasa from the Banu Midrar, and in 980 were able to drive the Miknasa out of Sijilmasa as well.
The Maghrawa reached their peak under Ziri ibn Atiyya (to 1001), who achieved supremacy in Fez under Umayyad suzerainty, and expanded their territory at the expense of the Banu Ifran in the northern Maghreb – another Zenata tribe whose alliances had shifted often between the Fatimids and the Umayyads of Córdoba. Ziri ibn Atiyya conquered as much as he could of what is now northern Morocco and was able to achieve supremacy in Fez by 987. In 989 he defeated his enemy, Abu al-Bahār, which resulted in Ziri ruling from Zab to Sous Al-Aqsa, in 991 achieving supremacy in the western Maghreb. As a result of his victory he was invited to Córdoba by Ibn Abi 'Amir al-Mansur (also Latinized as Almanzor), the regent of Caliph Hisham II and de facto ruler of the Caliphate of Córdoba. Ziri brought many gifts and Al-Mansur housed him in a lavish palace, but Ziri soon returned to North Africa. The Banu Ifran took advantage of his absence and, under Yaddū, managed to capture Fez. After a bloody struggle, Ziri reconquered Fez in 993 and displayed Yaddū's severed head on its walls.
A period of peace followed, in which Ziri founded the city of Oujda in 994 and made it his capital. However, Ziri was loyal to the Umayyad caliphs in Cordoba and increasingly resented the way that Ibn Abi 'Amir was holding Hisham II captive while progressively usurping his power. In 997 Ziri rejected Ibn Abi 'Amir's authority and declared himself a direct supporter of Caliph Hisham II. Ibn Abi 'Amir sent an invasion force to Morocco. After three unsuccessful months, Ibn Abi 'Amir's army was forced to retreat to the safety of Tangiers, so Ibn Abi 'Amir sent a powerful reinforcements under his son Abd al-Malik. The armies clashed near Tangiers, and in this battle, Ziri was stabbed by an African soldier who reported to Abd al-Malik that he had seriously wounded the Zenata leader. Abd al-Malik pressed home the advantage, and the wounded Ziri fled, hotly pursued by the Caliph's army. The inhabitants of Fez would not let him enter the city, but opened the gates to Abd al-Malik on 13 October 998. Ziri fled to the Sahara, where he rallied the Zenata tribes and overthrew the unpopular remnants of the Idrisid dynasty at Tiaret. He was able to expand his territory to include Tlemcen and other parts of western Algeria, this time under Fatimid protection. Ziri died in 1001 of the after-effects of the stab wounds. He was succeeded by his son Al-Mu'izz, who made peace with Al-Mansur, and regained possession of all his father's former territories.
A revolt against the Andalusian Umayyads was put down by Ibn Abi 'Amir, although the Maghrawa were able to regain power in Fez. Under the succeeding rulers al-Muizz (1001–1026), Hamman (1026–1039) and Dunas (1039), they consolidated their rule in northern and central Morocco.
Internal power struggles after 1060 enabled the Almoravid dynasty to conquer the Maghrawa realm in 1070 and put an end to their rule. In the mid 11th century the Maghrawa still controlled most of Morocco, notably most of the Sous and Draa River area as well as Aghmat, Fez and Sijilmasa. Later, Zenata power declined. The Maghrawa and Banu Ifran began oppressing their subjects, shedding their blood, violating their women, breaking into homes to seize food and depriving traders of their goods. Anyone who tried to ward them off was killed.
The Zirid dynasty (Arabic: الزيريون, romanized: az-zīriyyūn), Banu Ziri (Arabic: بنو زيري, romanized: banū zīrī), or the Zirid state (Arabic: الدولة الزيرية, romanized: ad-dawla az-zīriyya) was a Sanhaja Berber dynasty from modern-day Algeria which ruled the central Maghreb from 972 to 1014 and Ifriqiya (eastern Maghreb) from 972 to 1148.
Descendants of Ziri ibn Manad, a military leader of the Fatimid Caliphate and the eponymous founder of the dynasty, the Zirids were emirs who ruled in the name of the Fatimids. The Zirids gradually established their autonomy in Ifriqiya through military conquest until officially breaking with the Fatimids in the mid-11th century. The rule of the Zirid emirs opened the way to a period in North African history where political power was held by Berber dynasties such as the Almoravid dynasty, Almohad Caliphate, Zayyanid dynasty, Marinid Sultanate and Hafsid dynasty.
Under Buluggin ibn Ziri the Zirids extended their control westwards and briefly occupied Fez and much of present-day Morocco after 980, but encountered resistance from the local Zenata Berbers who gave their allegiance to the Caliphate of Cordoba. To the east, Zirid control was extended over Tripolitania after 978 and as far as Ajdabiya (in present-day Libya). One member of the dynastic family, Zawi ibn Ziri, revolted and fled to al-Andalus, eventually founding the Taifa of Granada in 1013, after the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba. Another branch of the Zirids, the Hammadids, broke away from the main branch after various internal disputes and took control of the territories of the central Maghreb after 1015. The Zirids proper were then designated as Badicides and occupied only Ifriqiya between 1048 and 1148. They were based in Kairouan until 1057, when they moved the capital to Mahdia on the coast. The Zirids of Ifriqiya also intervened in Sicily during the 11th century, as the Kalbids, the dynasty who governed the island on behalf of the Fatimids, fell into disorder.
The Zirids of Granada surrendered to the Almoravids in 1090, but the Badicides and the Hammadids remained independent during this time. Sometime between 1041 and 1051 the Zirid ruler al-Mu'izz ibn Badis renounced the Fatimid Caliphs and recognized the Sunni Muslim Abbasid Caliphate. In retaliation, the Fatimids instigated the migration of the Banu Hilal tribe to the Maghreb, dealing a serious blow to Zirid power in Ifriqiya. In the 12th century, the Hilalian invasions combined with the attacks of the Normans of Sicily along the coast further weakened Zirid power. The last Zirid ruler, al-Hasan, surrendered Mahdia to the Normans in 1148, thus ending independent Zirid rule. The Almohad Caliphate conquered the central Maghreb and Ifriqiya by 1160, ending the Hammadid dynasty in turn and finally unifying the whole of the Maghreb.
The Zirids were Sanhaja Berbers, from the sedentary Talkata tribe, originating from the area of modern Algeria. In the 10th century this tribe served as vassals of the Fatimid Caliphate, an Isma'ili Shi'a state that challenged the authority of the Sunni Abbasid caliphs. The progenitor of the Zirid dynasty, Ziri ibn Manad (r. 935–971) was installed as governor of the central Maghreb (roughly north-eastern Algeria today) on behalf of the Fatimids, guarding the western frontier of the Fatimid Caliphate. With Fatimid support Ziri founded his own capital and palace at 'Ashir, south-east of Algiers, in 936. He proved his worth as a key ally in 945, during the Kharijite rebellion of Abu Yazid, when he helped break Abu Yazid's siege of the Fatimid capital, Mahdia. After playing this valuable role, he expanded 'Ashir with a new palace circa 947. In 959 he aided Jawhar al-Siqili on a Fatimid military expedition which successfully conquered Fez and Sijilmasa in present-day Morocco. On their return home to the Fatimid capital they paraded the emir of Fez and the “Caliph” Ibn Wasul of Sijilmasa in cages in a humiliating manner. After this success, Ziri was also given Tahart to govern on behalf of the Fatimids. He was eventually killed in battle against the Zanata in 971.
When the Fatimids moved their capital to Egypt in 972, Ziri's son Buluggin ibn Ziri (r. 971–984) was appointed viceroy of Ifriqiya. He soon led a new expedition west and by 980 he had conquered Fez and most of Morocco, which had previously been retaken by the Umayyads of Cordoba in 973. He also led a successful expedition to Barghawata territory, from which he brought back a large number of slaves to Ifriqiya. In 978 the Fatimids also granted Buluggin overlordship of Tripolitania (in present-day Libya), allowing him to appoint his own governor in Tripoli. In 984 Buluggin died in Sijilmasa from an illness and his successor decided to abandon Morocco in 985.
After Buluggin's death, rule of the Zirid state passed to his son, Al-Mansur ibn Buluggin (r. 984–996), and continued through his descendants. However, this alienated the other sons of Ziri ibn Manad who now found themselves excluded from power. In 999 many of these brothers launched a rebellion in 'Ashir against Badis ibn al-Mansur (r. 996–1016), Buluggin's grandson, marking the first serious break in the unity of the Zirids. The rebels were defeated in battle by Hammad ibn Buluggin, Badis' uncle, and most of the brothers were killed. The only remaining brother of stature, Zawi ibn Ziri, led the remaining rebels westwards and sought new opportunity in al-Andalus under the Umayyads Caliphs of Cordoba, the former enemies of the Fatimids and Zirids. He and his followers eventually founded an independent kingdom in al-Andalus, the Taifa of Granada, in 1013.
After 1001 Tripolitania broke away under the leadership of Fulful ibn Sa'id ibn Khazrun, a Maghrawa leader who founded the Banu Khazrun dynasty, which endured until 1147. Fulful fought a protracted war against Badis ibn al-Mansur and sought outside help from the Fatimids and even from the Umayyads of Cordoba, but after his death in 1009 the Zirids were able to retake Tripoli for a time. The region nonetheless remained effectively under control of the Banu Khazrun, who fluctuated between practical autonomy and full independence, often playing the Fatimids and the Zirids against each other. The Zirids finally lost Tripoli to them in 1022.
Badis appointed Hammad ibn Buluggin as governor of 'Ashir and the western Zirid territories in 997. He gave Hammad a great deal of autonomy, allowing him to campaign against the Zanata and control any new territories he conquered. Hammad constructed his own capital, the Qal'at Bani Hammad, in 1008, and in 1015 he rebelled against Badis and declared himself independent altogether, while also recognizing the Abbasids instead of the Fatimids as caliphs. Badis besieged Hammad's capital and nearly subdued him, but died in 1016 shortly before this could be accomplished. His son and successor, al-Mu'izz ibn Badis (r. 1016–1062), defeated Hammad in 1017, which forced the negotiation of a peace agreement between them. Hammad resumed his recognition of the Fatimids as caliphs but remained independent, forging a new Hammadid state which controlled a large part of present-day Algeria thereafter.
The Zirid period of Ifriqiya is considered a high point in its history, with agriculture, industry, trade and learning, both religious and secular, all flourishing, especially in their capital, Qayrawan (Kairouan). The early reign of al-Mu'izz ibn Badis (r. 1016–1062) was particularly prosperous and marked the height of their power in Ifriqiya. In the eleventh century, when the question of Berber origin became a concern, the dynasty of al-Mu'izz started, as part of the Zirids' propaganda, to emphasize its supposed links to the Himyarite kings as a title to nobility, a theme that was taken the by court historians of the period. Management of the area by later Zirid rulers was neglectful as the agricultural economy declined, prompting an increase in banditry among the rural population. The relationship between the Zirids their Fatimid overlords varied - in 1016 thousands of Shiites died in rebellions in Ifriqiya, and the Fatimids encouraged the defection of Tripolitania from the Zirids, but nevertheless the relationship remained close. In 1049 the Zirids broke away completely by adopting Sunni Islam and recognizing the Abbasids of Baghdad as rightful Caliphs, a move which was popular with the urban Arabs of Kairouan.
In Sicily the Kalbids continued to govern on behalf of the Fatimids but the island descended into political disarray during the 11th century, inciting the Zirids to intervene on the island. In 1025 (or 1021), al-Mu'izz ibn Badis sent a fleet of 400 ships to the island in response to the Byzantines reconquering Calabria (in southern Italy) from the Muslims, but the fleet was lost in a powerful storm off the coast of Pantelleria. In 1036, the Muslim population of the island request aid from al-Mu'izz to overthrow the Kalbid emir Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Akhal, whose rule they considered flawed and unjust. The request also contained a pledge to recognize al-Mu'izz as their ruler. Al-Mu'izz, eager to expand his influence after the fragmentation of Zirid North Africa, accepted and sent his son, 'Abdallah, to the island with a large army. Al-Akhal, who had been in negotiations with the Byzantines, requested help from them. A Byzantine army intervened and defeated the Zirid army on the island, but it then withdrew to Calabria, allowing 'Abdallah to finish off al-Akhal. Al-Akhal was besieged in Palermo and killed in 1038. 'Abdallah was subsequently forced to withdraw from the island, either due to the ever-divided Sicilians turning against him or due to another Byzantine invasion in 1038, led by George Maniakes. Another Kalbid amir, al-Hasan al-Samsam, was elected to govern Sicily, but Muslim rule there disintegrated into various petty factions leading up to the Norman conquest of the island in the second half of the 11th century.
The Zirids renounced the Fatimids and recognized the Abbasid Caliphs in 1048-49, or sometime between 1041 and 1051. In retaliation, the Fatimids sent the Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym to the Maghreb. The Banu Sulaym settled first in Cyrenaica, but the Banu Hilal continued towards Ifriqiya. The Zirids attempted to stop their advance towards Ifriqiya, they sent 30,000 Sanhaja cavalry to meet the 3,000 Arab cavalry of Banu Hilal in the Battle of Haydaran of 14 April 1052. Nevertheless, the Zirids were decisively defeated and were forced to retreat, opening the road to Kairouan for the Hilalian Arab cavalry. The resulting anarchy devastated the previously flourishing agriculture, and the coastal towns assumed a new importance as conduits for maritime trade and bases for piracy against Christian shipping, as well as being the last holdout of the Zirids. The Banu Hilal invasions eventually forced al-Mu'izz ibn Badis to abandon Kairouan in 1057 and move his capital to Mahdia, while the Banu Hilal largely roamed and pillaged the interior of the former Zirid territories.
As a result of the Zirid withdrawal, various local principalities emerged in different areas. In Tunis, the shaykhs of the city elected Abd al-Haqq ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Khurasan (r. 1059-1095) as local ruler. He founded the local Banu Khurasan dynasty that governed the city thereafter, alternately recognizing the Hammadids or the Zirids as overlords depending on the circumstances. In Qabis (Gabès), the Zirid governor, al-Mu'izz ibn Muhammad ibn Walmiya remained loyal until 1062 when, outraged by the expulsion of his two brothers from Mahdia by al-Mu'izz ibn Badis, he declared his independence and placed himself under the protection of Mu'nis ibn Yahya, a chief of Banu Hilal. Sfaqus (Sfax) was declared independent by the Zirid governor, Mansur al-Barghawati, who was murdered and succeeded by his cousin Hammu ibn Malil al-Barghawati.
Al-Mui'zz ibn Badis was succeeded by his son, Tamim ibn al-Mu'izz (r. 1062-1108), who spent much of his reign attempting to restore Zirid power in the region. In 1063 he repelled a siege of Mahdia by the independent ruler of Sfax while also capturing the important port of Sus (Sousse). Meanwhile, the Hammadid ruler al-Nasir ibn 'Alannas (r. 1062-1088) began to intervene in Ifriqiya around this time, having his sovereignty recognized in Sfax, Tunis, and Kairouan. Tamim organized a coalition with some of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym tribes and succeeded in inflicting a heavy defeat on al-Nasir at the Battle of Sabiba in 1065. The war between the Zirids and Hammadids continued until 1077, when a truce was negotiated, sealed by a marriage between Tamim and one of al-Nasir's daughters. In 1074 Tamim sent a naval expedition to Calabria where they ravaged the Italian coasts, plundered Nicotera and enslaved many of its inhabitants. The next year (1075) another Zirid raid resulted in the capture of Mazara in Sicily; however, the Zirid emir rethought his involvement in Sicily and decided to withdraw, abandoning what they had briefly held. In 1087, the Zirid capital, Mahdia, was sacked by the Pisans. According to Ettinghausen, Grabar, and Jenkins-Madina, the Pisa Griffin is believed to have been part of the spoils taken during the sack. In 1083 Mahdia was besieged by a chief of the Banu Hilal, Malik ibn 'Alawi. Unable to take the city, Malik instead turned to Kairouan and captured that city, but Tamim marched out with his entire army and defeated the Banu Hilal forces, at which point he also brought Kairouan back under Zirid control. He went on to capture Gabès in 1097 and Sfax in 1100. Gabès, however, soon declared itself independent again under the leadership of the Banu Jami', a family from the Riyahi branch of the Banu Hilal.
Tamim's son and successor, Yahya ibn Tamim (r. 1108-1116), formally recognized the Fatimid caliphs again and received an emissary from Cairo in 1111. He captured an important fortress near Carthage called Iqlibiya and his fleet launched raids against Sardinia and Genoa, bringing back many captives. He was assassinated in 1116 and succeeded by his son, 'Ali ibn Yahya (r. 1116-1121). 'Ali continued to recognize the Fatimids, receiving another embassy from Cairo in 1118. He imposed his authority on Tunis, but failed to recapture Gabès from its local ruler, Rafi' ibn Jami', whose counterattack he then had to repel from Mahdia. He was succeeded by his son al-Hasan in 1121, the last Zirid ruler.
During the 1130s and 1140s the Normans of Sicily began to capture cities and islands along the coast of Ifriqiya. Jerba was captured in 1135 and Tripoli was captured in 1146. In 1148, the Normans captured Sfax, Gabès, and Mahdia. In Mahdia, the population was weakened by years of famine and the bulk of the Zirid army was away on another campaign when the Norman fleet, commanded by George of Antioch, arrived off the coast. Al-Hasan decided to abandon the city, leaving it to be occupied, which effectively ended the Zirid dynasty's rule. Al-Hasan fled to the citadel of al-Mu'allaqa near Carthage and stayed there for a several months. He planned to flee to the Fatimid court in Egypt but the Norman fleet blocked his way, so instead he headed west, making for the Almohad court of 'Abd al-Mu'min in Marrakesh. He obtained permission from Yahya ibn al-'Aziz, the Hammadid ruler, to cross his territory, but after entering Hammadid territory he was detained and placed under house arrest in Algiers. When 'Abd al-Mu'min captured Algiers in 1151, he freed al-Hasan, who accompanied him back to Marrakesh. Later, when 'Abd al-Mu'min conquered Mahdia in 1160, placing all of Ifriqiya under Almohad rule, al-Hasan was with him. 'Abd al-Mu'min appointed him governor of Mahdia, where he remained, residing in the suburb of Zawila, until 'Abd al-Mu'min's death in 1163. The new Almohad caliph, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, subsequently ordered him to come back to Marrakesh, but al-Hasan died along the way in Tamasna in 1167.
The Hammadid dynasty (Arabic: الحمّاديون) was a branch of the Sanhaja Berber dynasty that ruled an area roughly corresponding to north-eastern modern Algeria between 1008 and 1152. The state reached its peak under Nasir ibn Alnas during which it was briefly the most important state in Northwest Africa.
The Hammadid dynasty's first capital was at Qalaat Beni Hammad. It was founded in 1007, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When the area was sacked by the Banu Hilal tribe, the Hammadids moved their capital to Béjaïa in 1090.
The Almohad Caliphate (IPA: /ˈælməhæd/; Arabic: خِلَافَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِينَ or دَوْلَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِينَ or ٱلدَّوْلَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِيَّةُ from
Arabic: ٱلْمُوَحِّدُونَ, romanized: al-Muwaḥḥidūn, lit. 'those who profess the unity of God') was a North African Berber Muslim empire founded in the 12th century. At its height, it controlled much
of the Iberian Peninsula (Al Andalus) and North Africa (the Maghreb).
The Almohad docrtine was founded by Ibn Tumart among the Berber Masmuda tribes, but the Almohad caliphate and its ruling dynasty were founded after his death by Abd al-Mu'min al-Gumi, which was born in the Hammadid region of Tlemcen, Algeria. Around 1120, Ibn Tumart first established a Berber state in Tinmel in the Atlas Mountains. Under Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130–1163) they succeeded in overthrowing the ruling Almoravid dynasty governing Morocco in 1147, when he conquered Marrakesh and declared himself caliph. They then extended their power over all of the Maghreb by 1159. Al-Andalus soon followed, and all of Muslim Iberia was under Almohad rule by 1172.
The turning point of their presence in the Iberian Peninsula came in 1212, when Muhammad III, "al-Nasir" (1199–1214) was defeated at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena by an alliance of the Christian forces from Castile, Aragon and Navarre. Much of the remaining territories of al-Andalus were lost in the ensuing decades, with the cities of Córdoba and Seville falling to the Christians in 1236 and 1248 respectively.
The Almohads continued to rule in Africa until the piecemeal loss of territory through the revolt of tribes and districts enabled the rise of their most effective enemies, the Marinids, from northern Morocco in 1215. The last representative of the line, Idris al-Wathiq, was reduced to the possession of Marrakesh, where he was murdered by a slave in 1269; the Marinids seized Marrakesh, ending the Almohad domination of the Western Maghreb.
The Almohad movement originated with Ibn Tumart, a member of the Masmuda, a Berber tribal confederation of the Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. At the time, Morocco, western Algeria and Spain (al-Andalus), were under the rule of the Almoravids, a Sanhaja Berber dynasty. Early in his life, Ibn Tumart went to Spain to pursue his studies, and thereafter to Baghdad to deepen them. In Baghdad, Ibn Tumart attached himself to the theological school of al-Ash'ari, and came under the influence of the teacher al-Ghazali. He soon developed his own system, combining the doctrines of various masters. Ibn Tumart's main principle was a strict unitarianism (tawhid), which denied the independent existence of the attributes of God as being incompatible with His unity, and therefore a polytheistic idea. Ibn Tumart represented a revolt against what he perceived as anthropomorphism in Muslim orthodoxy. His followers would become known as the al-Muwaḥḥidūn ("Almohads"), meaning those who affirm the unity of God.
After his return to the Maghreb c. 1117, Ibn Tumart spent some time in various Ifriqiyan cities, preaching and agitating, heading riotous attacks on wine-shops and on other manifestations of laxity. He laid the blame for the latitude on the ruling dynasty of the Almoravids, whom he accused of obscurantism and impiety. He also opposed their sponsorship of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, which drew upon consensus (ijma) and other sources beyond the Qur'an and Sunnah in their reasoning, an anathema to the stricter Zahirism favored by Ibn Tumart. His antics and fiery preaching led fed-up authorities to move him along from town to town. After being expelled from Bejaia, Ibn Tumart set up camp in Mellala, in the outskirts of the city, where he received his first disciples – notably, al-Bashir (who would become his chief strategist) and Abd al-Mu'min (a Zenata Berber, who would later become his successor).
In 1120, Ibn Tumart and his small band of followers proceeded to Morocco, stopping first in Fez, where he briefly engaged the Maliki scholars of the city in debate. He even went so far as to assault the sister of the Almoravid emir ʿAli ibn Yusuf, in the streets of Fez, because she was going about unveiled, after the manner of Berber women. After being expelled from Fez, he went to Marrakesh, where he successfully tracked down the Almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf at a local mosque, and challenged the emir, and the leading scholars of the area, to a doctrinal debate. After the debate, the scholars concluded that Ibn Tumart's views were blasphemous and the man dangerous, and urged him to be put to death or imprisoned. But the emir decided merely to expel him from the city.
Ibn Tumart took refuge among his own people, the Hargha, in his home village of Igiliz (exact location uncertain), in the Sous valley. He retreated to a nearby cave, and lived out an ascetic lifestyle, coming out only to preach his program of puritan reform, attracting greater and greater crowds. At length, towards the end of Ramadan in late 1121, after a particularly moving sermon, reviewing his failure to persuade the Almoravids to reform by argument, Ibn Tumart 'revealed' himself as the true Mahdi, a divinely guided judge and lawgiver, and was recognized as such by his audience. This was effectively a declaration of war on the Almoravid state.
On the advice of one of his followers, Omar Hintati, a prominent chieftain of the Hintata, Ibn Tumart abandoned his cave in 1122 and went up into the High Atlas, to organize the Almohad movement among the highland Masmuda tribes. Besides his own tribe, the Hargha, Ibn Tumart secured the adherence of the Ganfisa, the Gadmiwa, the Hintata, the Haskura, and the Hazraja to the Almohad cause. Around 1124, Ibn Tumart erected the ribat of Tinmel, in the valley of the Nfis in the High Atlas, an impregnable fortified complex, which would serve both as the spiritual center and military headquarters of the Almohad movement.
For the first eight years, the Almohad rebellion was limited to a guerilla war along the peaks and ravines of the High Atlas. Their principal damage was in rendering insecure (or altogether impassable) the roads and mountain passes south of Marrakesh – threatening the route to all-important Sijilmassa, the gateway of the trans-Saharan trade. Unable to send enough manpower through the narrow passes to dislodge the Almohad rebels from their easily defended mountain strong points, the Almoravid authorities reconciled themselves to setting up strongholds to confine them there (most famously the fortress of Tasghîmût that protected the approach to Aghmat, which was conquered by the Almohads in 1132), while exploring alternative routes through more easterly passes.
Ibn Tumart organized the Almohads as a commune, with a minutely detailed structure. At the core was the Ahl ad-dār ("House of the Mahdi:), composed of Ibn Tumart's family. This was supplemented by two councils: an inner Council of Ten, the Mahdi's privy council, composed of his earliest and closest companions; and the consultative Council of Fifty, composed of the leading sheikhs of the Masmuda tribes. The early preachers and missionaries (ṭalaba and huffāẓ) also had their representatives. Militarily, there was a strict hierarchy of units. The Hargha tribe coming first (although not strictly ethnic; it included many "honorary" or "adopted" tribesmen from other ethnicities, e.g. Abd al-Mu'min himself). This was followed by the men of Tinmel, then the other Masmuda tribes in order, and rounded off by the black fighters, the ʻabīd. Each unit had a strict internal hierarchy, headed by a mohtasib, and divided into two factions: one for the early adherents, another for the late adherents, each headed by a mizwar (or amzwaru); then came the sakkakin (treasurers), effectively the money-minters, tax-collectors, and bursars, then came the regular army (jund), then the religious corps – the muezzins, the hafidh and the hizb – followed by the archers, the conscripts, and the slaves. Ibn Tumart's closest companion and chief strategist, al-Bashir, took upon himself the role of "political commissar", enforcing doctrinal discipline among the Masmuda tribesmen, often with a heavy hand.
In early 1130, the Almohads finally descended from the mountains for their first sizeable attack in the lowlands. It was a disaster. The Almohads swept aside an Almoravid column that had come out to meet them before Aghmat, and then chased their remnant all the way to Marrakesh. They laid siege to Marrakesh for forty days until, in April (or May) 1130, the Almoravids sallied from the city and crushed the Almohads in the bloody Battle of al-Buhayra (named after a large garden east of the city). The Almohads were thoroughly routed, with huge losses. Half their leadership was killed in action, and the survivors only just managed to scramble back to the mountains.
Ibn Tumart died shortly after, in August 1130. That the Almohad movement did not immediately collapse after such a devastating defeat and the death of their charismatic Mahdi, is likely due to the skills of his successor, Abd al-Mu'min. Ibn Tumart's death was kept a secret for three years, a period which Almohad chroniclers described as a ghayba or "occultation". This period likely gave Abd al-Mu'min time to secure his position as successor to the political leadership of the movement. Although a Zenata Berber from Tagra (Algeria), and thus an alien among the Masmuda of southern Morocco, Abd al-Mu'min nonetheless saw off his principal rivals and hammered wavering tribes back to the fold. In an ostentatious gesture of defiance, in 1132, if only to remind the emir that the Almohads were not finished, Abd al-Mu'min led an audacious night operation that seized Tasghîmût fortress and dismantled it thoroughly, carting off its great gates back to Tinmel. Three years after Ibn Tumart's death he was officially proclaimed "Caliph".
In order to neutralise the Masmudas, to whom he was a stranger, Abd al-Mumin relied on his tribe of origin, the Kumiyas (a Berber tribe from Orania), which he integrated massively into the army and within the Almohad power. He thus appointed his son as his successor and his other children as governors of the provinces of the Caliphate. The Kumiyas would later form the bodyguard of Abd al Mumin and his successor. In addition, he also relied on Arabs, representatives of the great Hilalian families, whom he deported to Morocco to weaken the influence of the Masmuda sheikhs. These moves have the effect of advancing the Arabisation of the future Morocco.
Abd al-Mu'min then came forward as the lieutenant of the Mahdi Ibn Tumart. Between 1130 and his death in 1163, Abd al-Mu'min not only rooted out the Almoravids, but extended his power over all northern Africa as far as Egypt, becoming amir of Marrakesh in 1147.
Al-Andalus followed the fate of Africa. Between 1146 and 1173, the Almohads gradually wrested control from the Almoravids over the Moorish principalities in Iberia. The Almohads transferred the capital of Muslim Iberia from Córdoba to Seville. They founded a great mosque there; its tower, the Giralda, was erected in 1184 to mark the accession of Ya'qub I. The Almohads also built a palace there called Al-Muwarak on the site of the modern day Alcázar of Seville.
The Almohad princes had a longer and more distinguished career than the Almoravids. The successors of Abd al-Mumin, Abu Yaqub Yusuf (Yusuf I, ruled 1163–1184) and Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur (Yaʻqūb I, ruled 1184–1199), were both able men. Initially their government drove many Jewish and Christian subjects to take refuge in the growing Christian states of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. Ultimately they became less fanatical than the Almoravids, and Ya'qub al-Mansur was a highly accomplished man who wrote a good Arabic style and protected the philosopher Averroes. In 1190–1191, he campaigned in southern Portugal and won back territory lost in 1189. His title of "al-Manṣūr" ("the Victorious") was earned by his victory over Alfonso VIII of Castile in the Battle of Alarcos (1195).
From the time of Yusuf II, however, the Almohads governed their co-religionists in Iberia and central North Africa through lieutenants, their dominions outside Morocco being treated as provinces. When Almohad emirs crossed the Straits it was to lead a jihad against the Christians and then return to Morocco.
In 1212, the Almohad Caliph Muhammad 'al-Nasir' (1199–1214), the successor of al-Mansur, after an initially successful advance north, was defeated by an alliance of the four Christian kings of Castile, Aragón, Navarre, and Portugal, at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena. The battle broke the Almohad advance, but the Christian powers remained too disorganized to profit from it immediately.
Before his death in 1213, al-Nasir appointed his young ten-year-old son as the next caliph Yusuf II "al-Mustansir". The Almohads passed through a period of effective regency for the young caliph, with power exercised by an oligarchy of elder family members, palace bureaucrats and leading nobles. The Almohad ministers were careful to negotiate a series of truces with the Christian kingdoms, which remained more-or-less in place for next fifteen years (the loss of Alcácer do Sal to the Kingdom of Portugal in 1217 was an exception).
In early 1224, the youthful caliph died in an accident, without any heirs. The palace bureaucrats in Marrakesh, led by the wazir Uthman ibn Jam'i, quickly engineered the election of his elderly grand-uncle, Abd al-Wahid I 'al-Makhlu', as the new Almohad caliph. But the rapid appointment upset other branches of the family, notably the brothers of the late al-Nasir, who governed in al-Andalus. The challenge was immediately raised by one of them, then governor in Murcia, who declared himself Caliph Abdallah al-Adil. With the help of his brothers, he quickly seized control of al-Andalus. His chief advisor, the shadowy Abu Zayd ibn Yujjan, tapped into his contacts in Marrakesh, and secured the deposition and assassination of Abd al-Wahid I, and the expulsion of the al-Jami'i clan.
This coup has been characterized as the pebble that finally broke al-Andalus. It was the first internal coup among the Almohads. The Almohad clan, despite occasional disagreements, had always remained tightly knit and loyally behind dynastic precedence. Caliph al-Adil's murderous breach of dynastic and constitutional propriety marred his acceptability to other Almohad sheikhs. One of the recusants was his cousin, Abd Allah al-Bayyasi ("the Baezan"), the Almohad governor of Jaén, who took a handful of followers and decamped for the hills around Baeza. He set up a rebel camp and forged an alliance with the hitherto quiet Ferdinand III of Castile. Sensing his greater priority was Marrakesh, where recusant Almohad sheikhs had rallied behind Yahya, another son of al-Nasir, al-Adil paid little attention to this little band of misfits.
The Kingdom of Tlemcen or Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen (Arabic: الزيانيون) was a Berber kingdom in what is now the northwest of Algeria. Its territory stretched from Tlemcen to the Chelif bend and Algiers, and at its zenith reached Sijilmasa and the Moulouya River in the west, Tuat to the south and the Soummam in the east.
The Tlemcen Kingdom was established after the demise of the Almohad Caliphate in 1236, and later fell under Ottoman rule in 1554. It was ruled by sultans of the Zayyanid dynasty. The capital of the Tlemcen kingdom centred on Tlemcen, which lay on the primary east–west route between Morocco and Ifriqiya. The kingdom was situated between the realm of the Marinids the west, centred on Fez, and the Hafsids to the east, centred on Tunis.
Tlemcen was a hub for the north–south trade route from Oran on the Mediterranean coast to the Western Sudan. As a prosperous trading centre, it attracted its more powerful neighbours. At different times the kingdom was invaded and occupied by the Marinids from the west, by the Hafsids from the east, and by Aragonese from the north. At other times, they were able to take advantage of turmoil among their neighbours: during the reign of Abu Tashfin I (r. 1318–1337) the Zayyanids occupied Tunis and in 1423, under the reign of Abu Malek, they briefly captured Fez. In the south the Zayyanid realm included Tuat, Tamentit and the Draa region which was governed by Abdallah Ibn Moslem ez Zerdali, a sheikh of the Zayyanids.
The Bānu ʿabd āl-Wād, also called the Bānu Ziyān or Zayyanids after Yaghmurasen Ibn Zyan, the founder of the dynasty, were leaders of a Berber group who had long been settled in the Central Maghreb. Although contemporary chroniclers asserted that they had a noble Arab origin, he reportedly spoke in Zenati dialect and denied the lineage that genealogists had attributed to him. The town of Tlemcen, called Pomaria by the Romans, is about 806m above sea level in fertile, well-watered country.
Tlemcen was an important centre under the Almoravid dynasty and its successors the Almohad Caliphate, who began a new wall around the town in 1161.
Yaghmurasen ibn Zayyan (1235–83) of the Bānu ʿabd āl-Wād was governor of Tlemcen under the Almohads. He inherited leadership of the family from his brother in 1235. When the Almohad empire began to fall apart, in 1235, Yaghmurasen declared his independence. The city of Tlemcen became the capital of one of three successor states, ruled for centuries by successive Ziyyanid sultans. Its flag was a white crescent pointing upwards on a blue field. The kingdom covered the less fertile regions of the Tell Atlas. Its people included a minority of settled farmers and villagers, and a majority of nomadic herders.
Yaghmurasen was able to maintain control over the rival Berber groups, and when faced with the outside threat of the Marinid dynasty, he formed an alliance with the Emir of Granada and the King of Castile, Alfonso X. According to Ibn Khaldun, "he was the bravest, most dreaded and honourable man of the 'Abd-la-Wadid family. No one looked after the interest of his people, maintained the influence of the kingdom and managed the state administration better than he did." In 1248 he defeated the Almohad Caliph in the Battle of Oujda during which the Almohad Caliph was killed. In 1264 he managed to conquer Sijilmasa, therefore bringing Sijilmasa and Tlemcen, the two most important outlets for trans-Saharan trade under one authority. Sijilmasa remained under his control for 11 years. Before his death he instructed his son and heir Uthman to remain on the defensive with the Marinid kingdom, but to expand into Hafsid territory if possible.
For most of its history the kingdom was on the defensive, threatened by stronger states to the east and the west. The nomadic Arabs to the south also took advantage of the frequent periods of weakness to raid the centre and take control of pastures in the south.
The city of Tlemcen was several times attacked or besieged by the Marinids, and large parts of the kingdom were occupied by them for several decades in the fourteenth century.
The Marinid Abu Yaqub Yusuf an-Nasr besieged Tlemcen from 1299 to 1307. During the siege he built a new town, al-Mansura, diverting most of the trade to this town. The new city was fortified and had a mosque, baths and palaces. The siege was raised when Abu Yakub was murdered in his sleep by one of his eunuchs.
When the Marinids left in 1307, the Zayyanids promptly destroyed al-Mansura. The Zayyanid king Abu Zayyan I died in 1308 and was succeeded by Abu Hammu I (r. 1308–1318). Abu Hammu was later killed in a conspiracy instigated by his son and heir Abu Tashufin I (r. 1318–1337). The reigns of Abu Hammu I and Abu Tashufin I marked the second apogee of the Zayyanids, a period during which they consolidated their hegemony in the central Maghreb. Tlemcen recovered its trade and its population grew, reaching about 100,000 by around the 1330s. Abu Tashufin initiated hostilities against Ifriqiya while the Marinids were distracted by their internal struggles. He besieged Béjaïa and sent an army into Tunisia that defeated the Hafsid king Abu Yahya Abu Bakr II, who fled to Constantine while the Zayyanids occupied Tunis in 1325.
The Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan (r. 1331–1348) cemented an alliance with Hafsids by marrying a Hafsid princess. Upon being attacked by the Zayyanids again, the Hafsids appealed to Abu al-Hasan for help, providing him with an excuse to invade his neighbour. The Marinid sultan initiated a siege of Tlemcen in 1335 and the city fell in 1337. Abu Tashufin died during the fighting. Abu al-Hasan received delegates from Egypt, Granada, Tunis and Mali congratulating him on his victory, by which he had gained complete control of the trans-Saharan trade. In 1346 the Hafsid Sultan, Abu Bakr, died and a dispute over the succession ensued. In 1347 Abu al-Hasan annexed Ifriqiya, briefly reuniting the Maghrib territories as they had been under the Almohads.
However, Abu al-Hasan went too far in attempting to impose more authority over the Arab tribes, who revolted and in April 1348 defeated his army near Kairouan. His son, Abu Inan Faris, who had been serving as governor of Tlemcen, returned to Fez and declared that he was sultan. Tlemcen and the central Maghreb revolted. The Zayyanid Abu Thabit I (1348-1352) was proclaimed king of Tlemcen. Abu al-Hasan had to return from Ifriqiya by sea. After failing to retake Tlemcen and being defeated by his son, Abu al-Hasan died in May 1351. In 1352 Abu Inan Faris recaptured Tlemcen. He also reconquered the central Maghreb. He took Béjaïa in 1353 and Tunis in 1357, becoming master of Ifriqiya. In 1358 he was forced to return to Fez due to Arab opposition, where he fell sick and was killed.
The Zayyanid king Abu Hammu Musa II (r. 1359–1389) next took the throne of Tlemcen. He pursued an expansionist policy, pushing towards Fez in the west and into the Chelif valley and Béjaïa in the east. He had a long reign punctuated by fighting against the Marinids or various rebel groups. The Marinids reoccupied Tlemcen in 1360 and in 1370. In both cases, the Marinids found they were unable to hold the region against local resistance. Abu Hammu attacked the Hafsids in Béjaïa again in 1366, but this resulted in Hafsid intervention in the kingdom's affairs. The Hafsid sultan released Abu Hammu's cousin, Abu Zayyan, and helped him in laying claim to the Zayyanid throne. This provoked an internecine war between the two Zayyanids until 1378, when Abu Hammu finally captured Abu Zayyan in Algiers.
The historian Ibn Khaldun lived in Tlemcen for a period during the generally prosperous reign of Abu Hammu Musa II, and helped him in negotiations with the nomadic Arabs. He said of this period, "Here [in Tlemcen] science and arts developed with success; here were born scholars and outstanding men, whose glory penetrated into other countries." Abu Hammu was deposed by his son, Abu Tashfin II (1389–94), and the state went into decline.
In the late 14th century and the 15th century, the state was increasingly weak and became intermittently a vassal of Hafsid Ifriqiya, Marinid Morocco or the Crown of Aragon. In 1386 Abu Hammu moved his capital to Algiers, which he judged less vulnerable, but a year later his son, Abu Tashufin, overthrew him and took him prisoner. Abu Hammu was sent on a ship towards Alexandria but he escaped along the way when the ship stopped in Tunis. In 1388 he recaptured Tlemcen, forcing his son to flee. Abu Tashufin sought refuge in Fez and enlisted the aid of the Marinids, who sent an army to occupy Tlemcen and reinstall him on the throne. As a result, Abu Tashufin and his successors recognized the suzerainty of the Marinids and paid them an annual tribute.
During the reign of the Marinid sultan Abu Sa'id, the Zayyanids rebelled on several occasions and Abu Sa'id had to reassert his authority. After Abu Sa'id's death in 1420 the Marinids were plunged into political turmoil. The Zayyanid emir, Abu Malek, used this opportunity to throw off Marinid authority and captured Fez in 1423. Abu Malek installed Muhammad, a Marinid prince, as a Zayyanid vassal in Fez. The Wattasids, a family related to the Marinids, continued to govern from Salé, where they proclaimed Abd al-Haqq II, an infant, as the successor to the Marinid throne, with Abu Zakariyya al-Wattasi as regent. The Hafsid sultan, Abd al-Aziz II, reacted to Abu Malek's rising influence by sending military expeditions westward, installing his own Zayyanid client king (Abu Abdallah II) in Tlemcen and pursuing Abu Malek to Fez. Abu Malek's Marinid puppet, Muhammad, was deposed and the Wattasids returned with Abd al-Haqq II to Fez, acknowledging Hafsid suzerainty. The Zayyanids remained vassals of the Hafsids until the end of the 15th century, when the Spanish expansion along the coast weakened the rule of both dynasties.
By the end of the 15th century the Kingdom of Aragon had gained effective political control, intervening in the dynastic disputes of the amirs of Tlemcen, whose authority had shrunk to the town and its immediate neighbourship. When the Spanish took the city of Oran from the kingdom in 1509, continuous pressure from the Berbers prompted the Spanish to attempt a counterattack against the city of Tlemcen (1543), which was deemed by the Papacy to be a crusade. The Spanish under Martin of Angulo had also suffered a prior defeat in 1535 when they attempted to install a client ruler in Tlemcen. The Spanish failed to take the city in the first attack, but the strategic vulnerability of Tlemcen caused the kingdom's weight to shift toward the safer and more heavily fortified corsair base at Algiers.
Tlemcen was captured in 1551 by the Ottoman Empire under Hassan Pasha. The last Zayyanid sultan's son escaped to Oran, then a Spanish possession. He was baptized and lived a quiet life as Don Carlos at the court of Philip II of Spain.
Under the Ottoman Empire Tlemcen quickly lost its former importance, becoming a sleepy provincial town. The failure of the kingdom to become a powerful state can be explained by the lack of geographical or cultural unity, the constant internal disputes and the reliance on irregular Arab-Berber nomads for the military.
The final triumph of the 700-year Christian conquest of Spain was marked by the fall of Granada in 1492. Christian Spain imposed its influence on the Maghrib coast by constructing fortified outposts and collecting tribute. But Spain never sought to extend its North African conquests much beyond a few modest enclaves. Privateering was an age-old practice in the Mediterranean, and North African rulers engaged in it increasingly in the late 16th and early 17th centuries because it was so lucrative. Until the 17th century the Barbary pirates used galleys, but a Dutch renegade of the name of Zymen Danseker taught them the advantage of using sailing ships.
Algeria became the privateering city-state par excellence, and two privateer brothers were instrumental in extending Ottoman influence in Algeria. At about the time Spain was establishing its presidios in the Maghrib, the Muslim privateer brothers Aruj and Khair ad Din—the latter known to Europeans as Barbarossa, or Red Beard—were operating successfully off Tunisia. In 1516 Aruj moved his base of operations to Algiers but was killed in 1518. Khair ad Din succeeded him as military commander of Algiers, and the Ottoman sultan gave him the title of beglerbey (provincial governor).
The Spanish expansionist policy in North Africa began with the Catholic Monarchs and the regent Cisneros, once the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula was finished. That way, several towns and outposts in the Algerian coast were conquered and occupied: Mers El Kébir (1505), Oran (1509), Algiers (1510) and Bugia (1510). The Spanish conquest of Oran was won with much bloodshed: 4,000 Algerians were massacred, and up to 8,000 were taken prisoner. For about 200 years, Oran's inhabitants were virtually held captive in their fortress walls, ravaged by famine and plague; Spanish soldiers, too, were irregularly fed and paid.
The Spaniards left Algiers in 1529, Bujia in 1554, Mers El Kébir and Oran in 1708. The Spanish returned in 1732 when the armada of the Duke of Montemar was victorious in the Battle of Aïn-el-Turk and retook Oran and Mers El Kébir; the Spanish massacred many Muslim soldiers. In 1751, a Spanish adventurer, named John Gascon, obtained permission, and vessels and fireworks, to go against Algiers, and set fire, at night, to the Algerian fleet. The plan, however, miscarried. In 1775, Charles III of Spain sent a large force to attack Algiers, under the command of Alejandro O'Reilly (who had led Spanish forces in crushing French rebellion in Louisiana), resulting in a disastrous defeat. The Algerians suffered 5,000 casualties. The Spanish navy bombarded Algiers in 1784; over 20,000 cannonballs were fired, much of the city and its fortifications were destroyed and most of the Algerian fleet was sunk.
Oran and Mers El Kébir were held until 1792, when they were sold by the king Charles IV to the Bey of Algiers.
The Regency of Algiers (Arabic: دولة الجزائر, romanized: Dawlat al-Jaza'ir) was a state in North Africa lasting from 1516 to 1830, until it was conquered by the French. Situated between the regency of Tunis in the east, the Sultanate of Morocco (from 1553) in the west and Tuat as well as the country south of In Salah in the south (and the Spanish and Portuguese possessions of North Africa), the Regency originally extended its borders from La Calle in the east to Trara in the west and from Algiers to Biskra, and afterwards spread to the present eastern and western borders of Algeria.
It had various degrees of autonomy throughout its existence, in some cases reaching complete independence, recognized even by the Ottoman sultan. The country was initially governed by governors appointed by the Ottoman sultan (1518–1659), rulers appointed by the Odjak of Algiers (1659–1710), and then Deys elected by the Divan of Algiers from (1710-1830).
From 1496, the Spanish conquered numerous possessions on the North African coast: Melilla (1496), Mers El Kébir (1505), Oran (1509), Bougie (1510), Tripoli (1510), Algiers, Shershell, Dellys, and Tenes. The Spaniards later led unsuccessful expeditions to take Algiers in the Algiers expedition in 1516, 1519 and another failed expedition in 1541.
Around the same time, the Ottoman privateer brothers Oruç and Hayreddin—both known to Europeans as Barbarossa, or "Red Beard"—were operating successfully off Tunisia under the Hafsids. In 1516, Oruç moved his base of operations to Algiers. He asked for the protection of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, but was killed in 1518 during his invasion of the Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen. Hayreddin succeeded him as military commander of Algiers.
In 1551 Hasan Pasha, the son of Hayreddin defeated the Spanish-Moroccan armies during a campaign to recapture Tlemcen, thus cementing Ottoman control in western and central Algeria.
After that, the conquest of Algeria sped up. In 1552 Salah Rais, with the help of some Kabyle kingdoms, conquered Touggourt, and established a foothold in the Sahara.
In the 1560s eastern Algeria was centralized, and the power struggle which had been present ever since the Emirate of Béjaïa collapsed came to an end.
During the 16th, 17th, and early 18th century, the Kabyle Kingdoms of Kuku and Ait Abbas managed to maintain their independence repelling Ottoman attacks several times, notably in the First Battle of Kalaa of the Beni Abbes. This was mainly thanks to their ideal position deep inside the Kabylia Mountains and their great organisation, and the fact that unlike in the West and East where collapsing kingdoms such as Tlemcen or Béjaïa were present, Kabylia had two new and energetic emirates.
Hayreddin Barbarossa established the military basis of the regency. The Ottomans provided a supporting garrison of 2,000 Turkish troops with artillery. He left Hasan Agha in command as his deputy when he had to leave for Constantinople in 1533. The son of Barbarossa, Hasan Pashan was in 1544 when his father retired, the first governor of the Regency to be directly appointed by the Ottoman Empire. He took the title of beylerbey. Algiers became a base in the war against Spain, and also in the Ottoman conflicts with Morocco.
Beylerbeys continued to be nominated for unlimited tenures until 1587. After Spain had sent an embassy to Constantinople in 1578 to negotiate a truce, leading to a formal peace in August 1580, the Regency of Algiers was a formal Ottoman territory, rather than just a military base in the war against Spain. At this time, the Ottoman Empire set up a regular Ottoman administration in Algiers and its dependencies, headed by Pashas, with 3-year terms to help considate Ottoman power in the Maghreb.
Despite the end of formal hostilities with Spain in 1580, attacks on Christian and especially Catholic shipping, with slavery for the captured, became prevalent in Algiers and were actually the main industry and source of revenues of the Regency.
In the early 17th century, Algiers also became, along with other North African ports such as Tunis, one of the bases for Anglo-Turkish piracy. There were as many as 8,000 renegades in the city in 1634. (Renegades were former Christians, sometimes fleeing the law, who voluntarily moved to Muslim territory and converted to Islam.) Hayreddin Barbarossa is credited with tearing down the Peñón of Algiers and using the stone to build the inner harbor.
A contemporary letter states:
"The infinity of goods, merchandise jewels and treasure taken by our English pirates daily from Christians and carried to Algire and Tunis to the great enriching of Mores and Turks and impoverishing of Christians"
Privateers and slavery of Christians originating from Algiers were a major problem throughout the centuries, leading to regular punitive expeditions by European powers. Spain (1567, 1775, 1783), Denmark (1770), France (1661, 1665, 1682, 1683, 1688), England (1622, 1655, 1672), all led naval bombardments against Algiers. Abraham Duquesne fought the Barbary pirates in 1681 and bombarded Algiers between 1682 and 1683, to help Christian captives.
In 1659 the Janissaries of the Odjak of Algiers took over the country, and removed the local Pasha with the blessing of the Ottoman Sultan. From there on a system of dual leaders was in place. There was first and foremost the Agha, elected by the Odjak, and the Pasha appointed by the Ottoman Sublime Porte, whom was a major cause of unrest. Of course, this duality was not stable. All of the Aghas were assassinated, without an exception. Even the first Agha was killed after only 1 year of rule. Thanks to this the Pashas from Constantinople were able to increase the power, and reaffirm Turkish control over the region. In 1671, the Rais, the pirate captains, elected a new leader, Mohamed Trik. The Janissaries also supported him, and started calling him the Dey, which means Uncle in Turkish.
In the early Dey period the country worked similarly to before, with the Pasha still holding considerable powers, but instead of the Janissaries electing their own leaders freely, other factions such as the Taifa of Rais also wanted to elect the deys. Mohammed Trik, taking over during a time instability was faced with heavy issues. Not only were the Janissaries on a rampage, removing any leaders for even the smallest mistakes (even if those leaders were elected by them), but the native populace was also restless. The conflicts with European powers didn't help this either. In 1677, following an explosion in Algiers and several attempts at his life, Mohammed escaped to Tripoli leaving Algiers to Baba Hassan. Just 4 years into his rule he was already at war with one of the most powerful countries in Europe, the Kingdom of France. In 1682 France bombarded Algiers for the first time. The Bombardment was inconclusive, and the leader of the fleet Abraham Duquesne failed to secure the submission of Algiers. The next year, Algiers was bombarded again, this time liberating a few slaves. Before a peace treaty could be signed though, Baba Hassan was deposed and killed by a Rais called Mezzo Morto Hüseyin. Continuing the war against France he was defeated in a naval battle in 1685, near Cherchell, and at last a French Bombardment in 1688 brought an end to his reign, and the war. His successor, Hadj Chabane was elected by the Raïs. He defeated Morocco in the Battle of Moulouya and defeated Tunis as well. He went back to Algiers, but he was assassinated in 1695 by the Janissaries whom once again took over the country. From there on Algiers was in turmoil once again. Leaders were assassinated, despite not even ruling for a year, and the Pasha was still a cause of unrest. The only notable event during this time of unrest was the recapture of Oran and Mers-el-Kébir from the Spanish.
Baba Ali Chaouche, also written as Chaouch, took over the country, ending the rule of the Janissaries. The Pasha attempted to resist him, but instead he was sent home, and told to never come back, and if he did he will be executed. He also sent a letter to the Ottoman sultan declaring that Algiers will from then on act as an independent state, and will not be an Ottoman vassal, but an ally at best. The Sublime Porte, enraged, tried to send another Pasha to Algiers, whom was then sent back to Constantinople by the Algerians. This marked the de facto independence of Algiers from the Ottoman Empire.
In the mid-1700s Dano-Norwegian trade in the Mediterranean expanded. In order to protect the lucrative business against piracy, Denmark–Norway had secured a peace deal with the states of Barbary Coast. It involved paying an annual tribute to the individual rulers and additionally to the States.
In 1766, Algiers had a new ruler, dey Baba Mohammed ben-Osman. He demanded that the annual payment made by Denmark-Norway should be increased, and he should receive new gifts. Denmark–Norway refused the demands. Shortly after, Algerian pirates hijacked three Dano-Norwegian ships and allowed the crew to be sold as slaves.
They threatened to bombard the Algerian capital if the Algerians did not agree to a new peace deal on Danish terms. Algiers was not intimidated by the fleet, the fleet was of 2 frigates, 2 bomb galiot and 4 ship of the line.
In the west, the Algerian-Cherifian conflicts shaped the western border of Algeria.
There were numerous battles between the Regency of Algiers and the Sharifian Empires for example: the campaign of Tlemcen in 1551, the campaign of Tlemcen in 1557, the Battle of Moulouya and the Battle of Chelif. The independent Kabyle Kingdoms also had some involvement, the Kingdom of Beni Abbes participated in the campaign of Tlemcen in 1551 and the Kingdom of Kuku provided Zwawa troops for the capture of Fez in 1576 in which Abd al-Malik was installed as an Ottoman vassal ruler over the Saadi Dynasty. The Kingdom of Kuku also participated in the capture of Fez in 1554 in which Salih Rais defeated the Moroccan army and conquered Morocco up until Fez, adding these territories to the Ottoman crown and placing Ali Abu Hassun as the ruler and vassal to the Ottoman sultan. In 1792 the Regency of Algiers managed to take possession of the Moroccan Rif and Oujda, which they then abandoned in 1795 for unknown reasons.
During the early 19th century, Algiers again resorted to widespread piracy against shipping from Europe and the young United States of America, mainly due to internal fiscal difficulties, and the damage caused by the Napoleonic Wars. This in turn led to the First Barbary War and Second Barbary War, which culminated in August 1816 when Lord Exmouth executed a naval bombardment of Algiers, the biggest, and most successful one. The Barbary Wars resulted in a major victory for the American, British, and Dutch Navy.
In between 1516 and 1567, the rulers of the Regency were chosen by the Ottoman sultan. During the first few decades, Algiers was completely aligned with the Ottoman Empire, although it later gained a certain level of autonomy as it was the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire, and administering it directly would have been problematic.
During this period a form of dual leadership was in place, with the Aghas sharing power and influence with a Pasha appointed by the Ottoman sultan from Constantinople. After 1567, the Deys became the main leaders of the country, although the Pashas still retained some power.
After a coup by Baba Ali Chaouch, the political situation of Algiers became complicated.
Some sources describe it as completely independent from the Ottomans, albeit the state was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire.
Cur Abdy, dey of Algiers shouted at an Ottoman envoy for claiming that the Ottoman Padishah was the king of Algiers ("King of Algiers? King of Algiers? If he is the King of Algiers then who am I?").
Despite the Ottomans having no influence in Algiers, and the Algerians often ignoring orders from the Ottoman sultan, such as in 1784. In some cases Algiers also participated in the Ottoman Empire's wars, such as the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792), albeit this was not common, and in 1798 for example Algiers sold wheat to the French Empire campaigning in Egypt against the Ottomans through two Jewish traders.
In some cases, Algiers was declared to be a country rebelling against the holy law of Islam by the Ottoman Caliph. This usually meant a declaration of war by the Ottomans against the Deylik of Algiers. This could happen due to many reasons. For example, under the rule of Haji Ali Dey, Algerian pirates regularly attacked Ottoman shipments, and Algiers waged war against the Beylik of Tunis, despite several protests by the Ottoman Porte, which resulted in a declaration of war.
It can be thus said that the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Algiers mainly depended on what the Dey at the time wanted. While in some cases, if the relationship between the two was favorable, Algiers did participate in Ottoman wars, Algiers otherwise remained completely autonomous from the rest of the Empire similar to the other Barbary States.
North African boundaries have shifted during various stages of the conquests. The borders of modern Algeria were expanded by the French, whose colonization began in 1830 (French invasion began on July 5). To benefit French colonists (many of whom were not in fact of French origin but Italian, Maltese, and Spanish) and nearly the entirety of whom lived in urban areas, northern Algeria was eventually organized into overseas departments of France, with representatives in the French National Assembly. France controlled the entire country, but the traditional Muslim population in the rural areas remained separated from the modern economic infrastructure of the European community.
As a result of what the French considered an insult to the French consul in Algiers by the Day in 1827, France blockaded Algiers for three years. In 1830, France invaded and occupied the coastal areas of Algeria, citing a diplomatic incident as casus belli. Hussein Dey went into exile. French colonization then gradually penetrated southwards, and came to have a profound impact on the area and its populations. The European conquest, initially accepted in the Algiers region, was soon met by a rebellion, led by Abdel Kadir, which took roughly a decade for the French troops to put down. By 1848 nearly all of northern Algeria was under French control, and the new government of the French Second Republic declared the occupied lands an integral part of France. Three "civil territories"—Algiers, Oran, and Constantine—were organized as French départements (local administrative units) under a civilian government. During the "Pacification of Algeria", which lasted until 1903, the French perpetrated atrocities which included mass executions of civilians and prisoners and the use of concentration camps; many estimates indicates that the native Algerian population fell by one-third in the years between the French invasion and the end of fighting in the mid-1870s due to warfare, disease and starvation.
In addition to enduring the affront of being ruled by a foreign, non-Muslim power, many Algerians lost their lands to the new government or to colonists. Traditional leaders were eliminated, coopted, or made irrelevant, and the traditional educational system was largely dismantled; social structures were stressed to the breaking point. From 1856, native Muslims and Jews were viewed as French subjects not citizens.
However, in 1865, Napoleon III allowed them to apply for full French citizenship, a measure that few took, since it involved renouncing the right to be governed by sharia law in personal matters, and was considered a kind of apostasy; in 1870, the Crémieux Decree made French citizenship automatic for Jewish natives, a move which largely angered many Muslims, which resulted in the Jews being seen as the accomplices of the colonial power by anti-colonial Algerians. Nonetheless, this period saw progress in health, some infrastructures, and the overall expansion of the economy of Algeria, as well as the formation of new social classes, which, after exposure to ideas of equality and political liberty, would help propel the country to independence.
During the colonization France focused on eradicating the local culture by destroying hundreds years old palaces and important buildings. It is estimated that around half of Algiers, a city founded in the 10th century, was destroyed. Many segregatory laws were levied against the Algerians and their culture.
A new generation of Islamic leadership emerged in Algeria at the time of World War I and grew to maturity during the 1920s and 1930s. Various groups were formed in opposition to French rule, most notable the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Algerian Movement.
Colons (colonists), or, more popularly, pieds noirs (literally, black feet) dominated the government and controlled the bulk of Algeria's wealth. Throughout the colonial era, they continued to block or delay all attempts to implement even the most modest reforms. But from 1933 to 1936, mounting social, political, and economic crises in Algeria induced the indigenous population to engage in numerous acts of political protest. The government responded with more restrictive laws governing public order and security. Algerian Muslims rallied to the French side at the start of World War II as they had done in World War I. But the colons were generally sympathetic to the collaborationist Vichy regime established following France's defeat by Nazi Germany. After the fall of the Vichy regime in Algeria (November 11, 1942) as a result of Operation Torch, the Free French commander in chief in North Africa slowly rescinded repressive Vichy laws, despite opposition by colon extremists.
In March 1943, Muslim leader Ferhat Abbas presented the French administration with the Manifesto of the Algerian People, signed by 56 Algerian nationalist and international leaders. The manifesto demanded an Algerian constitution that would guarantee immediate and effective political participation and legal equality for Muslims. Instead, the French administration in 1944 instituted a reform package, based on the 1936 Viollette Plan, that granted full French citizenship only to certain categories of "meritorious" Algerian Muslims, who numbered about 60,000. In April 1945 the French had arrested the Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj. On May 1 the followers of his Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) participated in demonstrations which were violently put down by the police. Several Algerians were killed. The tensions between the Muslim and colon communities exploded on May 8, 1945, V-E Day, causing the Sétif and Guelma massacre. When a Muslim march was met with violence, marchers rampaged. The army and police responded by conducting a prolonged and systematic ratissage (literally, raking over) of suspected centers of dissidence. According to official French figures, 1,500 Muslims died as a result of these countermeasures. Other estimates vary from 6,000 to as high as 45,000 killed. Many nationalists drew the conclusion that independence could not be won by peaceful means, and so started organizing for violent rebellion.
In August 1947, the French National Assembly approved the government-proposed Organic Statute of Algeria. This law called for the creation of an Algerian Assembly with one house representing Europeans and "meritorious" Muslims and the other representing the remaining 8 million or more Muslims. Muslim and colon deputies alike abstained or voted against the statute but for diametrically opposed reasons: the Muslims because it fell short of their expectations and the colons because it went too far.
The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), brutal and long, was the most recent major turning point in the country's history. Although often fratricidal, it ultimately united Algerians and seared the value of independence and the philosophy of anticolonialism into the national consciousness.
In the early morning hours of November 1, 1954, the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale—FLN) launched attacks throughout Algeria in the opening salvo of a war of independence. An important watershed in this war was the massacre of Pieds-Noirs civilians by the FLN near the town of Philippeville in August 1955. Which prompted Jacques Soustelle into calling for more repressive measures against the rebels. The French authorities claimed that 1,273 "guerrillas" died in what Soustelle admitted were "severe" reprisals. The FLN subsequently, giving names and addresses, claimed that 12,000 Muslims were killed. After Philippeville, all-out war began in Algeria. The FLN fought largely using guerrilla tactics whilst the French counter-insurgency tactics often included severe reprisals and repression.
Eventually, protracted negotiations led to a cease-fire signed by France and the FLN on March 18, 1962, at Evian, France. The Evian accords also provided for continuing economic, financial, technical, and cultural relations, along with interim administrative arrangements until a referendum on self-determination could be held. The Evian accords guaranteed the religious and property rights of French settlers, but the perception that they would not be respected led to the exodus of one million pieds-noirs and harkis.
Abusive tactics of the French Army remains a controversial subject in France to this day. Deliberate illegal methods were used, such as beatings, mutilations, hanging by the feet or hands, torture by electroshock, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual assaults, among others. French war crimes against Algerian civilians were also committed, including indiscriminate shootings of civilians, bombings of villages suspected of helping the ALN, rape, disembowelment of pregnant women, imprisonment without food in small cells (some of which were small enough to impede lying down), throwing prisoners out of helicopters to their death or into the sea with concrete on their feet, and burying people alive.
The FLN also committed many atrocities, both against French pieds-noirs and against fellow Algerians whom they deemed as supporting the French. These crimes included killing unarmed men, women and children, rape and disembowelment or decapitation of women and murdering children by slitting their throats or banging their heads against walls.
Between 350,000 and 1 million Algerians are estimated to have died during the war, and more than 2 million, out of a total Muslim population of 9 or 10 million, were made into refugees or forcibly relocated into government-controlled camps. Much of the countryside and agriculture was devastated, along with the modern economy, which had been dominated by urban European settlers (the pied-noirs). French sources estimated that at least 70,000 Muslim civilians were killed or abducted and presumed killed, by the FLN during the Algerian War. Nearly one million people of mostly French, Spanish and Italian descent left the country at independence due to the privileges that they lost as settlers and their unwillingness to be on equal footing with indigenous Algerians along with them left most Algerians of Jewish descent and those Muslim Algerians who had supported a French Algeria (harkis). 30–150,000 pro-French Muslims were also killed in Algeria by FLN in post-war reprisals.
The Algerian independence referendum was held in French Algeria on 1 July 1962, passing with 99.72% of the vote. As a result, France declared Algeria independent on 3 July. On 8 September 1963, the first Algerian constitution was adopted by nationwide referendum under close supervision by the National Liberation Front (FLN). Later that month, Ahmed Ben Bella was formally elected the first president of Algeria for a five-year term after receiving support from the FLN and the military, led by Colonel Houari Boumédiène.
However, the war for independence and its aftermath had severely disrupted Algeria's society and economy. In addition to the destruction of much of Algeria's infrastructure, an exodus of the upper-class French and European colons from Algeria deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the workforce was unemployed. The months immediately following independence witnessed the pell-mell rush of Algerians and government officials to claim the property and jobs left behind by the European colons. For example in the 1963 March Decrees, President Ben Bella declared all agricultural, industrial, and commercial properties previously owned and operated by Europeans vacant, thereby legalizing confiscation by the state.
The military played an important role in Ben Bella's administration. Since the president recognized the role that the military played in bringing him to power, he appointed senior military officers as ministers and other important positions within the new state, including naming Colonel Boumédiène as defence minister. These military officials played a core role into implementing the country's security and foreign policy.
Under the new constitution, Ben Bella's presidency combined the functions of chief of state and head of government with those of supreme commander of the armed forces. He formed his government without needing legislative approval and was responsible for the definition and direction of its policies. There was no effective institutional check on the president's powers. As a result, opposition leader Hocine Aït-Ahmed quit the National Assembly in 1963 to protest the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of the regime and formed a clandestine resistance movement, the Socialist Forces Front (Front des Forces Socialistes—FFS), dedicated to overthrowing the Ben Bella regime by force.
Late summer 1963 saw sporadic incidents attributed to the FFS, but more serious fighting broke out a year later, and the army moved quickly and in force to crush a rebellion. Minister of Defense Boumédiène had no qualms about sending the army to put down regional uprisings because he felt they posed a threat to the state. However, President Ben Bella attempted to co-opt allies from among these regional leaders in order to undermine the ability of military commanders to influence foreign and security policy. Tensions consequently built between Boumédiène and Ben Bella, and in 1965 the military removed Ben Bella in a coup d'état, replacing him with Boumédiène as head of state.
On 19 June 1965, Houari Boumédiène deposed Ahmed Ben Bella in a military coup d'état that was both swift and bloodless. Ben Bella "disappeared", and would not be seen again until he was released from house arrest in 1980 by Boumédiène's successor, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid. Boumédiène immediately dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1963 constitution. Political power resided in the Nation Council of the Algerian Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne—CNRA), a predominantly military body intended to foster cooperation among various factions in the army and the party.
Houari Boumédiène's position as head of government and of state was initially insecure, partly because of his lack of a significant power base outside of the armed forces. He relied strongly on a network of former associates known as the Oujda group, named after Boumédiène's posting as National Liberation Army (Armée de Libération Nationale—ALN) leader in the Moroccan border town of Oujda during the war years, but he could not fully dominate his fractious regime. This situation may have accounted for his deference to collegial rule.
Over Boumédiène's 11-year reign as Chairman of the CNRA, the council introduced two formal mechanisms: the People's Municipal Assembly (Assemblée Populaires Communales) and the People's Provincial Assembly (Assemblée Populaires de Wilaya) for popular participation in politics. Under Boumédiène's rule, leftist and socialist concepts were merged with Islam.
Boumédiène also used Islam to opportunistically consolidate his power. On one hand, he made token concessions and cosmetic changes to the government to appear more Islamic, such as putting Islamist Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi in charge of national education in 1965 and adopting policies criminalizing gambling, establishing Friday as the national holiday, and dropping plans to introduce birth control to paint an Islamic image of the new government. But on the other hand, Boumédiène's government also progressively repressed Islamic groups, such as by ordering the dissolution of Al Qiyam.
Following attempted coups—most notably that of chief-of-staff Col. Tahar Zbiri in December 1967—and a failed assassination attempt on 25 April 1968, Boumédiène consolidated power and forced military and political factions to submit. He took a systematic, authoritarian approach to state building, arguing that Algeria needed stability and an economic base before building any political institutions.
Eleven years after Boumédiène took power, after much public debate, a long-promised new constitution was promulgated in November 1976. The constitution restored the National Assembly and gave it legislative, consent, and oversight functions. Boumédiène was later elected president with 95 percent of the cast votes.
Boumédiène's death on 27 December 1978 set off a struggle within the FLN to choose a successor. A deadlock occurred between two candidates was broken when Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, a moderate who had collaborated with Boumédiène in deposing Ahmed Ben Bella, was sworn in on February 9, 1979. He was re-elected in 1984 and 1988. After the violent 1988 October Riots, a new constitution was adopted in 1989 that eradicated the Algerian one-party state by allowing the formation of political associations in addition to the FLN. It also removed the armed forces, which had run the government since the days of Boumédiène, from a role in the operation of the government.
Among the scores of parties that sprang up under the new constitution, the militant Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut—FIS) was the most successful, winning a majority of votes in the June 1990 municipal elections, as well as the first stage of the December national legislative elections.
The surprising first round of success for the fundamentalist FIS party in the December 1991 balloting caused the army to discuss options to intervene in the election. Officers feared that an Islamist government would interfere with their positions and core interests in economic, national security, and foreign policy, since the FIS has promised to make a fundamental re-haul of the social, political, and economic structure to achieve a radical Islamist agenda. Senior military figures, such as Defence Minister Khaled Nezzar, Chief of the General Staff Abdelmalek Guenaizia, and other leaders of the navy, Gendarmerie, and security services, all agreed that the FIS should be stopped from gaining power at the polling box. They also agreed that Bendjedid would need to be removed from office due to his determination to uphold the country's new constitution by continuing with the second round of ballots.
On 11 January 1992, Bendjedid announced his resignation on national television, saying it was necessary to "protect the unity of the people and the security of the country". Later that same day, the High Council of State (Haut Comité d'Etat—HCE), which was composed of five people (including Khaled Nezzar, Tedjini Haddam, Ali Kafi, Mohamed Boudiaf and Ali Haroun), was appointed to carry out the duties of the president.
The new government, led by Sid Ahmed Ghozali, banned all political activity at mosques and began stopping people from attending prayers at popular mosques. The FIS was legally dissolved by Interior Minister Larbi Belkheir on 9 February for attempting "insurrections against the state". A state of emergency was also declared and extraordinary powers, such as curtailing the right to associate, were granted to the regime.
Between January and March, a growing number of FIS militants were arrested by the military, including Abdelkader Hachani and his successors, Othman Aissani and Rabah Kebir. Following the announcement to dissolve the FIS and implement a state of emergency on 9 February, the Algerian security forces used their new emergency powers to conduct large scale arrests of FIS members and housed them in 5 "detention centers" in the Sahara. Between 5,000 (official number) and 30,000 (FIS number) people were detained.
This crackdown led to a fundamental Islamic insurgency, resulting in the continuous and brutal 10 year-long Algerian Civil War. During the civil war, the secular state apparatus nonetheless allowed elections featuring pro-government and moderate religious-based parties. The civil war lasted from 1991 to 2002.
After Chadli Bendjedid resigned from the presidency in the military coup of 1992, a series of figureheads were selected by the military to assume the presidency, as officers were reluctant to assume public political power even though they had manifested control over the government. Additionally, the military's senior leaders felt a need to give a civilian face to the new political regime they had hastily constructed in the aftermath of Benjedid's ousting and the termination of elections, preferring a friendlier non-military face to front the regime.
The first such head of state was Mohamed Boudiaf, who was appointed president of the High Council of State (HCE) in February 1992 after a 27-year exile in Morocco. However, Boudiaf quickly came to odds with the military when attempts by Boudiaf to appoint his own staff or form a political party were viewed with suspicion by officers. Boudiaf also launched political initiatives, such as a rigorous anti-corruption campaign in April 1992 and the sacking of Khaled Nezzar from his post as Defence Minister, which were seen by the military as an attempt to remove their influence in the government. The former of these initiatives was especially hazardous to the many senior military officials who had benefited massively and illegally from the political system for years. In the end, Boudiaf was assassinated in June 1992 by one of his bodyguards with Islamist sympathies.
Ali Kafi briefly assumed the HCE presidency after Boudiaf's death, before Liamine Zéroual was appointed as a long-term replacement in 1994. However, Zéroual only remained in office for four years before he announced his retirement, as he quickly became embroiled in a clan warfare within the upper classes of the military and fell out with groups of the more senior generals. After this Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Boumédiène's foreign minister, succeeded as the president.
As the Algerian civil war wound to a close, presidential elections were held again in April 1999. Although seven candidates qualified for election, all but Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had the support of the military as well as the National Liberation Front (FLN), withdrew on the eve of the election amid charges of electoral fraud and interference from the military. Bouteflika went on to win with 70 percent of the cast votes.
Despite the purportedly democratic elections, the civilian government immediately after the 1999 elections only acted as a sort of 'hijab' over the true government, mostly running day-to-day businesses, while the military still largely ran the country behind the scenes. For example, ministerial mandates to individuals were only granted with the military's approval, and different factions of the military invested in various political parties and the press, using them as pawns to gain influence.
However, the military's influence over politics decreased gradually, leaving Bouteflika with more authority on deciding policy. One reason for this was that the senior commanders who had dominated the political scene during the 1960s and 1970s started to retire. Bouteflika's former experience as Boumédiène's foreign minister earned him connections that rejuvenated Algeria's international reputation, which had been tarnished in the early 1990s due to the civil war. On the domestic front, Bouteflika's policy of "national reconciliation" to bring a close to civilian violence earned him a popular mandate that helped him to win further presidential terms in 2004, 2009 and 2014.
In 2010, journalists gathered to demonstrate for press freedom and against Bouteflika's self-appointed role as editor-in-chief of Algeria's state television station. In February 2011, the government rescinded the state of emergency that had been in place since 1992 but still banned all protest gatherings and demonstrations. However, in April 2011, over 2,000 protesters defied the official ban and took to the streets of Algiers, clashing with police forces. These protests can be seen as a part of the Arab Spring, with protesters noting that they were inspired by the recent Egyptian revolution, and that Algeria was a police state that was "corrupt to the bone".
In 2019, after 20 years in office, Bouteflika announced in February that he would seek a fifth term of office. This sparked widespread discontent around Algeria and protests in Algiers. Despite later attempts at saying he would resign after his term finished in late April, Bouteflika resigned on 2 April, after the chief of the army, Ahmed Gaid Salah, made a declaration that he was "unfit for office". Despite Gaid Salah being loyal to Bouteflika, many in the military identified with civilians, as nearly 70 percent of the army are civilian conscripts who are required to serve for 18 months. Also, since demonstrators demanded a change to the whole governmental system, many army officers aligned themselves with demonstrators in the hopes of surviving an anticipated revolution and retaining their positions.
After the resignation of Abdelaziz Bouteflika on 9 April 2019, the President of the Council of the Nation Abdelkader Bensalah became acting president of Algeria.
Following the presidential election on 12 December 2019, Abdelmadjid Tebboune was elected president after taking 58% of the votes, beating the candidates from both main parties, the National Liberation Front and the Democratic National Rally.
On the eve of the first anniversary of the Hirak Movement, which led to the resignation of former president Bouteflika, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced in a statement to the Algerian national media that 22 February would be declared the Algerian "National Day of Fraternity and Cohesion between the People and Its Army for Democracy." In the same statement, Tebboune spoke in favor of the Hirak Movement, saying that "the blessed Hirak has preserved the country from a total collapse", and that he had "made a personal commitment to carry out all of the [movement's] demands." On 21 and 22 February 2020, masses of demonstrators (with turnout comparable to well-established Algerian holidays like the Algerian Day of Independence) gathered to honor the anniversary of the Hirak Movement and the newly established national day.
In an effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, Tebboune announced on 17 March 2020 that "marches and rallies, whatever their motives" would be prohibited. But after protesters and journalists were arrested for participating in such marches, Tebboune faced accusations of attempting to "silence Algerians." Notably, the government's actions were condemned by Amnesty International, which said in a statement that "when all eyes [...] are on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Algerian authorities are devoting time to speeding up the prosecution and trial of activists, journalists, and supporters of the Hirak movement." The National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (Comité national pour la libération des détenus—CNLD) estimated that around 70 prisoners of conscience were imprisoned by 2 July 2020 and that several of the imprisoned were arrested for Facebook posts.
On 28 December 2019, the then-recently inaugurated President Tebboune met with Ahmed Benbitour, the former Algerian Head of Government, with whom he discussed the "foundations of the new Republic." On 8 January 2020, Tebboune established a "commission of experts" composed of 17 members (a majority of which were professors of constitutional law) responsible for examining the previous constitution and making any necessary revisions. Led by Ahmed Laraba, the commission was required to submit its proposals to Tebboune directly within the following two months. In a letter to Laraba on the same day, Tebboune outlined seven axes around which the commission should focus its discussion. These areas of focus included strengthening citizens' rights, combating corruption, consolidating the balance of powers in the Algerian government, increasing the oversight powers of parliament, promoting the independence of the judiciary, furthering citizens' equality under the law, and constitutionalizing elections. Tebboune's letter also included a call for an "immutable and intangible" two-term limit to anyone serving as president — a major point of contention in the initial Hirak Movement protests, which were spurred by former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika's announcement to run for a fifth term.
The preliminary draft revision of the constitution was publicly published on 7 May 2020, but the Laraba Commission (as the "commission of experts" came to be known) was open to additional proposals from the public until 20 June. By 3 June, the commission had received an estimated 1,200 additional public proposals. After all revisions were considered by the Laraba Commission, the draft was introduced to the Cabinet of Algeria (Council of Ministers).
The revised constitution was adopted in the Council of Ministers on 6 September, in the People's National Assembly on 10 September, and in the Council of the Nation on 12 September. The constitutional changes were approved in the 1 November 2020 referendum, with 66.68% of voters participating in favour of the changes.
On 16 February 2021, mass protests and a wave of nationwide rallies and peaceful demonstrations against the government of Abdelmadjid Tebboune began. In May 2021, Algeria prohibited any protests that do not have prior approval by authorities. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Much of the history of Algeria has taken place on the fertile coastal plain of North Africa, which is often called the Maghreb (or Maghreb). North Africa served as a transit region for people moving towards Europe or the Middle East, thus, the region's inhabitants have been influenced by populations from other areas, including the Carthaginians, Romans, and Vandals. The region was conquered by the Muslims in the early 8th century AD, but broke off from the Umayyad Caliphate after the Berber Revolt of 740. During the Ottoman period, Algeria became an important state in the Mediterranean sea which led to many naval conflicts. The last significant events in the country's recent history have been the Algerian War and Algerian Civil War.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Evidence of the early human occupation of Algeria is demonstrated by the discovery of 1.8 million year old Oldowan stone tools found at Ain Hanech in 1992. In 1954 fossilised Homo erectus bones were discovered by C. Arambourg at Ternefine that are 700,000 years old. Neolithic civilization (marked by animal domestication and subsistence agriculture) developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean Maghrib between 6000 and 2000 BC. This type of economy, richly depicted in the Tassili n'Ajjer cave paintings in southeastern Algeria, predominated in the Maghrib until the classical period.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Numidia (Berber: Inumiden; 202–40 BC) was the ancient kingdom of the Numidians located in northwest Africa, initially comprising the territory that now makes up modern-day Algeria, but later expanding across what is today known as Tunisia, Libya, and some parts of Morocco. The polity was originally divided between the Massylii in the east and the Masaesyli in the west. During the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), Masinissa, king of the Massylii, defeated Syphax of the Masaesyli to unify Numidia into one kingdom. The kingdom began as a sovereign state and later alternated between being a Roman province and a Roman client state.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Numidia, at its largest extent, was bordered by Mauretania to the west, at the Moulouya River, Africa to the east (also exercising control over Tripolitania), the Mediterranean Sea to the north, and the Sahara to the south. It was one of the first major states in the history of Algeria and the Berbers.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "By 112 BC, Jugurtha resumed his war with Adherbal. He incurred the wrath of Rome in the process by killing some Roman businessmen who were aiding Adherbal. After a brief war with Rome, Jugurtha surrendered and received a highly favourable peace treaty, which raised suspicions of bribery once more. The local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges brought by his political rival Gaius Memmius. Jugurtha was also forced to come to Rome to testify against the Roman commander, where Jugurtha was completely discredited once his violent and ruthless past became widely known, and after he had been suspected of murdering a Numidian rival.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "War broke out between Numidia and the Roman Republic and several legions were dispatched to North Africa under the command of the Consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. The war dragged out into a long and seemingly endless campaign as the Romans tried to defeat Jugurtha decisively. Frustrated at the apparent lack of action, Metellus' lieutenant Gaius Marius returned to Rome to seek election as Consul. Marius was elected, and then returned to Numidia to take control of the war. He sent his Quaestor Sulla to neighbouring Mauretania in order to eliminate their support for Jugurtha. With the help of Bocchus I of Mauretania, Sulla captured Jugurtha and brought the war to a conclusive end. Jugurtha was brought to Rome in chains and was placed in the Tullianum.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Jugurtha was executed by the Romans in 104 BC, after being paraded through the streets in Gaius Marius' Triumph.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Greek historians referred to these peoples as \"Νομάδες\" (i.e. Nomads), which by Latin interpretation became \"Numidae\" (but cf. also the correct use of Nomades). Historian Gabriel Camps, however, disputes this claim, favoring instead an African origin for the term.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The name appears first in Polybius (second century BC) to indicate the peoples and territory west of Carthage including the entire north of Algeria as far as the river Mulucha (Muluya), about 160 kilometres (100 mi) west of Oran.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Numidians were composed of two great tribal groups: the Massylii in eastern Numidia, and the Masaesyli in the west. During the first part of the Second Punic War, the eastern Massylii, under their king Gala, were allied with Carthage, while the western Masaesyli, under king Syphax, were allied with Rome. The Kingdom of Masaesyli under Syphax extended from the Moulouya river to Oued Rhumel.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "However, in 206 BC, the new king of the eastern Massylii, Masinissa, allied himself with Rome, and Syphax of the Masaesyli switched his allegiance to the Carthaginian side. At the end of the war, the victorious Romans gave all of Numidia to Masinissa of the Massylii. At the time of his death in 148 BC, Masinissa's territory extended from the Moulouya to the boundary of the Carthaginian territory, and also southeast as far as Cyrenaica to the gulf of Sirte, so that Numidia entirely surrounded Carthage (Appian, Punica, 106) except towards the sea. Furthermore, after the capture of Syphax the king in modern day Morocco with his capital based in Tingis, Bokkar, had become a vassal of Massinissa. Massinissa had also penetrated as far south beyond the Atlas to the Gaetuli and Fezzan was part of his domain.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 179 B.C. Masinissa had received a golden crown from the inhabitants of Delos as he had offered them a shipload of grain. A statue of Masinissa was set up in Delos in honour of him as well as an inscription dedicated to him in Delos by a native from Rhodes. His sons too had statues of them erected on the island of Delos and the King of Bithynia, Nicomedes, had also dedicated a statue to Masinissa.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After the death of the long-lived Masinissa around 148 BC, he was succeeded by his son Micipsa. When Micipsa died in 118 BC, he was succeeded jointly by his two sons Hiempsal I and Adherbal and Masinissa's illegitimate grandson, Jugurtha, who was very popular among the Numidians. Hiempsal and Jugurtha quarrelled immediately after the death of Micipsa. Jugurtha had Hiempsal killed, which led to open war with Adherbal.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Phoenician traders arrived on the North African coast around 900 BC and established Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) around 800 BC. During the classical period, Berber civilization was already at a stage in which agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and political organization supported several states. Trade links between Carthage and the Berbers in the interior grew, but territorial expansion also resulted in the enslavement or military recruitment of some Berbers and in the extraction of tribute from others.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Carthaginian state declined because of successive defeats by the Romans in the Punic Wars, and in 146 BC, the city of Carthage was destroyed. As Carthaginian power waned, the influence of Berber leaders in the hinterland grew.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By the 2nd century BC, several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. After that, king Masinissa managed to unify Numidia under his rule.",
"title": "Numidia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Christianity arrived in the 2nd century. By the end of the 4th century, the settled areas had become Christianized, and some Berber tribes had converted en masse.",
"title": "Roman empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Algeria came under the control of the Vandal Kingdom. Later, the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire) conquered Algeria from the Vandals, incorporating it into the Praetorian prefecture of Africa and later the Exarchate of Africa.",
"title": "Roman empire"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "From the 8th century Umayyad conquest of North Africa led by Musa bin Nusayr, Arab colonization started. The 11th century invasion of migrants from the Arabian peninsula brought oriental tribal customs. The introduction of Islam and Arabic had a profound impact on North Africa. The new religion and language introduced changes in social and economic relations, and established links with the Arab world through acculturation and assimilation.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The second Arab military expeditions into the Maghreb, between 642 and 669, resulted in the spread of Islam. The Umayyads (a Muslim dynasty based in Damascus from 661 to 750) recognised that the strategic necessity of dominating the Mediterranean dictated a concerted military effort on the North African front. By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam had conquered all of North Africa. In 750 the Abbasids succeeded the Umayyads as Muslim rulers and moved the caliphate to Baghdad. Under the Abbasids, Berber Kharijites Sufri Banu Ifran were opposed to Umayyad and Abbasids. After, the Rustumids (761–909) actually ruled most of the central Maghrib from Tahirt, southwest of Algiers. The imams gained a reputation for honesty, piety, and justice, and the court of Tahirt was noted for its support of scholarship. The Rustumid imams failed, however, to organise a reliable standing army, which opened the way for Tahirt's demise under the assault of the Fatimid dynasty.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Fatimids left the rule of most of Algeria to the Zirids and Hammadid (972–1148), a Berber dynasty that centered significant local power in Algeria for the first time, but who were still at war with Banu Ifran (kingdom of Tlemcen) and Maghraoua (942-1068). This period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline. Following a large incursion of Arab Bedouin from Egypt beginning in the first half of the 11th century, the use of Arabic spread to the countryside, and sedentary Berbers were gradually Arabised.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Almoravid (\"those who have made a religious retreat\") movement developed early in the 11th century among the Sanhaja Berbers of southern Morocco. The movement's initial impetus was religious, an attempt by a tribal leader to impose moral discipline and strict adherence to Islamic principles on followers. But the Almoravid movement shifted to engaging in military conquest after 1054. By 1106, the Almoravids had conquered the Maghreb as far east as Algiers and Morocco, and Spain up to the Ebro River.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Like the Almoravids, the Almohads (\"unitarians\") found their inspiration in Islamic reform. The Almohads took control of Morocco by 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib. The zenith of Almohad power occurred between 1163 and 1199. For the first time, the Maghrib was united under a local regime, but the continuing wars in Spain overtaxed the resources of the Almohads, and in the Maghrib their position was compromised by factional strife and a renewal of tribal warfare.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the central Maghrib, the Abdalwadid founded a dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Tlemcen in Algeria. For more than 300 years, until the region came under Ottoman suzerainty in the 16th century, the Zayanids kept a tenuous hold in the central Maghrib. Many coastal cities asserted their autonomy as municipal republics governed by merchant oligarchies, tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or the privateers who operated out of their ports. Nonetheless, Tlemcen, the \"pearl of the Maghrib,\" prospered as a commercial center.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to historians of the Middle Ages, the Berbers were divided into two branches, both going back to their ancestors Mazigh. The two branches, called Botr and Barnès were divided into tribes, and each Maghreb region is made up of several tribes. The large Berber tribes or peoples are Sanhaja, Houara, Zenata, Masmuda, Kutama, Awarba, Barghawata ... etc. Each tribe is divided into sub tribes. All these tribes had independent and territorial decisions.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Several Berber dynasties emerged during the Middle Ages: - In North and West Africa, in Spain (al-Andalus), Sicily, Egypt, as well as in the southern part of the Sahara, in modern-day Mali, Niger, and Senegal. The medieval historian Ibn Khaldun described the follying Berber dynasties: Zirid, Banu Ifran, Maghrawa, Almoravid, Hammadid, Almohad Caliphate, Marinid, Zayyanid, Wattasid, Meknes, Hafsid dynasty, Fatimids.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The invasion of the Banu Hilal Arab tribes in the 11th century sacked Kairouan, and the area under Zirid control was reduced to the coastal region, and the Arab conquests fragmented into petty Bedouin emirates.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Maghrawa or Meghrawa (Arabic: المغراويون) were a large Zenata Berber tribal confederation whose cradle and seat of power was the territory located on the Chlef in the north-western part of today's Algeria, bounded by the Ouarsenis to the south, the Mediterranean Sea to the north and Tlemcen to the west. They ruled these areas on behalf of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba at the end of the 10th century and during the first half of the 11th century. The Maghrawa confederation of zanata Berbers supposedly originated in the region of modern Algeria between Tlemcen and Tenes.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The confederation of Maghrawa were the majority people of the central Maghreb among the Zenata (Gaetuli). Both nomadic and sedentary, the Maghrawa lived under the command of Maghrawa chiefs or Zenata. Algiers has been the territory of the Maghrawa since ancient times. The name Maghrawa was transcribed into Greek by historians. The great kingdom of the Maghrawa was located between Algiers, Cherchell, Ténès, Chlef, Miliana and Médéa. The Maghrawa imposed their domination in the Aurès. Chlef and its surroundings were populated by the Maghrawa according to Ibn Khaldun. The Maghrawa settled and extended their domination throughout the Dahra and beyond Miliana to the Tafna wadi near Tlemcen, and were found as far away as Mali.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Maghrawa were one of the first Berber tribes to submit to Islam in the 7th century. They supported Uqba ibn Nafi in his campaign to the Atlantic in 683. They defected from Sunni Islam and became Kharijite Muslims from the 8th century, and allied first with the Idrisids, and, from the 10th century on, with the Umayyads of Córdoba in Al-Andalus. As a result, they were caught up in the Umayyad-Fatimid conflict in Morocco and Algeria. Although they won a victory over the allies of the Fatimids in 924, they soon allied with them. When they switched back to the side of Córdoba, the Zirids briefly took control over most of Morocco, and ruled on behalf of the Fatimids. In 976/977 the Maghrawa conquered Sijilmasa from the Banu Midrar, and in 980 were able to drive the Miknasa out of Sijilmasa as well.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Maghrawa reached their peak under Ziri ibn Atiyya (to 1001), who achieved supremacy in Fez under Umayyad suzerainty, and expanded their territory at the expense of the Banu Ifran in the northern Maghreb – another Zenata tribe whose alliances had shifted often between the Fatimids and the Umayyads of Córdoba. Ziri ibn Atiyya conquered as much as he could of what is now northern Morocco and was able to achieve supremacy in Fez by 987. In 989 he defeated his enemy, Abu al-Bahār, which resulted in Ziri ruling from Zab to Sous Al-Aqsa, in 991 achieving supremacy in the western Maghreb. As a result of his victory he was invited to Córdoba by Ibn Abi 'Amir al-Mansur (also Latinized as Almanzor), the regent of Caliph Hisham II and de facto ruler of the Caliphate of Córdoba. Ziri brought many gifts and Al-Mansur housed him in a lavish palace, but Ziri soon returned to North Africa. The Banu Ifran took advantage of his absence and, under Yaddū, managed to capture Fez. After a bloody struggle, Ziri reconquered Fez in 993 and displayed Yaddū's severed head on its walls.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A period of peace followed, in which Ziri founded the city of Oujda in 994 and made it his capital. However, Ziri was loyal to the Umayyad caliphs in Cordoba and increasingly resented the way that Ibn Abi 'Amir was holding Hisham II captive while progressively usurping his power. In 997 Ziri rejected Ibn Abi 'Amir's authority and declared himself a direct supporter of Caliph Hisham II. Ibn Abi 'Amir sent an invasion force to Morocco. After three unsuccessful months, Ibn Abi 'Amir's army was forced to retreat to the safety of Tangiers, so Ibn Abi 'Amir sent a powerful reinforcements under his son Abd al-Malik. The armies clashed near Tangiers, and in this battle, Ziri was stabbed by an African soldier who reported to Abd al-Malik that he had seriously wounded the Zenata leader. Abd al-Malik pressed home the advantage, and the wounded Ziri fled, hotly pursued by the Caliph's army. The inhabitants of Fez would not let him enter the city, but opened the gates to Abd al-Malik on 13 October 998. Ziri fled to the Sahara, where he rallied the Zenata tribes and overthrew the unpopular remnants of the Idrisid dynasty at Tiaret. He was able to expand his territory to include Tlemcen and other parts of western Algeria, this time under Fatimid protection. Ziri died in 1001 of the after-effects of the stab wounds. He was succeeded by his son Al-Mu'izz, who made peace with Al-Mansur, and regained possession of all his father's former territories.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "A revolt against the Andalusian Umayyads was put down by Ibn Abi 'Amir, although the Maghrawa were able to regain power in Fez. Under the succeeding rulers al-Muizz (1001–1026), Hamman (1026–1039) and Dunas (1039), they consolidated their rule in northern and central Morocco.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Internal power struggles after 1060 enabled the Almoravid dynasty to conquer the Maghrawa realm in 1070 and put an end to their rule. In the mid 11th century the Maghrawa still controlled most of Morocco, notably most of the Sous and Draa River area as well as Aghmat, Fez and Sijilmasa. Later, Zenata power declined. The Maghrawa and Banu Ifran began oppressing their subjects, shedding their blood, violating their women, breaking into homes to seize food and depriving traders of their goods. Anyone who tried to ward them off was killed.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Zirid dynasty (Arabic: الزيريون, romanized: az-zīriyyūn), Banu Ziri (Arabic: بنو زيري, romanized: banū zīrī), or the Zirid state (Arabic: الدولة الزيرية, romanized: ad-dawla az-zīriyya) was a Sanhaja Berber dynasty from modern-day Algeria which ruled the central Maghreb from 972 to 1014 and Ifriqiya (eastern Maghreb) from 972 to 1148.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Descendants of Ziri ibn Manad, a military leader of the Fatimid Caliphate and the eponymous founder of the dynasty, the Zirids were emirs who ruled in the name of the Fatimids. The Zirids gradually established their autonomy in Ifriqiya through military conquest until officially breaking with the Fatimids in the mid-11th century. The rule of the Zirid emirs opened the way to a period in North African history where political power was held by Berber dynasties such as the Almoravid dynasty, Almohad Caliphate, Zayyanid dynasty, Marinid Sultanate and Hafsid dynasty.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Under Buluggin ibn Ziri the Zirids extended their control westwards and briefly occupied Fez and much of present-day Morocco after 980, but encountered resistance from the local Zenata Berbers who gave their allegiance to the Caliphate of Cordoba. To the east, Zirid control was extended over Tripolitania after 978 and as far as Ajdabiya (in present-day Libya). One member of the dynastic family, Zawi ibn Ziri, revolted and fled to al-Andalus, eventually founding the Taifa of Granada in 1013, after the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba. Another branch of the Zirids, the Hammadids, broke away from the main branch after various internal disputes and took control of the territories of the central Maghreb after 1015. The Zirids proper were then designated as Badicides and occupied only Ifriqiya between 1048 and 1148. They were based in Kairouan until 1057, when they moved the capital to Mahdia on the coast. The Zirids of Ifriqiya also intervened in Sicily during the 11th century, as the Kalbids, the dynasty who governed the island on behalf of the Fatimids, fell into disorder.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Zirids of Granada surrendered to the Almoravids in 1090, but the Badicides and the Hammadids remained independent during this time. Sometime between 1041 and 1051 the Zirid ruler al-Mu'izz ibn Badis renounced the Fatimid Caliphs and recognized the Sunni Muslim Abbasid Caliphate. In retaliation, the Fatimids instigated the migration of the Banu Hilal tribe to the Maghreb, dealing a serious blow to Zirid power in Ifriqiya. In the 12th century, the Hilalian invasions combined with the attacks of the Normans of Sicily along the coast further weakened Zirid power. The last Zirid ruler, al-Hasan, surrendered Mahdia to the Normans in 1148, thus ending independent Zirid rule. The Almohad Caliphate conquered the central Maghreb and Ifriqiya by 1160, ending the Hammadid dynasty in turn and finally unifying the whole of the Maghreb.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Zirids were Sanhaja Berbers, from the sedentary Talkata tribe, originating from the area of modern Algeria. In the 10th century this tribe served as vassals of the Fatimid Caliphate, an Isma'ili Shi'a state that challenged the authority of the Sunni Abbasid caliphs. The progenitor of the Zirid dynasty, Ziri ibn Manad (r. 935–971) was installed as governor of the central Maghreb (roughly north-eastern Algeria today) on behalf of the Fatimids, guarding the western frontier of the Fatimid Caliphate. With Fatimid support Ziri founded his own capital and palace at 'Ashir, south-east of Algiers, in 936. He proved his worth as a key ally in 945, during the Kharijite rebellion of Abu Yazid, when he helped break Abu Yazid's siege of the Fatimid capital, Mahdia. After playing this valuable role, he expanded 'Ashir with a new palace circa 947. In 959 he aided Jawhar al-Siqili on a Fatimid military expedition which successfully conquered Fez and Sijilmasa in present-day Morocco. On their return home to the Fatimid capital they paraded the emir of Fez and the “Caliph” Ibn Wasul of Sijilmasa in cages in a humiliating manner. After this success, Ziri was also given Tahart to govern on behalf of the Fatimids. He was eventually killed in battle against the Zanata in 971.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "When the Fatimids moved their capital to Egypt in 972, Ziri's son Buluggin ibn Ziri (r. 971–984) was appointed viceroy of Ifriqiya. He soon led a new expedition west and by 980 he had conquered Fez and most of Morocco, which had previously been retaken by the Umayyads of Cordoba in 973. He also led a successful expedition to Barghawata territory, from which he brought back a large number of slaves to Ifriqiya. In 978 the Fatimids also granted Buluggin overlordship of Tripolitania (in present-day Libya), allowing him to appoint his own governor in Tripoli. In 984 Buluggin died in Sijilmasa from an illness and his successor decided to abandon Morocco in 985.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After Buluggin's death, rule of the Zirid state passed to his son, Al-Mansur ibn Buluggin (r. 984–996), and continued through his descendants. However, this alienated the other sons of Ziri ibn Manad who now found themselves excluded from power. In 999 many of these brothers launched a rebellion in 'Ashir against Badis ibn al-Mansur (r. 996–1016), Buluggin's grandson, marking the first serious break in the unity of the Zirids. The rebels were defeated in battle by Hammad ibn Buluggin, Badis' uncle, and most of the brothers were killed. The only remaining brother of stature, Zawi ibn Ziri, led the remaining rebels westwards and sought new opportunity in al-Andalus under the Umayyads Caliphs of Cordoba, the former enemies of the Fatimids and Zirids. He and his followers eventually founded an independent kingdom in al-Andalus, the Taifa of Granada, in 1013.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "After 1001 Tripolitania broke away under the leadership of Fulful ibn Sa'id ibn Khazrun, a Maghrawa leader who founded the Banu Khazrun dynasty, which endured until 1147. Fulful fought a protracted war against Badis ibn al-Mansur and sought outside help from the Fatimids and even from the Umayyads of Cordoba, but after his death in 1009 the Zirids were able to retake Tripoli for a time. The region nonetheless remained effectively under control of the Banu Khazrun, who fluctuated between practical autonomy and full independence, often playing the Fatimids and the Zirids against each other. The Zirids finally lost Tripoli to them in 1022.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Badis appointed Hammad ibn Buluggin as governor of 'Ashir and the western Zirid territories in 997. He gave Hammad a great deal of autonomy, allowing him to campaign against the Zanata and control any new territories he conquered. Hammad constructed his own capital, the Qal'at Bani Hammad, in 1008, and in 1015 he rebelled against Badis and declared himself independent altogether, while also recognizing the Abbasids instead of the Fatimids as caliphs. Badis besieged Hammad's capital and nearly subdued him, but died in 1016 shortly before this could be accomplished. His son and successor, al-Mu'izz ibn Badis (r. 1016–1062), defeated Hammad in 1017, which forced the negotiation of a peace agreement between them. Hammad resumed his recognition of the Fatimids as caliphs but remained independent, forging a new Hammadid state which controlled a large part of present-day Algeria thereafter.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Zirid period of Ifriqiya is considered a high point in its history, with agriculture, industry, trade and learning, both religious and secular, all flourishing, especially in their capital, Qayrawan (Kairouan). The early reign of al-Mu'izz ibn Badis (r. 1016–1062) was particularly prosperous and marked the height of their power in Ifriqiya. In the eleventh century, when the question of Berber origin became a concern, the dynasty of al-Mu'izz started, as part of the Zirids' propaganda, to emphasize its supposed links to the Himyarite kings as a title to nobility, a theme that was taken the by court historians of the period. Management of the area by later Zirid rulers was neglectful as the agricultural economy declined, prompting an increase in banditry among the rural population. The relationship between the Zirids their Fatimid overlords varied - in 1016 thousands of Shiites died in rebellions in Ifriqiya, and the Fatimids encouraged the defection of Tripolitania from the Zirids, but nevertheless the relationship remained close. In 1049 the Zirids broke away completely by adopting Sunni Islam and recognizing the Abbasids of Baghdad as rightful Caliphs, a move which was popular with the urban Arabs of Kairouan.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In Sicily the Kalbids continued to govern on behalf of the Fatimids but the island descended into political disarray during the 11th century, inciting the Zirids to intervene on the island. In 1025 (or 1021), al-Mu'izz ibn Badis sent a fleet of 400 ships to the island in response to the Byzantines reconquering Calabria (in southern Italy) from the Muslims, but the fleet was lost in a powerful storm off the coast of Pantelleria. In 1036, the Muslim population of the island request aid from al-Mu'izz to overthrow the Kalbid emir Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Akhal, whose rule they considered flawed and unjust. The request also contained a pledge to recognize al-Mu'izz as their ruler. Al-Mu'izz, eager to expand his influence after the fragmentation of Zirid North Africa, accepted and sent his son, 'Abdallah, to the island with a large army. Al-Akhal, who had been in negotiations with the Byzantines, requested help from them. A Byzantine army intervened and defeated the Zirid army on the island, but it then withdrew to Calabria, allowing 'Abdallah to finish off al-Akhal. Al-Akhal was besieged in Palermo and killed in 1038. 'Abdallah was subsequently forced to withdraw from the island, either due to the ever-divided Sicilians turning against him or due to another Byzantine invasion in 1038, led by George Maniakes. Another Kalbid amir, al-Hasan al-Samsam, was elected to govern Sicily, but Muslim rule there disintegrated into various petty factions leading up to the Norman conquest of the island in the second half of the 11th century.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Zirids renounced the Fatimids and recognized the Abbasid Caliphs in 1048-49, or sometime between 1041 and 1051. In retaliation, the Fatimids sent the Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym to the Maghreb. The Banu Sulaym settled first in Cyrenaica, but the Banu Hilal continued towards Ifriqiya. The Zirids attempted to stop their advance towards Ifriqiya, they sent 30,000 Sanhaja cavalry to meet the 3,000 Arab cavalry of Banu Hilal in the Battle of Haydaran of 14 April 1052. Nevertheless, the Zirids were decisively defeated and were forced to retreat, opening the road to Kairouan for the Hilalian Arab cavalry. The resulting anarchy devastated the previously flourishing agriculture, and the coastal towns assumed a new importance as conduits for maritime trade and bases for piracy against Christian shipping, as well as being the last holdout of the Zirids. The Banu Hilal invasions eventually forced al-Mu'izz ibn Badis to abandon Kairouan in 1057 and move his capital to Mahdia, while the Banu Hilal largely roamed and pillaged the interior of the former Zirid territories.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "As a result of the Zirid withdrawal, various local principalities emerged in different areas. In Tunis, the shaykhs of the city elected Abd al-Haqq ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Khurasan (r. 1059-1095) as local ruler. He founded the local Banu Khurasan dynasty that governed the city thereafter, alternately recognizing the Hammadids or the Zirids as overlords depending on the circumstances. In Qabis (Gabès), the Zirid governor, al-Mu'izz ibn Muhammad ibn Walmiya remained loyal until 1062 when, outraged by the expulsion of his two brothers from Mahdia by al-Mu'izz ibn Badis, he declared his independence and placed himself under the protection of Mu'nis ibn Yahya, a chief of Banu Hilal. Sfaqus (Sfax) was declared independent by the Zirid governor, Mansur al-Barghawati, who was murdered and succeeded by his cousin Hammu ibn Malil al-Barghawati.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Al-Mui'zz ibn Badis was succeeded by his son, Tamim ibn al-Mu'izz (r. 1062-1108), who spent much of his reign attempting to restore Zirid power in the region. In 1063 he repelled a siege of Mahdia by the independent ruler of Sfax while also capturing the important port of Sus (Sousse). Meanwhile, the Hammadid ruler al-Nasir ibn 'Alannas (r. 1062-1088) began to intervene in Ifriqiya around this time, having his sovereignty recognized in Sfax, Tunis, and Kairouan. Tamim organized a coalition with some of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym tribes and succeeded in inflicting a heavy defeat on al-Nasir at the Battle of Sabiba in 1065. The war between the Zirids and Hammadids continued until 1077, when a truce was negotiated, sealed by a marriage between Tamim and one of al-Nasir's daughters. In 1074 Tamim sent a naval expedition to Calabria where they ravaged the Italian coasts, plundered Nicotera and enslaved many of its inhabitants. The next year (1075) another Zirid raid resulted in the capture of Mazara in Sicily; however, the Zirid emir rethought his involvement in Sicily and decided to withdraw, abandoning what they had briefly held. In 1087, the Zirid capital, Mahdia, was sacked by the Pisans. According to Ettinghausen, Grabar, and Jenkins-Madina, the Pisa Griffin is believed to have been part of the spoils taken during the sack. In 1083 Mahdia was besieged by a chief of the Banu Hilal, Malik ibn 'Alawi. Unable to take the city, Malik instead turned to Kairouan and captured that city, but Tamim marched out with his entire army and defeated the Banu Hilal forces, at which point he also brought Kairouan back under Zirid control. He went on to capture Gabès in 1097 and Sfax in 1100. Gabès, however, soon declared itself independent again under the leadership of the Banu Jami', a family from the Riyahi branch of the Banu Hilal.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Tamim's son and successor, Yahya ibn Tamim (r. 1108-1116), formally recognized the Fatimid caliphs again and received an emissary from Cairo in 1111. He captured an important fortress near Carthage called Iqlibiya and his fleet launched raids against Sardinia and Genoa, bringing back many captives. He was assassinated in 1116 and succeeded by his son, 'Ali ibn Yahya (r. 1116-1121). 'Ali continued to recognize the Fatimids, receiving another embassy from Cairo in 1118. He imposed his authority on Tunis, but failed to recapture Gabès from its local ruler, Rafi' ibn Jami', whose counterattack he then had to repel from Mahdia. He was succeeded by his son al-Hasan in 1121, the last Zirid ruler.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "During the 1130s and 1140s the Normans of Sicily began to capture cities and islands along the coast of Ifriqiya. Jerba was captured in 1135 and Tripoli was captured in 1146. In 1148, the Normans captured Sfax, Gabès, and Mahdia. In Mahdia, the population was weakened by years of famine and the bulk of the Zirid army was away on another campaign when the Norman fleet, commanded by George of Antioch, arrived off the coast. Al-Hasan decided to abandon the city, leaving it to be occupied, which effectively ended the Zirid dynasty's rule. Al-Hasan fled to the citadel of al-Mu'allaqa near Carthage and stayed there for a several months. He planned to flee to the Fatimid court in Egypt but the Norman fleet blocked his way, so instead he headed west, making for the Almohad court of 'Abd al-Mu'min in Marrakesh. He obtained permission from Yahya ibn al-'Aziz, the Hammadid ruler, to cross his territory, but after entering Hammadid territory he was detained and placed under house arrest in Algiers. When 'Abd al-Mu'min captured Algiers in 1151, he freed al-Hasan, who accompanied him back to Marrakesh. Later, when 'Abd al-Mu'min conquered Mahdia in 1160, placing all of Ifriqiya under Almohad rule, al-Hasan was with him. 'Abd al-Mu'min appointed him governor of Mahdia, where he remained, residing in the suburb of Zawila, until 'Abd al-Mu'min's death in 1163. The new Almohad caliph, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, subsequently ordered him to come back to Marrakesh, but al-Hasan died along the way in Tamasna in 1167.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Hammadid dynasty (Arabic: الحمّاديون) was a branch of the Sanhaja Berber dynasty that ruled an area roughly corresponding to north-eastern modern Algeria between 1008 and 1152. The state reached its peak under Nasir ibn Alnas during which it was briefly the most important state in Northwest Africa.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The Hammadid dynasty's first capital was at Qalaat Beni Hammad. It was founded in 1007, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When the area was sacked by the Banu Hilal tribe, the Hammadids moved their capital to Béjaïa in 1090.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The Almohad Caliphate (IPA: /ˈælməhæd/; Arabic: خِلَافَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِينَ or دَوْلَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِينَ or ٱلدَّوْلَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِيَّةُ from",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Arabic: ٱلْمُوَحِّدُونَ, romanized: al-Muwaḥḥidūn, lit. 'those who profess the unity of God') was a North African Berber Muslim empire founded in the 12th century. At its height, it controlled much",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "of the Iberian Peninsula (Al Andalus) and North Africa (the Maghreb).",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Almohad docrtine was founded by Ibn Tumart among the Berber Masmuda tribes, but the Almohad caliphate and its ruling dynasty were founded after his death by Abd al-Mu'min al-Gumi, which was born in the Hammadid region of Tlemcen, Algeria. Around 1120, Ibn Tumart first established a Berber state in Tinmel in the Atlas Mountains. Under Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130–1163) they succeeded in overthrowing the ruling Almoravid dynasty governing Morocco in 1147, when he conquered Marrakesh and declared himself caliph. They then extended their power over all of the Maghreb by 1159. Al-Andalus soon followed, and all of Muslim Iberia was under Almohad rule by 1172.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The turning point of their presence in the Iberian Peninsula came in 1212, when Muhammad III, \"al-Nasir\" (1199–1214) was defeated at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena by an alliance of the Christian forces from Castile, Aragon and Navarre. Much of the remaining territories of al-Andalus were lost in the ensuing decades, with the cities of Córdoba and Seville falling to the Christians in 1236 and 1248 respectively.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Almohads continued to rule in Africa until the piecemeal loss of territory through the revolt of tribes and districts enabled the rise of their most effective enemies, the Marinids, from northern Morocco in 1215. The last representative of the line, Idris al-Wathiq, was reduced to the possession of Marrakesh, where he was murdered by a slave in 1269; the Marinids seized Marrakesh, ending the Almohad domination of the Western Maghreb.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Almohad movement originated with Ibn Tumart, a member of the Masmuda, a Berber tribal confederation of the Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. At the time, Morocco, western Algeria and Spain (al-Andalus), were under the rule of the Almoravids, a Sanhaja Berber dynasty. Early in his life, Ibn Tumart went to Spain to pursue his studies, and thereafter to Baghdad to deepen them. In Baghdad, Ibn Tumart attached himself to the theological school of al-Ash'ari, and came under the influence of the teacher al-Ghazali. He soon developed his own system, combining the doctrines of various masters. Ibn Tumart's main principle was a strict unitarianism (tawhid), which denied the independent existence of the attributes of God as being incompatible with His unity, and therefore a polytheistic idea. Ibn Tumart represented a revolt against what he perceived as anthropomorphism in Muslim orthodoxy. His followers would become known as the al-Muwaḥḥidūn (\"Almohads\"), meaning those who affirm the unity of God.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "After his return to the Maghreb c. 1117, Ibn Tumart spent some time in various Ifriqiyan cities, preaching and agitating, heading riotous attacks on wine-shops and on other manifestations of laxity. He laid the blame for the latitude on the ruling dynasty of the Almoravids, whom he accused of obscurantism and impiety. He also opposed their sponsorship of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, which drew upon consensus (ijma) and other sources beyond the Qur'an and Sunnah in their reasoning, an anathema to the stricter Zahirism favored by Ibn Tumart. His antics and fiery preaching led fed-up authorities to move him along from town to town. After being expelled from Bejaia, Ibn Tumart set up camp in Mellala, in the outskirts of the city, where he received his first disciples – notably, al-Bashir (who would become his chief strategist) and Abd al-Mu'min (a Zenata Berber, who would later become his successor).",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1120, Ibn Tumart and his small band of followers proceeded to Morocco, stopping first in Fez, where he briefly engaged the Maliki scholars of the city in debate. He even went so far as to assault the sister of the Almoravid emir ʿAli ibn Yusuf, in the streets of Fez, because she was going about unveiled, after the manner of Berber women. After being expelled from Fez, he went to Marrakesh, where he successfully tracked down the Almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf at a local mosque, and challenged the emir, and the leading scholars of the area, to a doctrinal debate. After the debate, the scholars concluded that Ibn Tumart's views were blasphemous and the man dangerous, and urged him to be put to death or imprisoned. But the emir decided merely to expel him from the city.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Ibn Tumart took refuge among his own people, the Hargha, in his home village of Igiliz (exact location uncertain), in the Sous valley. He retreated to a nearby cave, and lived out an ascetic lifestyle, coming out only to preach his program of puritan reform, attracting greater and greater crowds. At length, towards the end of Ramadan in late 1121, after a particularly moving sermon, reviewing his failure to persuade the Almoravids to reform by argument, Ibn Tumart 'revealed' himself as the true Mahdi, a divinely guided judge and lawgiver, and was recognized as such by his audience. This was effectively a declaration of war on the Almoravid state.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "On the advice of one of his followers, Omar Hintati, a prominent chieftain of the Hintata, Ibn Tumart abandoned his cave in 1122 and went up into the High Atlas, to organize the Almohad movement among the highland Masmuda tribes. Besides his own tribe, the Hargha, Ibn Tumart secured the adherence of the Ganfisa, the Gadmiwa, the Hintata, the Haskura, and the Hazraja to the Almohad cause. Around 1124, Ibn Tumart erected the ribat of Tinmel, in the valley of the Nfis in the High Atlas, an impregnable fortified complex, which would serve both as the spiritual center and military headquarters of the Almohad movement.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "For the first eight years, the Almohad rebellion was limited to a guerilla war along the peaks and ravines of the High Atlas. Their principal damage was in rendering insecure (or altogether impassable) the roads and mountain passes south of Marrakesh – threatening the route to all-important Sijilmassa, the gateway of the trans-Saharan trade. Unable to send enough manpower through the narrow passes to dislodge the Almohad rebels from their easily defended mountain strong points, the Almoravid authorities reconciled themselves to setting up strongholds to confine them there (most famously the fortress of Tasghîmût that protected the approach to Aghmat, which was conquered by the Almohads in 1132), while exploring alternative routes through more easterly passes.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Ibn Tumart organized the Almohads as a commune, with a minutely detailed structure. At the core was the Ahl ad-dār (\"House of the Mahdi:), composed of Ibn Tumart's family. This was supplemented by two councils: an inner Council of Ten, the Mahdi's privy council, composed of his earliest and closest companions; and the consultative Council of Fifty, composed of the leading sheikhs of the Masmuda tribes. The early preachers and missionaries (ṭalaba and huffāẓ) also had their representatives. Militarily, there was a strict hierarchy of units. The Hargha tribe coming first (although not strictly ethnic; it included many \"honorary\" or \"adopted\" tribesmen from other ethnicities, e.g. Abd al-Mu'min himself). This was followed by the men of Tinmel, then the other Masmuda tribes in order, and rounded off by the black fighters, the ʻabīd. Each unit had a strict internal hierarchy, headed by a mohtasib, and divided into two factions: one for the early adherents, another for the late adherents, each headed by a mizwar (or amzwaru); then came the sakkakin (treasurers), effectively the money-minters, tax-collectors, and bursars, then came the regular army (jund), then the religious corps – the muezzins, the hafidh and the hizb – followed by the archers, the conscripts, and the slaves. Ibn Tumart's closest companion and chief strategist, al-Bashir, took upon himself the role of \"political commissar\", enforcing doctrinal discipline among the Masmuda tribesmen, often with a heavy hand.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In early 1130, the Almohads finally descended from the mountains for their first sizeable attack in the lowlands. It was a disaster. The Almohads swept aside an Almoravid column that had come out to meet them before Aghmat, and then chased their remnant all the way to Marrakesh. They laid siege to Marrakesh for forty days until, in April (or May) 1130, the Almoravids sallied from the city and crushed the Almohads in the bloody Battle of al-Buhayra (named after a large garden east of the city). The Almohads were thoroughly routed, with huge losses. Half their leadership was killed in action, and the survivors only just managed to scramble back to the mountains.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Ibn Tumart died shortly after, in August 1130. That the Almohad movement did not immediately collapse after such a devastating defeat and the death of their charismatic Mahdi, is likely due to the skills of his successor, Abd al-Mu'min. Ibn Tumart's death was kept a secret for three years, a period which Almohad chroniclers described as a ghayba or \"occultation\". This period likely gave Abd al-Mu'min time to secure his position as successor to the political leadership of the movement. Although a Zenata Berber from Tagra (Algeria), and thus an alien among the Masmuda of southern Morocco, Abd al-Mu'min nonetheless saw off his principal rivals and hammered wavering tribes back to the fold. In an ostentatious gesture of defiance, in 1132, if only to remind the emir that the Almohads were not finished, Abd al-Mu'min led an audacious night operation that seized Tasghîmût fortress and dismantled it thoroughly, carting off its great gates back to Tinmel. Three years after Ibn Tumart's death he was officially proclaimed \"Caliph\".",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In order to neutralise the Masmudas, to whom he was a stranger, Abd al-Mumin relied on his tribe of origin, the Kumiyas (a Berber tribe from Orania), which he integrated massively into the army and within the Almohad power. He thus appointed his son as his successor and his other children as governors of the provinces of the Caliphate. The Kumiyas would later form the bodyguard of Abd al Mumin and his successor. In addition, he also relied on Arabs, representatives of the great Hilalian families, whom he deported to Morocco to weaken the influence of the Masmuda sheikhs. These moves have the effect of advancing the Arabisation of the future Morocco.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Abd al-Mu'min then came forward as the lieutenant of the Mahdi Ibn Tumart. Between 1130 and his death in 1163, Abd al-Mu'min not only rooted out the Almoravids, but extended his power over all northern Africa as far as Egypt, becoming amir of Marrakesh in 1147.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Al-Andalus followed the fate of Africa. Between 1146 and 1173, the Almohads gradually wrested control from the Almoravids over the Moorish principalities in Iberia. The Almohads transferred the capital of Muslim Iberia from Córdoba to Seville. They founded a great mosque there; its tower, the Giralda, was erected in 1184 to mark the accession of Ya'qub I. The Almohads also built a palace there called Al-Muwarak on the site of the modern day Alcázar of Seville.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Almohad princes had a longer and more distinguished career than the Almoravids. The successors of Abd al-Mumin, Abu Yaqub Yusuf (Yusuf I, ruled 1163–1184) and Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur (Yaʻqūb I, ruled 1184–1199), were both able men. Initially their government drove many Jewish and Christian subjects to take refuge in the growing Christian states of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. Ultimately they became less fanatical than the Almoravids, and Ya'qub al-Mansur was a highly accomplished man who wrote a good Arabic style and protected the philosopher Averroes. In 1190–1191, he campaigned in southern Portugal and won back territory lost in 1189. His title of \"al-Manṣūr\" (\"the Victorious\") was earned by his victory over Alfonso VIII of Castile in the Battle of Alarcos (1195).",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "From the time of Yusuf II, however, the Almohads governed their co-religionists in Iberia and central North Africa through lieutenants, their dominions outside Morocco being treated as provinces. When Almohad emirs crossed the Straits it was to lead a jihad against the Christians and then return to Morocco.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1212, the Almohad Caliph Muhammad 'al-Nasir' (1199–1214), the successor of al-Mansur, after an initially successful advance north, was defeated by an alliance of the four Christian kings of Castile, Aragón, Navarre, and Portugal, at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena. The battle broke the Almohad advance, but the Christian powers remained too disorganized to profit from it immediately.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Before his death in 1213, al-Nasir appointed his young ten-year-old son as the next caliph Yusuf II \"al-Mustansir\". The Almohads passed through a period of effective regency for the young caliph, with power exercised by an oligarchy of elder family members, palace bureaucrats and leading nobles. The Almohad ministers were careful to negotiate a series of truces with the Christian kingdoms, which remained more-or-less in place for next fifteen years (the loss of Alcácer do Sal to the Kingdom of Portugal in 1217 was an exception).",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In early 1224, the youthful caliph died in an accident, without any heirs. The palace bureaucrats in Marrakesh, led by the wazir Uthman ibn Jam'i, quickly engineered the election of his elderly grand-uncle, Abd al-Wahid I 'al-Makhlu', as the new Almohad caliph. But the rapid appointment upset other branches of the family, notably the brothers of the late al-Nasir, who governed in al-Andalus. The challenge was immediately raised by one of them, then governor in Murcia, who declared himself Caliph Abdallah al-Adil. With the help of his brothers, he quickly seized control of al-Andalus. His chief advisor, the shadowy Abu Zayd ibn Yujjan, tapped into his contacts in Marrakesh, and secured the deposition and assassination of Abd al-Wahid I, and the expulsion of the al-Jami'i clan.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "This coup has been characterized as the pebble that finally broke al-Andalus. It was the first internal coup among the Almohads. The Almohad clan, despite occasional disagreements, had always remained tightly knit and loyally behind dynastic precedence. Caliph al-Adil's murderous breach of dynastic and constitutional propriety marred his acceptability to other Almohad sheikhs. One of the recusants was his cousin, Abd Allah al-Bayyasi (\"the Baezan\"), the Almohad governor of Jaén, who took a handful of followers and decamped for the hills around Baeza. He set up a rebel camp and forged an alliance with the hitherto quiet Ferdinand III of Castile. Sensing his greater priority was Marrakesh, where recusant Almohad sheikhs had rallied behind Yahya, another son of al-Nasir, al-Adil paid little attention to this little band of misfits.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Kingdom of Tlemcen or Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen (Arabic: الزيانيون) was a Berber kingdom in what is now the northwest of Algeria. Its territory stretched from Tlemcen to the Chelif bend and Algiers, and at its zenith reached Sijilmasa and the Moulouya River in the west, Tuat to the south and the Soummam in the east.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Tlemcen Kingdom was established after the demise of the Almohad Caliphate in 1236, and later fell under Ottoman rule in 1554. It was ruled by sultans of the Zayyanid dynasty. The capital of the Tlemcen kingdom centred on Tlemcen, which lay on the primary east–west route between Morocco and Ifriqiya. The kingdom was situated between the realm of the Marinids the west, centred on Fez, and the Hafsids to the east, centred on Tunis.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Tlemcen was a hub for the north–south trade route from Oran on the Mediterranean coast to the Western Sudan. As a prosperous trading centre, it attracted its more powerful neighbours. At different times the kingdom was invaded and occupied by the Marinids from the west, by the Hafsids from the east, and by Aragonese from the north. At other times, they were able to take advantage of turmoil among their neighbours: during the reign of Abu Tashfin I (r. 1318–1337) the Zayyanids occupied Tunis and in 1423, under the reign of Abu Malek, they briefly captured Fez. In the south the Zayyanid realm included Tuat, Tamentit and the Draa region which was governed by Abdallah Ibn Moslem ez Zerdali, a sheikh of the Zayyanids.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Bānu ʿabd āl-Wād, also called the Bānu Ziyān or Zayyanids after Yaghmurasen Ibn Zyan, the founder of the dynasty, were leaders of a Berber group who had long been settled in the Central Maghreb. Although contemporary chroniclers asserted that they had a noble Arab origin, he reportedly spoke in Zenati dialect and denied the lineage that genealogists had attributed to him. The town of Tlemcen, called Pomaria by the Romans, is about 806m above sea level in fertile, well-watered country.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Tlemcen was an important centre under the Almoravid dynasty and its successors the Almohad Caliphate, who began a new wall around the town in 1161.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Yaghmurasen ibn Zayyan (1235–83) of the Bānu ʿabd āl-Wād was governor of Tlemcen under the Almohads. He inherited leadership of the family from his brother in 1235. When the Almohad empire began to fall apart, in 1235, Yaghmurasen declared his independence. The city of Tlemcen became the capital of one of three successor states, ruled for centuries by successive Ziyyanid sultans. Its flag was a white crescent pointing upwards on a blue field. The kingdom covered the less fertile regions of the Tell Atlas. Its people included a minority of settled farmers and villagers, and a majority of nomadic herders.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Yaghmurasen was able to maintain control over the rival Berber groups, and when faced with the outside threat of the Marinid dynasty, he formed an alliance with the Emir of Granada and the King of Castile, Alfonso X. According to Ibn Khaldun, \"he was the bravest, most dreaded and honourable man of the 'Abd-la-Wadid family. No one looked after the interest of his people, maintained the influence of the kingdom and managed the state administration better than he did.\" In 1248 he defeated the Almohad Caliph in the Battle of Oujda during which the Almohad Caliph was killed. In 1264 he managed to conquer Sijilmasa, therefore bringing Sijilmasa and Tlemcen, the two most important outlets for trans-Saharan trade under one authority. Sijilmasa remained under his control for 11 years. Before his death he instructed his son and heir Uthman to remain on the defensive with the Marinid kingdom, but to expand into Hafsid territory if possible.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "For most of its history the kingdom was on the defensive, threatened by stronger states to the east and the west. The nomadic Arabs to the south also took advantage of the frequent periods of weakness to raid the centre and take control of pastures in the south.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The city of Tlemcen was several times attacked or besieged by the Marinids, and large parts of the kingdom were occupied by them for several decades in the fourteenth century.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Marinid Abu Yaqub Yusuf an-Nasr besieged Tlemcen from 1299 to 1307. During the siege he built a new town, al-Mansura, diverting most of the trade to this town. The new city was fortified and had a mosque, baths and palaces. The siege was raised when Abu Yakub was murdered in his sleep by one of his eunuchs.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "When the Marinids left in 1307, the Zayyanids promptly destroyed al-Mansura. The Zayyanid king Abu Zayyan I died in 1308 and was succeeded by Abu Hammu I (r. 1308–1318). Abu Hammu was later killed in a conspiracy instigated by his son and heir Abu Tashufin I (r. 1318–1337). The reigns of Abu Hammu I and Abu Tashufin I marked the second apogee of the Zayyanids, a period during which they consolidated their hegemony in the central Maghreb. Tlemcen recovered its trade and its population grew, reaching about 100,000 by around the 1330s. Abu Tashufin initiated hostilities against Ifriqiya while the Marinids were distracted by their internal struggles. He besieged Béjaïa and sent an army into Tunisia that defeated the Hafsid king Abu Yahya Abu Bakr II, who fled to Constantine while the Zayyanids occupied Tunis in 1325.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan (r. 1331–1348) cemented an alliance with Hafsids by marrying a Hafsid princess. Upon being attacked by the Zayyanids again, the Hafsids appealed to Abu al-Hasan for help, providing him with an excuse to invade his neighbour. The Marinid sultan initiated a siege of Tlemcen in 1335 and the city fell in 1337. Abu Tashufin died during the fighting. Abu al-Hasan received delegates from Egypt, Granada, Tunis and Mali congratulating him on his victory, by which he had gained complete control of the trans-Saharan trade. In 1346 the Hafsid Sultan, Abu Bakr, died and a dispute over the succession ensued. In 1347 Abu al-Hasan annexed Ifriqiya, briefly reuniting the Maghrib territories as they had been under the Almohads.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "However, Abu al-Hasan went too far in attempting to impose more authority over the Arab tribes, who revolted and in April 1348 defeated his army near Kairouan. His son, Abu Inan Faris, who had been serving as governor of Tlemcen, returned to Fez and declared that he was sultan. Tlemcen and the central Maghreb revolted. The Zayyanid Abu Thabit I (1348-1352) was proclaimed king of Tlemcen. Abu al-Hasan had to return from Ifriqiya by sea. After failing to retake Tlemcen and being defeated by his son, Abu al-Hasan died in May 1351. In 1352 Abu Inan Faris recaptured Tlemcen. He also reconquered the central Maghreb. He took Béjaïa in 1353 and Tunis in 1357, becoming master of Ifriqiya. In 1358 he was forced to return to Fez due to Arab opposition, where he fell sick and was killed.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The Zayyanid king Abu Hammu Musa II (r. 1359–1389) next took the throne of Tlemcen. He pursued an expansionist policy, pushing towards Fez in the west and into the Chelif valley and Béjaïa in the east. He had a long reign punctuated by fighting against the Marinids or various rebel groups. The Marinids reoccupied Tlemcen in 1360 and in 1370. In both cases, the Marinids found they were unable to hold the region against local resistance. Abu Hammu attacked the Hafsids in Béjaïa again in 1366, but this resulted in Hafsid intervention in the kingdom's affairs. The Hafsid sultan released Abu Hammu's cousin, Abu Zayyan, and helped him in laying claim to the Zayyanid throne. This provoked an internecine war between the two Zayyanids until 1378, when Abu Hammu finally captured Abu Zayyan in Algiers.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The historian Ibn Khaldun lived in Tlemcen for a period during the generally prosperous reign of Abu Hammu Musa II, and helped him in negotiations with the nomadic Arabs. He said of this period, \"Here [in Tlemcen] science and arts developed with success; here were born scholars and outstanding men, whose glory penetrated into other countries.\" Abu Hammu was deposed by his son, Abu Tashfin II (1389–94), and the state went into decline.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In the late 14th century and the 15th century, the state was increasingly weak and became intermittently a vassal of Hafsid Ifriqiya, Marinid Morocco or the Crown of Aragon. In 1386 Abu Hammu moved his capital to Algiers, which he judged less vulnerable, but a year later his son, Abu Tashufin, overthrew him and took him prisoner. Abu Hammu was sent on a ship towards Alexandria but he escaped along the way when the ship stopped in Tunis. In 1388 he recaptured Tlemcen, forcing his son to flee. Abu Tashufin sought refuge in Fez and enlisted the aid of the Marinids, who sent an army to occupy Tlemcen and reinstall him on the throne. As a result, Abu Tashufin and his successors recognized the suzerainty of the Marinids and paid them an annual tribute.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "During the reign of the Marinid sultan Abu Sa'id, the Zayyanids rebelled on several occasions and Abu Sa'id had to reassert his authority. After Abu Sa'id's death in 1420 the Marinids were plunged into political turmoil. The Zayyanid emir, Abu Malek, used this opportunity to throw off Marinid authority and captured Fez in 1423. Abu Malek installed Muhammad, a Marinid prince, as a Zayyanid vassal in Fez. The Wattasids, a family related to the Marinids, continued to govern from Salé, where they proclaimed Abd al-Haqq II, an infant, as the successor to the Marinid throne, with Abu Zakariyya al-Wattasi as regent. The Hafsid sultan, Abd al-Aziz II, reacted to Abu Malek's rising influence by sending military expeditions westward, installing his own Zayyanid client king (Abu Abdallah II) in Tlemcen and pursuing Abu Malek to Fez. Abu Malek's Marinid puppet, Muhammad, was deposed and the Wattasids returned with Abd al-Haqq II to Fez, acknowledging Hafsid suzerainty. The Zayyanids remained vassals of the Hafsids until the end of the 15th century, when the Spanish expansion along the coast weakened the rule of both dynasties.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "By the end of the 15th century the Kingdom of Aragon had gained effective political control, intervening in the dynastic disputes of the amirs of Tlemcen, whose authority had shrunk to the town and its immediate neighbourship. When the Spanish took the city of Oran from the kingdom in 1509, continuous pressure from the Berbers prompted the Spanish to attempt a counterattack against the city of Tlemcen (1543), which was deemed by the Papacy to be a crusade. The Spanish under Martin of Angulo had also suffered a prior defeat in 1535 when they attempted to install a client ruler in Tlemcen. The Spanish failed to take the city in the first attack, but the strategic vulnerability of Tlemcen caused the kingdom's weight to shift toward the safer and more heavily fortified corsair base at Algiers.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Tlemcen was captured in 1551 by the Ottoman Empire under Hassan Pasha. The last Zayyanid sultan's son escaped to Oran, then a Spanish possession. He was baptized and lived a quiet life as Don Carlos at the court of Philip II of Spain.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Under the Ottoman Empire Tlemcen quickly lost its former importance, becoming a sleepy provincial town. The failure of the kingdom to become a powerful state can be explained by the lack of geographical or cultural unity, the constant internal disputes and the reliance on irregular Arab-Berber nomads for the military.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The final triumph of the 700-year Christian conquest of Spain was marked by the fall of Granada in 1492. Christian Spain imposed its influence on the Maghrib coast by constructing fortified outposts and collecting tribute. But Spain never sought to extend its North African conquests much beyond a few modest enclaves. Privateering was an age-old practice in the Mediterranean, and North African rulers engaged in it increasingly in the late 16th and early 17th centuries because it was so lucrative. Until the 17th century the Barbary pirates used galleys, but a Dutch renegade of the name of Zymen Danseker taught them the advantage of using sailing ships.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Algeria became the privateering city-state par excellence, and two privateer brothers were instrumental in extending Ottoman influence in Algeria. At about the time Spain was establishing its presidios in the Maghrib, the Muslim privateer brothers Aruj and Khair ad Din—the latter known to Europeans as Barbarossa, or Red Beard—were operating successfully off Tunisia. In 1516 Aruj moved his base of operations to Algiers but was killed in 1518. Khair ad Din succeeded him as military commander of Algiers, and the Ottoman sultan gave him the title of beglerbey (provincial governor).",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Spanish expansionist policy in North Africa began with the Catholic Monarchs and the regent Cisneros, once the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula was finished. That way, several towns and outposts in the Algerian coast were conquered and occupied: Mers El Kébir (1505), Oran (1509), Algiers (1510) and Bugia (1510). The Spanish conquest of Oran was won with much bloodshed: 4,000 Algerians were massacred, and up to 8,000 were taken prisoner. For about 200 years, Oran's inhabitants were virtually held captive in their fortress walls, ravaged by famine and plague; Spanish soldiers, too, were irregularly fed and paid.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The Spaniards left Algiers in 1529, Bujia in 1554, Mers El Kébir and Oran in 1708. The Spanish returned in 1732 when the armada of the Duke of Montemar was victorious in the Battle of Aïn-el-Turk and retook Oran and Mers El Kébir; the Spanish massacred many Muslim soldiers. In 1751, a Spanish adventurer, named John Gascon, obtained permission, and vessels and fireworks, to go against Algiers, and set fire, at night, to the Algerian fleet. The plan, however, miscarried. In 1775, Charles III of Spain sent a large force to attack Algiers, under the command of Alejandro O'Reilly (who had led Spanish forces in crushing French rebellion in Louisiana), resulting in a disastrous defeat. The Algerians suffered 5,000 casualties. The Spanish navy bombarded Algiers in 1784; over 20,000 cannonballs were fired, much of the city and its fortifications were destroyed and most of the Algerian fleet was sunk.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Oran and Mers El Kébir were held until 1792, when they were sold by the king Charles IV to the Bey of Algiers.",
"title": "Medieval Muslim Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The Regency of Algiers (Arabic: دولة الجزائر, romanized: Dawlat al-Jaza'ir) was a state in North Africa lasting from 1516 to 1830, until it was conquered by the French. Situated between the regency of Tunis in the east, the Sultanate of Morocco (from 1553) in the west and Tuat as well as the country south of In Salah in the south (and the Spanish and Portuguese possessions of North Africa), the Regency originally extended its borders from La Calle in the east to Trara in the west and from Algiers to Biskra, and afterwards spread to the present eastern and western borders of Algeria.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "It had various degrees of autonomy throughout its existence, in some cases reaching complete independence, recognized even by the Ottoman sultan. The country was initially governed by governors appointed by the Ottoman sultan (1518–1659), rulers appointed by the Odjak of Algiers (1659–1710), and then Deys elected by the Divan of Algiers from (1710-1830).",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "From 1496, the Spanish conquered numerous possessions on the North African coast: Melilla (1496), Mers El Kébir (1505), Oran (1509), Bougie (1510), Tripoli (1510), Algiers, Shershell, Dellys, and Tenes. The Spaniards later led unsuccessful expeditions to take Algiers in the Algiers expedition in 1516, 1519 and another failed expedition in 1541.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Around the same time, the Ottoman privateer brothers Oruç and Hayreddin—both known to Europeans as Barbarossa, or \"Red Beard\"—were operating successfully off Tunisia under the Hafsids. In 1516, Oruç moved his base of operations to Algiers. He asked for the protection of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, but was killed in 1518 during his invasion of the Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen. Hayreddin succeeded him as military commander of Algiers.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "In 1551 Hasan Pasha, the son of Hayreddin defeated the Spanish-Moroccan armies during a campaign to recapture Tlemcen, thus cementing Ottoman control in western and central Algeria.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "After that, the conquest of Algeria sped up. In 1552 Salah Rais, with the help of some Kabyle kingdoms, conquered Touggourt, and established a foothold in the Sahara.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "In the 1560s eastern Algeria was centralized, and the power struggle which had been present ever since the Emirate of Béjaïa collapsed came to an end.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "During the 16th, 17th, and early 18th century, the Kabyle Kingdoms of Kuku and Ait Abbas managed to maintain their independence repelling Ottoman attacks several times, notably in the First Battle of Kalaa of the Beni Abbes. This was mainly thanks to their ideal position deep inside the Kabylia Mountains and their great organisation, and the fact that unlike in the West and East where collapsing kingdoms such as Tlemcen or Béjaïa were present, Kabylia had two new and energetic emirates.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Hayreddin Barbarossa established the military basis of the regency. The Ottomans provided a supporting garrison of 2,000 Turkish troops with artillery. He left Hasan Agha in command as his deputy when he had to leave for Constantinople in 1533. The son of Barbarossa, Hasan Pashan was in 1544 when his father retired, the first governor of the Regency to be directly appointed by the Ottoman Empire. He took the title of beylerbey. Algiers became a base in the war against Spain, and also in the Ottoman conflicts with Morocco.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Beylerbeys continued to be nominated for unlimited tenures until 1587. After Spain had sent an embassy to Constantinople in 1578 to negotiate a truce, leading to a formal peace in August 1580, the Regency of Algiers was a formal Ottoman territory, rather than just a military base in the war against Spain. At this time, the Ottoman Empire set up a regular Ottoman administration in Algiers and its dependencies, headed by Pashas, with 3-year terms to help considate Ottoman power in the Maghreb.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Despite the end of formal hostilities with Spain in 1580, attacks on Christian and especially Catholic shipping, with slavery for the captured, became prevalent in Algiers and were actually the main industry and source of revenues of the Regency.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "In the early 17th century, Algiers also became, along with other North African ports such as Tunis, one of the bases for Anglo-Turkish piracy. There were as many as 8,000 renegades in the city in 1634. (Renegades were former Christians, sometimes fleeing the law, who voluntarily moved to Muslim territory and converted to Islam.) Hayreddin Barbarossa is credited with tearing down the Peñón of Algiers and using the stone to build the inner harbor.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "A contemporary letter states:",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "\"The infinity of goods, merchandise jewels and treasure taken by our English pirates daily from Christians and carried to Algire and Tunis to the great enriching of Mores and Turks and impoverishing of Christians\"",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Privateers and slavery of Christians originating from Algiers were a major problem throughout the centuries, leading to regular punitive expeditions by European powers. Spain (1567, 1775, 1783), Denmark (1770), France (1661, 1665, 1682, 1683, 1688), England (1622, 1655, 1672), all led naval bombardments against Algiers. Abraham Duquesne fought the Barbary pirates in 1681 and bombarded Algiers between 1682 and 1683, to help Christian captives.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In 1659 the Janissaries of the Odjak of Algiers took over the country, and removed the local Pasha with the blessing of the Ottoman Sultan. From there on a system of dual leaders was in place. There was first and foremost the Agha, elected by the Odjak, and the Pasha appointed by the Ottoman Sublime Porte, whom was a major cause of unrest. Of course, this duality was not stable. All of the Aghas were assassinated, without an exception. Even the first Agha was killed after only 1 year of rule. Thanks to this the Pashas from Constantinople were able to increase the power, and reaffirm Turkish control over the region. In 1671, the Rais, the pirate captains, elected a new leader, Mohamed Trik. The Janissaries also supported him, and started calling him the Dey, which means Uncle in Turkish.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "In the early Dey period the country worked similarly to before, with the Pasha still holding considerable powers, but instead of the Janissaries electing their own leaders freely, other factions such as the Taifa of Rais also wanted to elect the deys. Mohammed Trik, taking over during a time instability was faced with heavy issues. Not only were the Janissaries on a rampage, removing any leaders for even the smallest mistakes (even if those leaders were elected by them), but the native populace was also restless. The conflicts with European powers didn't help this either. In 1677, following an explosion in Algiers and several attempts at his life, Mohammed escaped to Tripoli leaving Algiers to Baba Hassan. Just 4 years into his rule he was already at war with one of the most powerful countries in Europe, the Kingdom of France. In 1682 France bombarded Algiers for the first time. The Bombardment was inconclusive, and the leader of the fleet Abraham Duquesne failed to secure the submission of Algiers. The next year, Algiers was bombarded again, this time liberating a few slaves. Before a peace treaty could be signed though, Baba Hassan was deposed and killed by a Rais called Mezzo Morto Hüseyin. Continuing the war against France he was defeated in a naval battle in 1685, near Cherchell, and at last a French Bombardment in 1688 brought an end to his reign, and the war. His successor, Hadj Chabane was elected by the Raïs. He defeated Morocco in the Battle of Moulouya and defeated Tunis as well. He went back to Algiers, but he was assassinated in 1695 by the Janissaries whom once again took over the country. From there on Algiers was in turmoil once again. Leaders were assassinated, despite not even ruling for a year, and the Pasha was still a cause of unrest. The only notable event during this time of unrest was the recapture of Oran and Mers-el-Kébir from the Spanish.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Baba Ali Chaouche, also written as Chaouch, took over the country, ending the rule of the Janissaries. The Pasha attempted to resist him, but instead he was sent home, and told to never come back, and if he did he will be executed. He also sent a letter to the Ottoman sultan declaring that Algiers will from then on act as an independent state, and will not be an Ottoman vassal, but an ally at best. The Sublime Porte, enraged, tried to send another Pasha to Algiers, whom was then sent back to Constantinople by the Algerians. This marked the de facto independence of Algiers from the Ottoman Empire.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "In the mid-1700s Dano-Norwegian trade in the Mediterranean expanded. In order to protect the lucrative business against piracy, Denmark–Norway had secured a peace deal with the states of Barbary Coast. It involved paying an annual tribute to the individual rulers and additionally to the States.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "In 1766, Algiers had a new ruler, dey Baba Mohammed ben-Osman. He demanded that the annual payment made by Denmark-Norway should be increased, and he should receive new gifts. Denmark–Norway refused the demands. Shortly after, Algerian pirates hijacked three Dano-Norwegian ships and allowed the crew to be sold as slaves.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "They threatened to bombard the Algerian capital if the Algerians did not agree to a new peace deal on Danish terms. Algiers was not intimidated by the fleet, the fleet was of 2 frigates, 2 bomb galiot and 4 ship of the line.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "In the west, the Algerian-Cherifian conflicts shaped the western border of Algeria.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "There were numerous battles between the Regency of Algiers and the Sharifian Empires for example: the campaign of Tlemcen in 1551, the campaign of Tlemcen in 1557, the Battle of Moulouya and the Battle of Chelif. The independent Kabyle Kingdoms also had some involvement, the Kingdom of Beni Abbes participated in the campaign of Tlemcen in 1551 and the Kingdom of Kuku provided Zwawa troops for the capture of Fez in 1576 in which Abd al-Malik was installed as an Ottoman vassal ruler over the Saadi Dynasty. The Kingdom of Kuku also participated in the capture of Fez in 1554 in which Salih Rais defeated the Moroccan army and conquered Morocco up until Fez, adding these territories to the Ottoman crown and placing Ali Abu Hassun as the ruler and vassal to the Ottoman sultan. In 1792 the Regency of Algiers managed to take possession of the Moroccan Rif and Oujda, which they then abandoned in 1795 for unknown reasons.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "During the early 19th century, Algiers again resorted to widespread piracy against shipping from Europe and the young United States of America, mainly due to internal fiscal difficulties, and the damage caused by the Napoleonic Wars. This in turn led to the First Barbary War and Second Barbary War, which culminated in August 1816 when Lord Exmouth executed a naval bombardment of Algiers, the biggest, and most successful one. The Barbary Wars resulted in a major victory for the American, British, and Dutch Navy.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "In between 1516 and 1567, the rulers of the Regency were chosen by the Ottoman sultan. During the first few decades, Algiers was completely aligned with the Ottoman Empire, although it later gained a certain level of autonomy as it was the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire, and administering it directly would have been problematic.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "During this period a form of dual leadership was in place, with the Aghas sharing power and influence with a Pasha appointed by the Ottoman sultan from Constantinople. After 1567, the Deys became the main leaders of the country, although the Pashas still retained some power.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "After a coup by Baba Ali Chaouch, the political situation of Algiers became complicated.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Some sources describe it as completely independent from the Ottomans, albeit the state was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Cur Abdy, dey of Algiers shouted at an Ottoman envoy for claiming that the Ottoman Padishah was the king of Algiers (\"King of Algiers? King of Algiers? If he is the King of Algiers then who am I?\").",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Despite the Ottomans having no influence in Algiers, and the Algerians often ignoring orders from the Ottoman sultan, such as in 1784. In some cases Algiers also participated in the Ottoman Empire's wars, such as the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792), albeit this was not common, and in 1798 for example Algiers sold wheat to the French Empire campaigning in Egypt against the Ottomans through two Jewish traders.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "In some cases, Algiers was declared to be a country rebelling against the holy law of Islam by the Ottoman Caliph. This usually meant a declaration of war by the Ottomans against the Deylik of Algiers. This could happen due to many reasons. For example, under the rule of Haji Ali Dey, Algerian pirates regularly attacked Ottoman shipments, and Algiers waged war against the Beylik of Tunis, despite several protests by the Ottoman Porte, which resulted in a declaration of war.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "It can be thus said that the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Algiers mainly depended on what the Dey at the time wanted. While in some cases, if the relationship between the two was favorable, Algiers did participate in Ottoman wars, Algiers otherwise remained completely autonomous from the rest of the Empire similar to the other Barbary States.",
"title": "Regency of Algiers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "North African boundaries have shifted during various stages of the conquests. The borders of modern Algeria were expanded by the French, whose colonization began in 1830 (French invasion began on July 5). To benefit French colonists (many of whom were not in fact of French origin but Italian, Maltese, and Spanish) and nearly the entirety of whom lived in urban areas, northern Algeria was eventually organized into overseas departments of France, with representatives in the French National Assembly. France controlled the entire country, but the traditional Muslim population in the rural areas remained separated from the modern economic infrastructure of the European community.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "As a result of what the French considered an insult to the French consul in Algiers by the Day in 1827, France blockaded Algiers for three years. In 1830, France invaded and occupied the coastal areas of Algeria, citing a diplomatic incident as casus belli. Hussein Dey went into exile. French colonization then gradually penetrated southwards, and came to have a profound impact on the area and its populations. The European conquest, initially accepted in the Algiers region, was soon met by a rebellion, led by Abdel Kadir, which took roughly a decade for the French troops to put down. By 1848 nearly all of northern Algeria was under French control, and the new government of the French Second Republic declared the occupied lands an integral part of France. Three \"civil territories\"—Algiers, Oran, and Constantine—were organized as French départements (local administrative units) under a civilian government. During the \"Pacification of Algeria\", which lasted until 1903, the French perpetrated atrocities which included mass executions of civilians and prisoners and the use of concentration camps; many estimates indicates that the native Algerian population fell by one-third in the years between the French invasion and the end of fighting in the mid-1870s due to warfare, disease and starvation.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "In addition to enduring the affront of being ruled by a foreign, non-Muslim power, many Algerians lost their lands to the new government or to colonists. Traditional leaders were eliminated, coopted, or made irrelevant, and the traditional educational system was largely dismantled; social structures were stressed to the breaking point. From 1856, native Muslims and Jews were viewed as French subjects not citizens.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "However, in 1865, Napoleon III allowed them to apply for full French citizenship, a measure that few took, since it involved renouncing the right to be governed by sharia law in personal matters, and was considered a kind of apostasy; in 1870, the Crémieux Decree made French citizenship automatic for Jewish natives, a move which largely angered many Muslims, which resulted in the Jews being seen as the accomplices of the colonial power by anti-colonial Algerians. Nonetheless, this period saw progress in health, some infrastructures, and the overall expansion of the economy of Algeria, as well as the formation of new social classes, which, after exposure to ideas of equality and political liberty, would help propel the country to independence.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "During the colonization France focused on eradicating the local culture by destroying hundreds years old palaces and important buildings. It is estimated that around half of Algiers, a city founded in the 10th century, was destroyed. Many segregatory laws were levied against the Algerians and their culture.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "A new generation of Islamic leadership emerged in Algeria at the time of World War I and grew to maturity during the 1920s and 1930s. Various groups were formed in opposition to French rule, most notable the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Algerian Movement.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Colons (colonists), or, more popularly, pieds noirs (literally, black feet) dominated the government and controlled the bulk of Algeria's wealth. Throughout the colonial era, they continued to block or delay all attempts to implement even the most modest reforms. But from 1933 to 1936, mounting social, political, and economic crises in Algeria induced the indigenous population to engage in numerous acts of political protest. The government responded with more restrictive laws governing public order and security. Algerian Muslims rallied to the French side at the start of World War II as they had done in World War I. But the colons were generally sympathetic to the collaborationist Vichy regime established following France's defeat by Nazi Germany. After the fall of the Vichy regime in Algeria (November 11, 1942) as a result of Operation Torch, the Free French commander in chief in North Africa slowly rescinded repressive Vichy laws, despite opposition by colon extremists.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "In March 1943, Muslim leader Ferhat Abbas presented the French administration with the Manifesto of the Algerian People, signed by 56 Algerian nationalist and international leaders. The manifesto demanded an Algerian constitution that would guarantee immediate and effective political participation and legal equality for Muslims. Instead, the French administration in 1944 instituted a reform package, based on the 1936 Viollette Plan, that granted full French citizenship only to certain categories of \"meritorious\" Algerian Muslims, who numbered about 60,000. In April 1945 the French had arrested the Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj. On May 1 the followers of his Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) participated in demonstrations which were violently put down by the police. Several Algerians were killed. The tensions between the Muslim and colon communities exploded on May 8, 1945, V-E Day, causing the Sétif and Guelma massacre. When a Muslim march was met with violence, marchers rampaged. The army and police responded by conducting a prolonged and systematic ratissage (literally, raking over) of suspected centers of dissidence. According to official French figures, 1,500 Muslims died as a result of these countermeasures. Other estimates vary from 6,000 to as high as 45,000 killed. Many nationalists drew the conclusion that independence could not be won by peaceful means, and so started organizing for violent rebellion.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "In August 1947, the French National Assembly approved the government-proposed Organic Statute of Algeria. This law called for the creation of an Algerian Assembly with one house representing Europeans and \"meritorious\" Muslims and the other representing the remaining 8 million or more Muslims. Muslim and colon deputies alike abstained or voted against the statute but for diametrically opposed reasons: the Muslims because it fell short of their expectations and the colons because it went too far.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), brutal and long, was the most recent major turning point in the country's history. Although often fratricidal, it ultimately united Algerians and seared the value of independence and the philosophy of anticolonialism into the national consciousness.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "In the early morning hours of November 1, 1954, the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale—FLN) launched attacks throughout Algeria in the opening salvo of a war of independence. An important watershed in this war was the massacre of Pieds-Noirs civilians by the FLN near the town of Philippeville in August 1955. Which prompted Jacques Soustelle into calling for more repressive measures against the rebels. The French authorities claimed that 1,273 \"guerrillas\" died in what Soustelle admitted were \"severe\" reprisals. The FLN subsequently, giving names and addresses, claimed that 12,000 Muslims were killed. After Philippeville, all-out war began in Algeria. The FLN fought largely using guerrilla tactics whilst the French counter-insurgency tactics often included severe reprisals and repression.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Eventually, protracted negotiations led to a cease-fire signed by France and the FLN on March 18, 1962, at Evian, France. The Evian accords also provided for continuing economic, financial, technical, and cultural relations, along with interim administrative arrangements until a referendum on self-determination could be held. The Evian accords guaranteed the religious and property rights of French settlers, but the perception that they would not be respected led to the exodus of one million pieds-noirs and harkis.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Abusive tactics of the French Army remains a controversial subject in France to this day. Deliberate illegal methods were used, such as beatings, mutilations, hanging by the feet or hands, torture by electroshock, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual assaults, among others. French war crimes against Algerian civilians were also committed, including indiscriminate shootings of civilians, bombings of villages suspected of helping the ALN, rape, disembowelment of pregnant women, imprisonment without food in small cells (some of which were small enough to impede lying down), throwing prisoners out of helicopters to their death or into the sea with concrete on their feet, and burying people alive.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "The FLN also committed many atrocities, both against French pieds-noirs and against fellow Algerians whom they deemed as supporting the French. These crimes included killing unarmed men, women and children, rape and disembowelment or decapitation of women and murdering children by slitting their throats or banging their heads against walls.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Between 350,000 and 1 million Algerians are estimated to have died during the war, and more than 2 million, out of a total Muslim population of 9 or 10 million, were made into refugees or forcibly relocated into government-controlled camps. Much of the countryside and agriculture was devastated, along with the modern economy, which had been dominated by urban European settlers (the pied-noirs). French sources estimated that at least 70,000 Muslim civilians were killed or abducted and presumed killed, by the FLN during the Algerian War. Nearly one million people of mostly French, Spanish and Italian descent left the country at independence due to the privileges that they lost as settlers and their unwillingness to be on equal footing with indigenous Algerians along with them left most Algerians of Jewish descent and those Muslim Algerians who had supported a French Algeria (harkis). 30–150,000 pro-French Muslims were also killed in Algeria by FLN in post-war reprisals.",
"title": "French rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "The Algerian independence referendum was held in French Algeria on 1 July 1962, passing with 99.72% of the vote. As a result, France declared Algeria independent on 3 July. On 8 September 1963, the first Algerian constitution was adopted by nationwide referendum under close supervision by the National Liberation Front (FLN). Later that month, Ahmed Ben Bella was formally elected the first president of Algeria for a five-year term after receiving support from the FLN and the military, led by Colonel Houari Boumédiène.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "However, the war for independence and its aftermath had severely disrupted Algeria's society and economy. In addition to the destruction of much of Algeria's infrastructure, an exodus of the upper-class French and European colons from Algeria deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the workforce was unemployed. The months immediately following independence witnessed the pell-mell rush of Algerians and government officials to claim the property and jobs left behind by the European colons. For example in the 1963 March Decrees, President Ben Bella declared all agricultural, industrial, and commercial properties previously owned and operated by Europeans vacant, thereby legalizing confiscation by the state.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "The military played an important role in Ben Bella's administration. Since the president recognized the role that the military played in bringing him to power, he appointed senior military officers as ministers and other important positions within the new state, including naming Colonel Boumédiène as defence minister. These military officials played a core role into implementing the country's security and foreign policy.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Under the new constitution, Ben Bella's presidency combined the functions of chief of state and head of government with those of supreme commander of the armed forces. He formed his government without needing legislative approval and was responsible for the definition and direction of its policies. There was no effective institutional check on the president's powers. As a result, opposition leader Hocine Aït-Ahmed quit the National Assembly in 1963 to protest the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of the regime and formed a clandestine resistance movement, the Socialist Forces Front (Front des Forces Socialistes—FFS), dedicated to overthrowing the Ben Bella regime by force.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Late summer 1963 saw sporadic incidents attributed to the FFS, but more serious fighting broke out a year later, and the army moved quickly and in force to crush a rebellion. Minister of Defense Boumédiène had no qualms about sending the army to put down regional uprisings because he felt they posed a threat to the state. However, President Ben Bella attempted to co-opt allies from among these regional leaders in order to undermine the ability of military commanders to influence foreign and security policy. Tensions consequently built between Boumédiène and Ben Bella, and in 1965 the military removed Ben Bella in a coup d'état, replacing him with Boumédiène as head of state.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "On 19 June 1965, Houari Boumédiène deposed Ahmed Ben Bella in a military coup d'état that was both swift and bloodless. Ben Bella \"disappeared\", and would not be seen again until he was released from house arrest in 1980 by Boumédiène's successor, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid. Boumédiène immediately dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1963 constitution. Political power resided in the Nation Council of the Algerian Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne—CNRA), a predominantly military body intended to foster cooperation among various factions in the army and the party.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "Houari Boumédiène's position as head of government and of state was initially insecure, partly because of his lack of a significant power base outside of the armed forces. He relied strongly on a network of former associates known as the Oujda group, named after Boumédiène's posting as National Liberation Army (Armée de Libération Nationale—ALN) leader in the Moroccan border town of Oujda during the war years, but he could not fully dominate his fractious regime. This situation may have accounted for his deference to collegial rule.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "Over Boumédiène's 11-year reign as Chairman of the CNRA, the council introduced two formal mechanisms: the People's Municipal Assembly (Assemblée Populaires Communales) and the People's Provincial Assembly (Assemblée Populaires de Wilaya) for popular participation in politics. Under Boumédiène's rule, leftist and socialist concepts were merged with Islam.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Boumédiène also used Islam to opportunistically consolidate his power. On one hand, he made token concessions and cosmetic changes to the government to appear more Islamic, such as putting Islamist Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi in charge of national education in 1965 and adopting policies criminalizing gambling, establishing Friday as the national holiday, and dropping plans to introduce birth control to paint an Islamic image of the new government. But on the other hand, Boumédiène's government also progressively repressed Islamic groups, such as by ordering the dissolution of Al Qiyam.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "Following attempted coups—most notably that of chief-of-staff Col. Tahar Zbiri in December 1967—and a failed assassination attempt on 25 April 1968, Boumédiène consolidated power and forced military and political factions to submit. He took a systematic, authoritarian approach to state building, arguing that Algeria needed stability and an economic base before building any political institutions.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Eleven years after Boumédiène took power, after much public debate, a long-promised new constitution was promulgated in November 1976. The constitution restored the National Assembly and gave it legislative, consent, and oversight functions. Boumédiène was later elected president with 95 percent of the cast votes.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "Boumédiène's death on 27 December 1978 set off a struggle within the FLN to choose a successor. A deadlock occurred between two candidates was broken when Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, a moderate who had collaborated with Boumédiène in deposing Ahmed Ben Bella, was sworn in on February 9, 1979. He was re-elected in 1984 and 1988. After the violent 1988 October Riots, a new constitution was adopted in 1989 that eradicated the Algerian one-party state by allowing the formation of political associations in addition to the FLN. It also removed the armed forces, which had run the government since the days of Boumédiène, from a role in the operation of the government.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "Among the scores of parties that sprang up under the new constitution, the militant Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut—FIS) was the most successful, winning a majority of votes in the June 1990 municipal elections, as well as the first stage of the December national legislative elections.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "The surprising first round of success for the fundamentalist FIS party in the December 1991 balloting caused the army to discuss options to intervene in the election. Officers feared that an Islamist government would interfere with their positions and core interests in economic, national security, and foreign policy, since the FIS has promised to make a fundamental re-haul of the social, political, and economic structure to achieve a radical Islamist agenda. Senior military figures, such as Defence Minister Khaled Nezzar, Chief of the General Staff Abdelmalek Guenaizia, and other leaders of the navy, Gendarmerie, and security services, all agreed that the FIS should be stopped from gaining power at the polling box. They also agreed that Bendjedid would need to be removed from office due to his determination to uphold the country's new constitution by continuing with the second round of ballots.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "On 11 January 1992, Bendjedid announced his resignation on national television, saying it was necessary to \"protect the unity of the people and the security of the country\". Later that same day, the High Council of State (Haut Comité d'Etat—HCE), which was composed of five people (including Khaled Nezzar, Tedjini Haddam, Ali Kafi, Mohamed Boudiaf and Ali Haroun), was appointed to carry out the duties of the president.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "The new government, led by Sid Ahmed Ghozali, banned all political activity at mosques and began stopping people from attending prayers at popular mosques. The FIS was legally dissolved by Interior Minister Larbi Belkheir on 9 February for attempting \"insurrections against the state\". A state of emergency was also declared and extraordinary powers, such as curtailing the right to associate, were granted to the regime.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Between January and March, a growing number of FIS militants were arrested by the military, including Abdelkader Hachani and his successors, Othman Aissani and Rabah Kebir. Following the announcement to dissolve the FIS and implement a state of emergency on 9 February, the Algerian security forces used their new emergency powers to conduct large scale arrests of FIS members and housed them in 5 \"detention centers\" in the Sahara. Between 5,000 (official number) and 30,000 (FIS number) people were detained.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "This crackdown led to a fundamental Islamic insurgency, resulting in the continuous and brutal 10 year-long Algerian Civil War. During the civil war, the secular state apparatus nonetheless allowed elections featuring pro-government and moderate religious-based parties. The civil war lasted from 1991 to 2002.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "After Chadli Bendjedid resigned from the presidency in the military coup of 1992, a series of figureheads were selected by the military to assume the presidency, as officers were reluctant to assume public political power even though they had manifested control over the government. Additionally, the military's senior leaders felt a need to give a civilian face to the new political regime they had hastily constructed in the aftermath of Benjedid's ousting and the termination of elections, preferring a friendlier non-military face to front the regime.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "The first such head of state was Mohamed Boudiaf, who was appointed president of the High Council of State (HCE) in February 1992 after a 27-year exile in Morocco. However, Boudiaf quickly came to odds with the military when attempts by Boudiaf to appoint his own staff or form a political party were viewed with suspicion by officers. Boudiaf also launched political initiatives, such as a rigorous anti-corruption campaign in April 1992 and the sacking of Khaled Nezzar from his post as Defence Minister, which were seen by the military as an attempt to remove their influence in the government. The former of these initiatives was especially hazardous to the many senior military officials who had benefited massively and illegally from the political system for years. In the end, Boudiaf was assassinated in June 1992 by one of his bodyguards with Islamist sympathies.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Ali Kafi briefly assumed the HCE presidency after Boudiaf's death, before Liamine Zéroual was appointed as a long-term replacement in 1994. However, Zéroual only remained in office for four years before he announced his retirement, as he quickly became embroiled in a clan warfare within the upper classes of the military and fell out with groups of the more senior generals. After this Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Boumédiène's foreign minister, succeeded as the president.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "As the Algerian civil war wound to a close, presidential elections were held again in April 1999. Although seven candidates qualified for election, all but Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had the support of the military as well as the National Liberation Front (FLN), withdrew on the eve of the election amid charges of electoral fraud and interference from the military. Bouteflika went on to win with 70 percent of the cast votes.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "Despite the purportedly democratic elections, the civilian government immediately after the 1999 elections only acted as a sort of 'hijab' over the true government, mostly running day-to-day businesses, while the military still largely ran the country behind the scenes. For example, ministerial mandates to individuals were only granted with the military's approval, and different factions of the military invested in various political parties and the press, using them as pawns to gain influence.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "However, the military's influence over politics decreased gradually, leaving Bouteflika with more authority on deciding policy. One reason for this was that the senior commanders who had dominated the political scene during the 1960s and 1970s started to retire. Bouteflika's former experience as Boumédiène's foreign minister earned him connections that rejuvenated Algeria's international reputation, which had been tarnished in the early 1990s due to the civil war. On the domestic front, Bouteflika's policy of \"national reconciliation\" to bring a close to civilian violence earned him a popular mandate that helped him to win further presidential terms in 2004, 2009 and 2014.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "In 2010, journalists gathered to demonstrate for press freedom and against Bouteflika's self-appointed role as editor-in-chief of Algeria's state television station. In February 2011, the government rescinded the state of emergency that had been in place since 1992 but still banned all protest gatherings and demonstrations. However, in April 2011, over 2,000 protesters defied the official ban and took to the streets of Algiers, clashing with police forces. These protests can be seen as a part of the Arab Spring, with protesters noting that they were inspired by the recent Egyptian revolution, and that Algeria was a police state that was \"corrupt to the bone\".",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "In 2019, after 20 years in office, Bouteflika announced in February that he would seek a fifth term of office. This sparked widespread discontent around Algeria and protests in Algiers. Despite later attempts at saying he would resign after his term finished in late April, Bouteflika resigned on 2 April, after the chief of the army, Ahmed Gaid Salah, made a declaration that he was \"unfit for office\". Despite Gaid Salah being loyal to Bouteflika, many in the military identified with civilians, as nearly 70 percent of the army are civilian conscripts who are required to serve for 18 months. Also, since demonstrators demanded a change to the whole governmental system, many army officers aligned themselves with demonstrators in the hopes of surviving an anticipated revolution and retaining their positions.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "After the resignation of Abdelaziz Bouteflika on 9 April 2019, the President of the Council of the Nation Abdelkader Bensalah became acting president of Algeria.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "Following the presidential election on 12 December 2019, Abdelmadjid Tebboune was elected president after taking 58% of the votes, beating the candidates from both main parties, the National Liberation Front and the Democratic National Rally.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "On the eve of the first anniversary of the Hirak Movement, which led to the resignation of former president Bouteflika, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced in a statement to the Algerian national media that 22 February would be declared the Algerian \"National Day of Fraternity and Cohesion between the People and Its Army for Democracy.\" In the same statement, Tebboune spoke in favor of the Hirak Movement, saying that \"the blessed Hirak has preserved the country from a total collapse\", and that he had \"made a personal commitment to carry out all of the [movement's] demands.\" On 21 and 22 February 2020, masses of demonstrators (with turnout comparable to well-established Algerian holidays like the Algerian Day of Independence) gathered to honor the anniversary of the Hirak Movement and the newly established national day.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "In an effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, Tebboune announced on 17 March 2020 that \"marches and rallies, whatever their motives\" would be prohibited. But after protesters and journalists were arrested for participating in such marches, Tebboune faced accusations of attempting to \"silence Algerians.\" Notably, the government's actions were condemned by Amnesty International, which said in a statement that \"when all eyes [...] are on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Algerian authorities are devoting time to speeding up the prosecution and trial of activists, journalists, and supporters of the Hirak movement.\" The National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (Comité national pour la libération des détenus—CNLD) estimated that around 70 prisoners of conscience were imprisoned by 2 July 2020 and that several of the imprisoned were arrested for Facebook posts.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "On 28 December 2019, the then-recently inaugurated President Tebboune met with Ahmed Benbitour, the former Algerian Head of Government, with whom he discussed the \"foundations of the new Republic.\" On 8 January 2020, Tebboune established a \"commission of experts\" composed of 17 members (a majority of which were professors of constitutional law) responsible for examining the previous constitution and making any necessary revisions. Led by Ahmed Laraba, the commission was required to submit its proposals to Tebboune directly within the following two months. In a letter to Laraba on the same day, Tebboune outlined seven axes around which the commission should focus its discussion. These areas of focus included strengthening citizens' rights, combating corruption, consolidating the balance of powers in the Algerian government, increasing the oversight powers of parliament, promoting the independence of the judiciary, furthering citizens' equality under the law, and constitutionalizing elections. Tebboune's letter also included a call for an \"immutable and intangible\" two-term limit to anyone serving as president — a major point of contention in the initial Hirak Movement protests, which were spurred by former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika's announcement to run for a fifth term.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "The preliminary draft revision of the constitution was publicly published on 7 May 2020, but the Laraba Commission (as the \"commission of experts\" came to be known) was open to additional proposals from the public until 20 June. By 3 June, the commission had received an estimated 1,200 additional public proposals. After all revisions were considered by the Laraba Commission, the draft was introduced to the Cabinet of Algeria (Council of Ministers).",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "The revised constitution was adopted in the Council of Ministers on 6 September, in the People's National Assembly on 10 September, and in the Council of the Nation on 12 September. The constitutional changes were approved in the 1 November 2020 referendum, with 66.68% of voters participating in favour of the changes.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 181,
"text": "On 16 February 2021, mass protests and a wave of nationwide rallies and peaceful demonstrations against the government of Abdelmadjid Tebboune began. In May 2021, Algeria prohibited any protests that do not have prior approval by authorities.",
"title": "Independent Algeria"
}
]
| Much of the history of Algeria has taken place on the fertile coastal plain of North Africa, which is often called the Maghreb. North Africa served as a transit region for people moving towards Europe or the Middle East, thus, the region's inhabitants have been influenced by populations from other areas, including the Carthaginians, Romans, and Vandals. The region was conquered by the Muslims in the early 8th century AD, but broke off from the Umayyad Caliphate after the Berber Revolt of 740. During the Ottoman period, Algeria became an important state in the Mediterranean sea which led to many naval conflicts. The last significant events in the country's recent history have been the Algerian War and Algerian Civil War. | 2001-06-28T13:01:08Z | 2023-11-26T21:01:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Algeria |
14,114 | History of Zimbabwe | Until roughly 2,000 years ago, what would become Zimbabwe was populated by ancestors of the San people. Bantu inhabitants of the region arrived and developed ceramic production in the area. A series of trading empires emerged, including the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and Kingdom of Zimbabwe. In the 1880s, the British South Africa Company began its activities in the region, leading to the colonial era in Southern Rhodesia.
In 1964, the colonial government declared itself independent as Rhodesia, but largely failed to secure international recognition and faced sustained internal opposition in the Bush War.
After fifteen years of war, following the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 there was a transition to internationally recognised majority rule in 1980. The United Kingdom, which had never recognised Rhodesian independence, briefly imposed direct rule in order to grant independence on 18 April that year as the new country of Zimbabwe. In the 2000s Zimbabwe's economy began to deteriorate due to various factors, including the imposition of economic sanctions by western countries led by the United Kingdom and widespread corruption in government. Economic instability caused many Zimbabweans to emigrate. Prior to its recognized independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, the nation had been known by several names: Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe Rhodesia.
Prior to the arrival of Bantu speakers in present-day Zimbabwe the region was populated by ancestors of the San people. The first Bantu-speaking farmers arrived during the Bantu expansion around 2000 years ago.
These Bantu speakers were the makers of early Iron Age pottery belonging to the Silver Leaves or Matola tradition, of the third to fifth centuries A.D., found in southeast Zimbabwe. This tradition was part of the eastern stream of Bantu expansion (sometimes called Kwale) which originated west of the Great Lakes, spreading to the coastal regions of southeastern Kenya and north eastern Tanzania, and then southwards to Mozambique, south eastern Zimbabwe and Natal. More substantial in numbers in Zimbabwe were the makers of the Ziwa and Gokomere ceramic wares, of the fourth century A.D. Their early Iron Age ceramic tradition belonged to the highlands facies of the eastern stream, which moved inland to Malawi and Zimbabwe. Imports of beads have been found at Gokomere and Ziwa sites, possibly in return for gold exported to the coast.
A later phase of the Gokomere culture was the Zhizo in southern Zimbabwe. Zhizo communities settled in the Shashe-Limpopo area in the tenth century. Their capital there was Schroda (just across the Limpopo River from Zimbabwe). Many fragments of ceramic figurines have been recovered from there, including figures of animals and birds, and also fertility dolls. The inhabitants produced ivory bracelets and other ivory goods. Imported beads found there and at other Zhizo sites, are evidence of trade, probably of ivory and skins, with traders on the Indian Ocean coast.
Pottery belonging to a western stream of Bantu expansion (sometimes called Kalundu) has been found at sites in northeastern Zimbabwe, dating back to the seventh century. (The western stream originated in the same area as the eastern stream: both belong to the same style system, called by Phillipson the Chifumbadze system, which has general acceptance by archaeologists.) The terms eastern and western streams represent the expansion of the Bantu-speaking peoples in terms of their culture. Another question is about the branches of the Bantu languages which they spoke. It seems that the makers of the Ziwa/Gokomere wares were not the ancestral speakers of the Shona languages of today's Zimbabwe, who did not arrive in there until around the tenth century, from south of the Limpopo river, and whose ceramic culture belonged to the western stream. The linguist and historian Ehret believes that in view of the similarity of the Ziwa/Gokomere pottery to the Nkope of the ancestral Nyasa language speakers, the Ziwa/Gokomere people spoke a language closely related to the Nyasa group. Their language, whatever it was, was superseded by the ancestral Shona languages, although Ehret says that a set of Nyasa words occur in central Shona dialects today.
The evidence that the ancestral Shona speakers came from South Africa is that the ceramic styles associated with Shona speakers in Zimbabwe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries can be traced back to western stream (Kalunndu) pottery styles in South Africa. The Ziwa /Gokomere and Zhizo traditions were superseded by Leopards Kopje and Gumanye wares of the Kalundu tradition from the tenth century.
Although the western stream Kalundu tradition was ancestral to Shona ceramic wares, the closest relationships of the ancestral Shona language according to many linguists were with a southern division of eastern Bantu – such languages as the southeastern languages (Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Tsonga), Nyasa and Makwa. While it may well be the case that the people of the western stream spoke a language belonging to a wider Eastern Bantu division, it is a puzzle which remains to be resolved that they spoke a language most closely related to the languages just mentioned, all of which are today spoken in southeastern Africa.
After the Shona speaking people moved into the present day Zimbabwe many different dialects developed over time in the different parts of the country. Among these was Kalanga.
It is believed that Kalanga speaking societies first emerged in the middle Limpopo valley in the 9th century before moving on to the Zimbabwean highlands. The Zimbabwean plateau eventually became the centre of subsequent Kalanga states. The Kingdom of Mapungubwe was the first in a series of sophisticated trade states developed in Zimbabwe by the time of the first European explorers from Portugal. They traded in gold, ivory and copper for cloth and glass. From about 1250 until 1450, Mapungubwe was eclipsed by the Kingdom of Zimbabwe. This Kalanga state further refined and expanded upon Mapungubwe's stone architecture, which survives to this day at the ruins of the kingdom's capital of Great Zimbabwe. From c. 1450–1760, Zimbabwe gave way to the Kingdom of Mutapa. This Kalanga state ruled much of the area that is known as Zimbabwe today, and parts of central Mozambique. It is known by many names including the Mutapa Empire, also known as Mwenemutapa was known for its gold trade routes with Arabs and the Portuguese. António Fernandes, a Portuguese explorer, first entered the area in 1511 from Sofala and encountered the Manyika people. He returned in 1513 and explored the northern region of the territory, coming into contact with Chikuyo Chisamarengu, the ruler of Mutapa. In the early 17th century, Portuguese settlers destroyed the trade and began a series of wars which left the empire in near collapse. As a direct response to Portuguese aggression in the interior, a new Kalanga state emerged called the Rozvi Empire. Relying on centuries of military, political and religious development, the Rozvi (which means "destroyers") removed the Portuguese from the Zimbabwe plateau by force of arms. The Rozvi continued the stone building traditions of the Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe kingdoms while adding guns to its arsenal and developing a professional army to protect its trade routes and conquests. Around 1821, the Zulu general Mzilikazi of the Khumalo clan successfully rebelled from King Shaka and created his own clan, the Ndebele. The Ndebele fought their way northwards into the Transvaal, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake and beginning an era of widespread devastation known as the Mfecane. When Boer trekkers converged on the Transvaal in 1836, they drove the tribe even further northward.
After losing their remaining South African lands in 1840, Mzilikazi and his tribe permanently settled the southwest of present-day Zimbabwe in what became known as Matabeleland, establishing Bulawayo as their capital. Mzilikazi then organised his society into a military system with regimental kraals, similar to those of Shaka, which was stable enough to repel further Boer incursions. During the pre-colonial period, the Ndebele social structure was stratified. It was composed of mainly three social groups, Zansi, Enhla and Amahole. The Zansi comprised the ruling class the original Khumalo people who migrated from south of Limpopo with Mzilikazi. The Enhla and Amahole groups were made up of other tribes and ethnics who had been incorporated into the empire during the migration. However, with the passage of time, this stratification has slowly disappeared The Ndebele people have for long ascribed to the worship of Unkunkulu as their supreme being. Their religious life in general, rituals, ceremonies, practices, devotion and loyalty revolves around the worship of this Supreme Being. However, with the popularisation of Christianity and other religions, Ndebele traditional religion is now uncommon.
Mzilikazi died in 1868 and, following a violent power struggle, was succeeded by his son, Lobengula. King Mzilikazi had established the Ndebele Kingdom, with Shona subjects paying tribute to him. The nascent kingdom encountered European powers for the first time and Lonbengula signed various treaties with the various nations jostling for power in the region, playing them off one another in order to preserve the sovereignty of his kingdom and gain the aid of the Europeans should the kingdom become involved in a war.
In the 1880s, British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) started to make inroads into the region. In 1898, the name Southern Rhodesia was adopted. In 1888, Rhodes obtained a concession for mining rights from King Lobengula of the Ndebele peoples. Cecil Rhodes presented this concession to persuade the British government to grant a royal charter to his British South Africa Company over Matabeleland, and its subject states such as Mashonaland. Rhodes sought permission to negotiate similar concessions covering all territory between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika, then known as 'Zambesia'. In accordance with the terms of aforementioned concessions and treaties, Cecil Rhodes promoted the immigration of white settlers into the region, as well as the establishment of mines, primarily to extract the diamond ores present. In 1895 the BSAC adopted the name 'Rhodesia' for the territory of Zambesia, in honour of Cecil Rhodes. In 1898, 'Southern Rhodesia' became the official denotation for the region south of the Zambezi, which later became Zimbabwe. The region to the north was administered separately by the BSAC and later named Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
The Shona waged unsuccessful wars (known as Chimurenga) against encroachment upon their lands by clients of BSAC and Cecil Rhodes in 1896 and 1897. Following the failed insurrections of 1896–97 the Ndebele and Shona groups became subject to Rhodes's administration thus precipitating European settlement en masse in the new colony.
The colony's first formal constitution was drafted in 1899, and copied various pieces of legislation directly from that of the Union of South Africa; Rhodesia was meant to be, in many ways, a shadow colony of the Cape. Many within the administrative framework of the BSAC assumed that Southern Rhodesia, when its "development" was "suitably advanced", would "take its rightful place as a member of" the Union of South Africa after the Second Boer War (1898-1902), when the four South African colonies joined under the auspices of one flag and began to work towards the creation of a unified administrative structure. The territory was made open to white settlement, and these settlers were then in turn given considerable administrative powers, including a franchise that, while on the surface non-racial, ensured "a predominantly European electorate" which "operated to preclude Great Britain from modifying her policy in Southern Rhodesia and subsequently treating it as a territory inhabited mainly by Africans whose interests should be paramount and to whom British power should be transferred".
Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony in October 1923, subsequent to a referendum held the previous year. The British government took full command of the British South Africa Company's holdings, including both Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Northern Rhodesia retained its status as a colonial protectorate; Southern Rhodesia was given responsible self-government – with limitations and still annexed to the crown as a colony. Many studies of the country see it as a state that operated independently within the Commonwealth; nominally under the rule of the Crown, but technically able to do as it pleased. And in theory, Southern Rhodesia was able to govern itself, draft its own legislation, and elect its own parliamentary leaders. But in reality, this was self-government subject to supervision. Until the white minority settler government's declaration of unilateral independence in 1965, London remained in control of the colony's external affairs, and all legislation was subject to approval from the United Kingdom Government and the Queen.
In 1930, the Land Apportionment Act divided rural land along racial lines, creating four types of land: white-owned land that could not be acquired by Africans; purchase areas for those Africans who could afford to purchase land; Tribal Trust Lands designated as the African reserves; and Crown lands owned by the state, reserved for future use and public parks. Fifty one percent of the land was given to approximately 50,000 white inhabitants, with 29.8 per cent left for over a million Africans.
Many Rhodesians served on behalf of the United Kingdom during World War II, mainly in the East African Campaign against Axis forces in Italian East Africa.
In 1953, the British government consolidated the two colonies of Rhodesia with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which was dominated by Southern Rhodesia. This move was heavily opposed by the residents of Nyasaland, who feared coming under the domination of white Rhodesians. In 1962, however, with growing African nationalism and general dissent, the British government declared that Nyasaland had the right to secede from the Federation; soon afterwards, they said the same for Northern Rhodesia.
After African-majority governments had assumed control in neighbouring Northern Rhodesia and in Nyasaland, the white-minority Southern Rhodesian government led by Ian Smith made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965. The United Kingdom deemed this an act of rebellion, but did not re-establish control by force. The white minority government declared itself a republic in 1970. A civil war ensued, with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU and Robert Mugabe's ZANU using assistance from the governments of Zambia and Mozambique. Although Smith's declaration was not recognised by the United Kingdom nor any other foreign power, Southern Rhodesia dropped the designation "Southern", and claimed nation status as the Republic of Rhodesia in 1970 although this was not recognised internationally.
The country gained official independence as Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980. The government held independence celebrations in Rufaro stadium in Salisbury, the capital. Lord Christopher Soames, the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, watched as Charles, Prince of Wales, gave a farewell salute and the Rhodesian Signal Corps played "God Save the Queen". Many foreign dignitaries also attended, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, President Shehu Shagari of Nigeria, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, President Seretse Khama of Botswana, and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of Australia, representing the Commonwealth of Nations. Bob Marley sang 'Zimbabwe', a song he wrote, at the government's invitation in a concert at the country's independence festivities.
President Shagari pledged $15 million at the celebration to train Zimbabweans in Zimbabwe and expatriates in Nigeria. Mugabe's government used part of the money to buy newspaper companies owned by South Africans, increasing the government's control over the media. The rest went to training students in Nigerian universities, government workers in the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria in Badagry, and soldiers in the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna. Later that year Mugabe commissioned a report by the BBC on press freedom in Zimbabwe. The BBC issued its report on 26 June, recommending the privatisation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and its independence from political interests.
Mugabe's government changed the capital's name from Salisbury to Harare on 18 April 1982 in celebration of the second anniversary of independence. The government renamed the main street in the capital, Jameson Avenue, in honour of Samora Machel, President of Mozambique.
In 1992, a World Bank study indicated that more than 500 health centres had been built since 1980. The percentage of children vaccinated increased from 25% in 1980 to 67% in 1988 and life expectancy increased from 55 to 59 years. Enrolment increased by 232 per cent one year after primary education was made free and secondary school enrolment increased by 33 per cent in two years. These social policies lead to an increase in the debt ratio. Several laws were passed in the 1980s in an attempt to reduce wage gaps. However, the gaps remained considerable. In 1988, the law gave women, at least in theory, the same rights as men. Previously, they could only take a few personal initiatives without the consent of their father or husband.
The new Constitution provided for an executive President as Head of State with a Prime Minister as Head of Government. Reverend Canaan Banana served as the first President. In government amended the Constitution in 1987 to provide for an Executive President and abolished the office of Prime Minister. The constitutional changes came into effect on 1 January 1988 with Robert Mugabe as president. The bicameral Parliament of Zimbabwe had a directly elected House of Assembly and an indirectly elected Senate, partly made up of tribal chiefs. The Constitution established two separate voters rolls, one for the black majority, who had 80% of the seats in Parliament, and the other for whites and other ethnic minorities, such as Coloureds, people of mixed race, and Asians, who held 20%. The government amended the Constitution in 1986, eliminating the voter rolls and replacing the white seats with seats filled by nominated members. Many white MPs joined ZANU which then reappointed them. In 1990 the government abolished the Senate and increased the House of Assembly's membership to include members nominated by the President.
Prime Minister Mugabe kept Peter Walls, the head of the army, in his government and put him in charge of integrating the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), and the Rhodesian Army. While Western media outlets praised Mugabe's efforts at reconciliation with the white minority, tension soon developed. On 17 March 1980, after several unsuccessful assassination attempts Mugabe asked Walls, "Why are your men trying to kill me?" Walls replied, "If they were my men you would be dead." BBC News interviewed Walls on 11 August 1980. He told the BBC that he had asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to annul the 1980 election prior to the official announcement of the result on the grounds that Mugabe used intimidation to win the election. Walls said Thatcher had not replied to his request. On 12 August British government officials denied that they had not responded, saying Antony Duff, Deputy Governor of Salisbury, told Walls on 3 March that Thatcher would not annul the election.
Minister of Information Nathan Shamuyarira said the government would not be "held ransom by racial misfits" and told "all those Europeans who do not accept the new order to pack their bags." He also said the government continued to consider taking "legal or administrative action" against Walls. Mugabe, returning from a visit with United States President Jimmy Carter in New York City, said, "One thing is quite clear—we are not going to have disloyal characters in our society." Walls returned to Zimbabwe after the interview, telling Peter Hawthorne of Time magazine, "To stay away at this time would have appeared like an admission of guilt." Mugabe drafted legislation that would exile Walls from Zimbabwe for life and Walls moved to South Africa.
Ethnic divisions soon came back to the forefront of national politics. Tension between ZAPU and ZANU erupted with guerrilla activity starting again in Matabeleland in south-western Zimbabwe. Nkomo (ZAPU) left for exile in Britain and did not return until Mugabe guaranteed his safety. In 1982 government security officials discovered large caches of arms and ammunition on properties owned by ZAPU, accusing Nkomo and his followers of plotting to overthrow the government. Mugabe fired Nkomo and his closest aides from the cabinet. Seven MPs, members of the Rhodesian Front, left Smith's party to sit as "independents" on 4 March 1982, signifying their dissatisfaction with his policies. As a result of what they saw as persecution of Nkomo and his party, PF-ZAPU supporters, army deserters began a campaign of dissidence against the government. Centring primarily in Matabeleland, home of the Ndebeles who were at the time PF-ZAPU's main followers, this dissidence continued through 1987. It involved attacks on government personnel and installations, armed banditry aimed at disrupting security and economic life in the rural areas, and harassment of ZANU-PF members.
Because of the unsettled security situation immediately after independence and democratic sentiments, the government kept in force a "state of emergency". This gave the government widespread powers under the "Law and Order Maintenance Act," including the right to detain persons without charge which it used quite widely. In 1983 to 1984 the government declared a curfew in areas of Matabeleland and sent in the army in an attempt to suppress members of the Ndebele tribe. The pacification campaign, known as the Gukuruhundi, or strong wind, resulted in at least 20,000 civilian deaths perpetrated by an elite, North Korean-trained brigade, known in Zimbabwe as the Gukurahundi.
ZANU-PF increased its majority in the 1985 elections, winning 67 of the 100 seats. The majority gave Mugabe the opportunity to start making changes to the constitution, including those with regard to land restoration. Fighting did not cease until Mugabe and Nkomo reached an agreement in December 1987 whereby ZAPU became part of ZANU-PF and the government changed the constitution to make Mugabe the country's first executive president and Nkomo one of two vice-presidents.
Elections in March 1990 resulted in another overwhelming victory for Mugabe and his party, which won 117 of the 120 election seats. Election observers estimated voter turnout at only 54% and found the campaign neither free nor fair, though balloting met international standards. Unsatisfied with a de facto one-party state, Mugabe called on the ZANU-PF Central Committee to support the creation of a de jure one-party state in September 1990 and lost. The government began further amending the constitution. The judiciary and human rights advocates fiercely criticised the first amendments enacted in April 1991 because they restored corporal and capital punishment and denied recourse to the courts in cases of compulsory purchase of land by the government. The general health of the civilian population also began to significantly flounder and by 1997 25% of the population of Zimbabwe had been infected by HIV, the AIDS virus.
During the 1990s students, trade unionists, and workers often demonstrated to express their discontent with the government. Students protested in 1990 against proposals for an increase in government control of universities and again in 1991 and 1992 when they clashed with police. Trade unionists and workers also criticised the government during this time. In 1992 police prevented trade unionists from holding anti-government demonstrations. In 1994 widespread industrial unrest weakened the economy. In 1996 civil servants, nurses, and junior doctors went on strike over salary issues.
On 9 December 1997 a national strike paralysed the country. Mugabe was panicked by demonstrations by ZANLA ex-combatants, war veterans, who had been the heart of incursions 20 years earlier in the Bush War. He agreed to pay them large gratuities and pensions, which proved to be a wholly unproductive and unbudgeted financial commitment. The discontent with the government spawned draconian government crackdowns which in turn started to destroy both the fabric of the state and of society. This in turn brought with it further discontent within the population. Thus a vicious downward spiral commenced.
Although many whites had left Zimbabwe after independence, mainly for neighbouring South Africa, those who remained continued to wield disproportionate control of some sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. In the late-1990s whites accounted for less than 1% of the population but owned 70% of arable land. Mugabe raised this issue of land ownership by white farmers. In a calculated move, he began forcible land redistribution, which brought the government into headlong conflict with the International Monetary Fund. Amid a severe drought in the region, the police and military were instructed not to stop the invasion of white-owned farms by the so-called 'war veterans' and youth militia. This led to a mass migration of White Zimbabweans out of Zimbabwe. At present almost no arable land is in the possession of white farmers.
The economy was run along corporatist lines with strict governmental controls on all aspects of the economy. Controls were placed on wages, prices and massive increases in government spending resulting in significant budget deficits. This experiment met with very mixed results and Zimbabwe fell further behind the first world and unemployment. Some market reforms in the 1990s were attempted. A 40 per cent devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar was allowed to occur and price and wage controls were removed. These policies also failed at that time. Growth, employment, wages, and social service spending contracted sharply, inflation did not improve, the deficit remained well above target, and many industrial firms, notably in textiles and footwear, closed in response to increased competition and high real interest rates. The incidence of poverty in the country increased during this time.
However, Zimbabwe began experiencing a period of considerable political and economic upheaval in 1999. Opposition to President Mugabe and the ZANU-PF government grew considerably after the mid-1990s in part due to worsening economic and human rights conditions brought about by the seizure of farmland owned by white farmers and economic sanctions imposed by Western countries in response. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was established in September 1999 as an opposition party founded by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai.
The MDC's first opportunity to test opposition to the Mugabe government came in February 2000, when a referendum was held on a draft constitution proposed by the government. Among its elements, the new constitution would have permitted President Mugabe to seek two additional terms in office, granted government officials immunity from prosecution, and authorised government seizure of white-owned land. The referendum was handily defeated. Shortly thereafter, the government, through a loosely organised group of war veterans, some of the so-called war veterans judging from their age were not war veterans as they were too young to have fought in the chimurenga, sanctioned an aggressive land redistribution program often characterised by forced expulsion of white farmers and violence against both farmers and farm employees.
Parliamentary elections held in June 2000 were marred by localised violence, electoral irregularities, and government intimidation of opposition supporters. Nonetheless, the MDC succeeded in capturing 57 of 120 seats in the National Assembly.
Presidential elections were held in March 2002. In the months leading up to the poll, ZANU-PF, with the support of the army, security services, and especially the so-called 'war veterans', – very few of whom actually fought in the Second Chimurenga against the Smith regime in the 1970s – set about wholesale intimidation and suppression of the MDC-led opposition. Despite strong international criticism, these measures, together with organised subversion of the electoral process, ensured a Mugabe victory . The government's behaviour drew strong criticism from the EU and the US, which imposed limited sanctions against the leading members of the Mugabe regime. Since the 2002 election, Zimbabwe has suffered further economic difficulty and growing political chaos.
Divisions within the opposition MDC had begun to fester early in the decade, after Morgan Tsvangirai (the president of the MDC) was lured into a government sting operation that videotaped him talking of Mr. Mugabe's removal from power. He was subsequently arrested and put on trial on treason charges. This crippled his control of party affairs and raised questions about his competence. It also catalysed a major split within the party. In 2004 he was acquitted, but not until after suffering serious abuse and mistreatment in prison. The opposing faction was led by Welshman Ncube who was the general secretary of the party. In mid-2004, vigilantes loyal to Mr. Tsvangirai began attacking members who were mostly loyal to Ncube, climaxing in a September raid on the party's Harare headquarters in which the security director was nearly thrown to his death.
An internal party inquiry later established that aides to Tsvangirai had tolerated, if not endorsed, the violence. Divisive as the violence was, it was a debate over the rule of law that set off the party's final break-up in November 2005. These division severely weakened the opposition. In addition the government employed its own operatives to both spy on each side and to undermine each side via acts of espionage. Zimbabwean parliamentary election, 2005 were held in March 2005 in which ZANU-PF won a two-thirds majority, were again criticised by international observers as being flawed. Mugabe's political operatives were thus able to weaken the opposition internally and the security apparatus of the state was able to destabilise it externally by using violence in anti-Mugabe strongholds to prevent citizens from voting. Some voters were 'turned away' from polling station despite having proper identification, further guaranteeing that the government could control the results. Additionally Mugabe had started to appoint judges sympathetic to the government, making any judicial appeal futile. Mugabe was also able to appoint 30 of the members of parliament.
As Senate elections approached further opposition splits occurred. Ncube's supporters argued that the M.D.C. should field a slate of candidates; Tsvangirai's argued for a boycott. When party leaders voted on the issue, Ncube's side narrowly won, but Mr. Tsvangirai declared that as president of the party he was not bound by the majority's decision. Again the opposition was weakened. As a result, the elections for a new Senate in November 2005 were largely boycotted by the opposition. Mugabe's party won 24 of the 31 constituencies where elections were held amid low voter turnout. Again, evidence surfaced of voter intimidation and fraud.
In May 2005 the government began Operation Murambatsvina. It was officially billed to rid urban areas of illegal structures, illegal business enterprises, and criminal activities. In practice its purpose was to punish political opponents. The UN estimates 700,000 people have been left without jobs or homes as a result. Families and traders, especially at the beginning of the operation, were often given no notice before police destroyed their homes and businesses. Others were able to salvage some possessions and building materials but often had nowhere to go, despite the government's statement that people should be returning to their rural homes. Thousands of families were left unprotected in the open in the middle of Zimbabwe's winter., . The government interfered with non-governmental organisation (NGO) efforts to provide emergency assistance to the displaced in many instances. Some families were removed to transit camps, where they had no shelter or cooking facilities and minimal food, supplies, and sanitary facilities. The operation continued into July 2005, when the government began a program to provide housing for the newly displaced.
Human Rights Watch said the evictions had disrupted treatment for people with HIV/AIDS in a country where 3,000 die from the disease each week and about 1.3 million children have been orphaned. The operation was "the latest manifestation of a massive human rights problem that has been going on for years", said Amnesty International. As of September 2006, housing construction fell far short of demand, and there were reports that beneficiaries were mostly civil servants and ruling party loyalists, not those displaced. The government campaign of forced evictions continued in 2006, albeit on a lesser scale.
In September 2005 Mugabe signed constitutional amendments that reinstituted a national senate (abolished in 1987) and that nationalised all land. This converted all ownership rights into leases. The amendments also ended the right of landowners to challenge government expropriation of land in the courts and marked the end of any hope of returning any land that had been hitherto grabbed by armed land invasions. Elections for the senate in November resulted in a victory for the government. The MDC split over whether to field candidates and partially boycotted the vote. In addition to low turnout there was widespread government intimidation. The split in the MDC hardened into factions, each of which claimed control of the party. The early months of 2006 were marked by food shortages and mass hunger. The sheer extremity of the siltation was revealed by the fact that in the courts, state witnesses said they were too weak from hunger to testify.
In August 2006 runaway inflation forced the government to replace its existing currency with a revalued one. In December 2006, ZANU-PF proposed the "harmonisation" of the parliamentary and presidential election schedules in 2010; the move was seen by the opposition as an excuse to extend Mugabe's term as president until 2010.
Morgan Tsvangirai was badly beaten on 12 March 2007 after being arrested and held at Machipisa Police Station in the Highfield suburb of Harare. The event garnered an international outcry and was considered particularly brutal and extreme, even considering the reputation of Mugabe's government. Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa Programme said "We are very concerned by reports of continuing brutal attacks on opposition activists in Zimbabwe and call on the government to stop all acts of violence and intimidation against opposition activists".
The economy has shrunk by 50% from 2000 to 2007. In September 2007 the inflation rate was put at almost 8,000%, the world's highest. There are frequent power and water outages. Harare's drinking water became unreliable in 2006 and as a consequence dysentery and cholera swept the city in December 2006 and January 2007. Unemployment in formal jobs is running at a record 80%. There was widespread hunger, manipulated by the government so that opposition strongholds suffer the most. Availability of bread was severely constrained after a poor wheat harvest and the closure of all bakeries.
The country, which used to be one of Africa's richest, became one of its poorest. Many observers now view the country as a 'failed state'. The settlement of the Second Congo War brought back Zimbabwe's substantial military commitment, although some troops remain to secure the mining assets under their control. The government lacks the resources or machinery to deal with the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which affects 25% of the population. With all this and the forced and violent removal of white farmers in a brutal land redistribution program, Mugabe has earned himself widespread scorn from the international arena.
The regime has managed to cling to power by creating wealthy enclaves for government ministers, and senior party members. For example, Borrowdale Brook, a suburb of Harare is an oasis of wealth and privilege. It features mansions, manicured lawns, full shops with fully stocked shelves containing an abundance of fruit and vegetables, big cars and a golf club give is the home to President Mugabe's out-of-town retreat.
Zimbabwe's bakeries shut down in October 2007 and supermarkets warned that they would have no bread for the foreseeable future due to collapse in wheat production after the seizure of white-owned farms. The ministry of agriculture has also blamed power shortages for the wheat shortfall, saying that electricity cuts have affected irrigation and halved crop yields per acre. The power shortages are because Zimbabwe relies on Mozambique for some of its electricity and that due to an unpaid bill of $35 million Mozambique had reduced the amount of electrical power it supplies. On 4 December 2007, The United States imposed travel sanctions against 38 people with ties to President Mugabe because they "played a central role in the regime's escalated human rights abuses."
On 8 December 2007, Mugabe attended a meeting of EU and African leaders in Lisbon, prompting UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to decline to attend. While German chancellor Angela Merkel criticised Mugabe with her public comments, the leaders of other African countries offered him statements of support.
The educational system in Zimbabwe which was once regarded as among the best in Africa, went into crisis in 2007 because of the country's economic meltdown. One foreign reporter witnessed hundreds of children at Hatcliffe Extension Primary School in Epworth, 19 kilometres (12 miles) west of Harare, writing in the dust on the floor because they had no exercise books or pencils. The high school exam system unravelled in 2007. Examiners refused to mark examination papers when they were offered just Z$79 a paper, enough to buy three small candies. Corruption has crept into the system and may explain why in January 2007 thousands of pupils received no marks for subjects they had entered, while others were deemed "excellent" in subjects they had not sat. However, as of late the education system has recovered and is still considered the best in Southern Africa.
Zimbabwe held a presidential election along with a 2008 parliamentary election of 29 March. The three major candidates were incumbent President Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai (MDC-T), and Simba Makoni, an independent. As no candidate received an outright majority in the first round, a second round was held on 27 June 2008 between Tsvangirai (with 47.9% of the first round vote) and Mugabe (43.2%). Tsvangirai withdrew from the second round a week before it was scheduled to take place, citing violence against his party's supporters. The second round went ahead, despite widespread criticism, and led to victory for Mugabe.
Because of Zimbabwe's dire economic situation the election was expected to provide President Mugabe with his toughest electoral challenge to date. Mugabe's opponents were critical of the handling of the electoral process, and the government was accused of planning to rig the election; Human Rights Watch said that the election was likely to be "deeply flawed". After the first round, but before the counting was completed, Jose Marcos Barrica, the head of the Southern African Development Community observer mission, described the election as "a peaceful and credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe."
No official results were announced for more than a month after the first round. The failure to release results was strongly criticised by the MDC, which unsuccessfully sought an order from the High Court to force their release. An independent projection placed Tsvangirai in the lead, but without the majority needed to avoid a second round. The MDC declared that Tsvangirai won a narrow majority in the first round and initially refused to participate in any second round. ZANU-PF has said that Mugabe will participate in a second round; the party alleged that some electoral officials, in connection with the MDC, fraudulently reduced Mugabe's score, and as a result a recount was conducted.
After the recount and the verification of the results, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced on 2 May that Tsvangirai won 47.9% and Mugabe won 43.2%, thereby necessitating a run-off, which was to be held on 27 June 2008. Despite Tsvangirai's continuing claims to have won a first round majority, he refused to participate in the second round. The period following the first round was marked by serious political violence caused by ZANU-PF. ZANU-PF blamed the MDC supporters for perpetrating this violence; Western governments and prominent Western organisations have blamed ZANU-PF for the violence which seems very likely to be true. On 22 June 2008, Tsvangirai announced that he was withdrawing from the run-off, describing it as a "violent sham" and saying that his supporters risked being killed if they voted for him. The second round nevertheless went ahead as planned with Mugabe as the only actively participating candidate, although Tsvangirai's name remained on the ballot. Mugabe won the second round by an overwhelming margin and was sworn in for another term as president on 29 June.
The international reaction to the second round have varied. The United States and states of the European Union have called for increased sanctions. On 11 July, the United Nations Security Council voted to impose sanctions on the Zimbabwe; Russia and China vetoed. The African Union has called for a "government of national unity."
Preliminary talks to set up conditions for official negotiations began between leading negotiators from both parties on 10 July, and on 22 July, the three party leaders met for the first time in Harare to express their support for a negotiated settlement of disputes arising out of the presidential and parliamentary elections. Negotiations between the parties officially began on 25 July and are currently proceeding with very few details released from the negotiation teams in Pretoria, as coverage by the media is barred from the premises where the negotiations are taking place. The talks were mediated by South African President Thabo Mbeki.
On 15 September 2008, the leaders of the 14-member Southern African Development Community witnessed the signing of the power-sharing agreement, brokered by South African leader Thabo Mbeki. With symbolic handshake and warm smiles at the Rainbow Towers hotel, in Harare, Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed the deal to end the violent political crisis. As provided, Robert Mugabe will remain president, Morgan Tsvangirai will become prime minister, ZANU-PF and the MDC will share control of the police, Mugabe's Zanu (PF) will command the Army, and Arthur Mutambara becomes deputy prime minister.
In November 2008 the Air Force of Zimbabwe was sent, after some police officers began refusing orders to shoot the illegal miners at Marange diamond fields. Up to 150 of the estimated 30,000 illegal miners were shot from helicopter gunships. In 2008 some Zimbabwean lawyers and opposition politicians from Mutare claimed that Shiri was the prime mover behind the military assaults on illegal diggers in the diamond mines in the east of Zimbabwe. Estimates of the death toll by mid-December range from 83 reported by the Mutare City Council, based on a request for burial ground, to 140 estimated by the (then) opposition Movement for Democratic Change - Tsvangirai party.
In January 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai announced that he would do as the leaders across Africa had insisted and join a coalition government as prime minister with his nemesis, President Robert Mugabe . On 11 February 2009 Tsvangirai was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. By 2009 inflation had peaked at 500 billion % per year under the Mugabe government and the Zimbabwe currency was worthless. The opposition shared power with the Mugabe regime between 2009 and 2013, Zimbabwe switched to using the US dollar as currency and the economy improved reaching a growth rate of 10% per year.
In 2013 the Mugabe government won an election which The Economist described as "rigged," doubled the size of the civil service and embarked on "...misrule and dazzling corruption." However, the United Nations, African Union and SADC endorsed the elections as free and fair.
By 2016 the economy had collapsed, nationwide protests took place throughout the country and the finance minister admitted "Right now we literally have nothing." There was the introduction of bond notes to literally fight the biting cash crisis and liquidity crunch. Cash became scarce on the market in the year 2017.
On Wednesday 15 November 2017 the military placed President Mugabe under house arrest and removed him from power. The military stated that the president was safe. The military placed tanks around government buildings in Harare and blocked the main road to the airport. Public opinion in the capital favored the dictators removal although they were uncertain about his replacement with another dictatorship. The Times reported that Emmerson Mnangagwa helped to orchestrate the coup. He had recently been sacked by Mr Mugabe so that the path could be smoothed for Grace Mugabe to replace her husband. A Zimbabwean army officer, Major General Sibusiso Moyo, went on television to say the military was targeting "criminals" around President Mugabe but not actively removing the president from power. However the head of the African Union described it as such.
Ugandan writer Charles Onyango-Obbo stated on Twitter "If it looks like a coup, walks like a coup and quacks like a coup, then it's a coup". Naunihal Singh, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of a book on military coups, described the situation in Zimbabwe as a coup. He tweeted that "'The President is safe' is a classic coup catch-phrase" of such an event.
Robert Mugabe resigned 21 November 2017. Second Vice-President Phelekezela Mphoko became the Acting President. Former Vice-President and new ZANU-PF -leader, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was sworn in as president on 24 November 2017.
General elections were held on 30 July 2018 to elect the president and members of both houses of parliament. Ruling party ZANU-PF won the majority of seats in parliament, incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa was declared the winner after receiving 50.8% of votes. The opposition accused the government of rigging the vote. In subsequent riots by MDC supporters, the army opened fire and killed three people, while three others died of their injuries the following day.
In January 2019 following a 130% increase in the price of fuel thousands of Zimbabweans protested and the government responded with a coordinated crackdown that resulted in hundreds of arrests and multiple deaths.
In June 2019, former president Robert Mugabe died in Singapore, aged 95.
Economic statistics 2021
GDP growth in Zimbabwe is projected to reach 3.9% in 2021, a significant improvement after a two-year recession, according to the World Bank Zimbabwe Economic Update. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Until roughly 2,000 years ago, what would become Zimbabwe was populated by ancestors of the San people. Bantu inhabitants of the region arrived and developed ceramic production in the area. A series of trading empires emerged, including the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and Kingdom of Zimbabwe. In the 1880s, the British South Africa Company began its activities in the region, leading to the colonial era in Southern Rhodesia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1964, the colonial government declared itself independent as Rhodesia, but largely failed to secure international recognition and faced sustained internal opposition in the Bush War.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After fifteen years of war, following the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 there was a transition to internationally recognised majority rule in 1980. The United Kingdom, which had never recognised Rhodesian independence, briefly imposed direct rule in order to grant independence on 18 April that year as the new country of Zimbabwe. In the 2000s Zimbabwe's economy began to deteriorate due to various factors, including the imposition of economic sanctions by western countries led by the United Kingdom and widespread corruption in government. Economic instability caused many Zimbabweans to emigrate. Prior to its recognized independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, the nation had been known by several names: Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe Rhodesia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Prior to the arrival of Bantu speakers in present-day Zimbabwe the region was populated by ancestors of the San people. The first Bantu-speaking farmers arrived during the Bantu expansion around 2000 years ago.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "These Bantu speakers were the makers of early Iron Age pottery belonging to the Silver Leaves or Matola tradition, of the third to fifth centuries A.D., found in southeast Zimbabwe. This tradition was part of the eastern stream of Bantu expansion (sometimes called Kwale) which originated west of the Great Lakes, spreading to the coastal regions of southeastern Kenya and north eastern Tanzania, and then southwards to Mozambique, south eastern Zimbabwe and Natal. More substantial in numbers in Zimbabwe were the makers of the Ziwa and Gokomere ceramic wares, of the fourth century A.D. Their early Iron Age ceramic tradition belonged to the highlands facies of the eastern stream, which moved inland to Malawi and Zimbabwe. Imports of beads have been found at Gokomere and Ziwa sites, possibly in return for gold exported to the coast.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A later phase of the Gokomere culture was the Zhizo in southern Zimbabwe. Zhizo communities settled in the Shashe-Limpopo area in the tenth century. Their capital there was Schroda (just across the Limpopo River from Zimbabwe). Many fragments of ceramic figurines have been recovered from there, including figures of animals and birds, and also fertility dolls. The inhabitants produced ivory bracelets and other ivory goods. Imported beads found there and at other Zhizo sites, are evidence of trade, probably of ivory and skins, with traders on the Indian Ocean coast.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Pottery belonging to a western stream of Bantu expansion (sometimes called Kalundu) has been found at sites in northeastern Zimbabwe, dating back to the seventh century. (The western stream originated in the same area as the eastern stream: both belong to the same style system, called by Phillipson the Chifumbadze system, which has general acceptance by archaeologists.) The terms eastern and western streams represent the expansion of the Bantu-speaking peoples in terms of their culture. Another question is about the branches of the Bantu languages which they spoke. It seems that the makers of the Ziwa/Gokomere wares were not the ancestral speakers of the Shona languages of today's Zimbabwe, who did not arrive in there until around the tenth century, from south of the Limpopo river, and whose ceramic culture belonged to the western stream. The linguist and historian Ehret believes that in view of the similarity of the Ziwa/Gokomere pottery to the Nkope of the ancestral Nyasa language speakers, the Ziwa/Gokomere people spoke a language closely related to the Nyasa group. Their language, whatever it was, was superseded by the ancestral Shona languages, although Ehret says that a set of Nyasa words occur in central Shona dialects today.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The evidence that the ancestral Shona speakers came from South Africa is that the ceramic styles associated with Shona speakers in Zimbabwe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries can be traced back to western stream (Kalunndu) pottery styles in South Africa. The Ziwa /Gokomere and Zhizo traditions were superseded by Leopards Kopje and Gumanye wares of the Kalundu tradition from the tenth century.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Although the western stream Kalundu tradition was ancestral to Shona ceramic wares, the closest relationships of the ancestral Shona language according to many linguists were with a southern division of eastern Bantu – such languages as the southeastern languages (Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Tsonga), Nyasa and Makwa. While it may well be the case that the people of the western stream spoke a language belonging to a wider Eastern Bantu division, it is a puzzle which remains to be resolved that they spoke a language most closely related to the languages just mentioned, all of which are today spoken in southeastern Africa.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After the Shona speaking people moved into the present day Zimbabwe many different dialects developed over time in the different parts of the country. Among these was Kalanga.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "It is believed that Kalanga speaking societies first emerged in the middle Limpopo valley in the 9th century before moving on to the Zimbabwean highlands. The Zimbabwean plateau eventually became the centre of subsequent Kalanga states. The Kingdom of Mapungubwe was the first in a series of sophisticated trade states developed in Zimbabwe by the time of the first European explorers from Portugal. They traded in gold, ivory and copper for cloth and glass. From about 1250 until 1450, Mapungubwe was eclipsed by the Kingdom of Zimbabwe. This Kalanga state further refined and expanded upon Mapungubwe's stone architecture, which survives to this day at the ruins of the kingdom's capital of Great Zimbabwe. From c. 1450–1760, Zimbabwe gave way to the Kingdom of Mutapa. This Kalanga state ruled much of the area that is known as Zimbabwe today, and parts of central Mozambique. It is known by many names including the Mutapa Empire, also known as Mwenemutapa was known for its gold trade routes with Arabs and the Portuguese. António Fernandes, a Portuguese explorer, first entered the area in 1511 from Sofala and encountered the Manyika people. He returned in 1513 and explored the northern region of the territory, coming into contact with Chikuyo Chisamarengu, the ruler of Mutapa. In the early 17th century, Portuguese settlers destroyed the trade and began a series of wars which left the empire in near collapse. As a direct response to Portuguese aggression in the interior, a new Kalanga state emerged called the Rozvi Empire. Relying on centuries of military, political and religious development, the Rozvi (which means \"destroyers\") removed the Portuguese from the Zimbabwe plateau by force of arms. The Rozvi continued the stone building traditions of the Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe kingdoms while adding guns to its arsenal and developing a professional army to protect its trade routes and conquests. Around 1821, the Zulu general Mzilikazi of the Khumalo clan successfully rebelled from King Shaka and created his own clan, the Ndebele. The Ndebele fought their way northwards into the Transvaal, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake and beginning an era of widespread devastation known as the Mfecane. When Boer trekkers converged on the Transvaal in 1836, they drove the tribe even further northward.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After losing their remaining South African lands in 1840, Mzilikazi and his tribe permanently settled the southwest of present-day Zimbabwe in what became known as Matabeleland, establishing Bulawayo as their capital. Mzilikazi then organised his society into a military system with regimental kraals, similar to those of Shaka, which was stable enough to repel further Boer incursions. During the pre-colonial period, the Ndebele social structure was stratified. It was composed of mainly three social groups, Zansi, Enhla and Amahole. The Zansi comprised the ruling class the original Khumalo people who migrated from south of Limpopo with Mzilikazi. The Enhla and Amahole groups were made up of other tribes and ethnics who had been incorporated into the empire during the migration. However, with the passage of time, this stratification has slowly disappeared The Ndebele people have for long ascribed to the worship of Unkunkulu as their supreme being. Their religious life in general, rituals, ceremonies, practices, devotion and loyalty revolves around the worship of this Supreme Being. However, with the popularisation of Christianity and other religions, Ndebele traditional religion is now uncommon.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Mzilikazi died in 1868 and, following a violent power struggle, was succeeded by his son, Lobengula. King Mzilikazi had established the Ndebele Kingdom, with Shona subjects paying tribute to him. The nascent kingdom encountered European powers for the first time and Lonbengula signed various treaties with the various nations jostling for power in the region, playing them off one another in order to preserve the sovereignty of his kingdom and gain the aid of the Europeans should the kingdom become involved in a war.",
"title": "Pre-Colonial era (1000–1852)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the 1880s, British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC) started to make inroads into the region. In 1898, the name Southern Rhodesia was adopted. In 1888, Rhodes obtained a concession for mining rights from King Lobengula of the Ndebele peoples. Cecil Rhodes presented this concession to persuade the British government to grant a royal charter to his British South Africa Company over Matabeleland, and its subject states such as Mashonaland. Rhodes sought permission to negotiate similar concessions covering all territory between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika, then known as 'Zambesia'. In accordance with the terms of aforementioned concessions and treaties, Cecil Rhodes promoted the immigration of white settlers into the region, as well as the establishment of mines, primarily to extract the diamond ores present. In 1895 the BSAC adopted the name 'Rhodesia' for the territory of Zambesia, in honour of Cecil Rhodes. In 1898, 'Southern Rhodesia' became the official denotation for the region south of the Zambezi, which later became Zimbabwe. The region to the north was administered separately by the BSAC and later named Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Shona waged unsuccessful wars (known as Chimurenga) against encroachment upon their lands by clients of BSAC and Cecil Rhodes in 1896 and 1897. Following the failed insurrections of 1896–97 the Ndebele and Shona groups became subject to Rhodes's administration thus precipitating European settlement en masse in the new colony.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The colony's first formal constitution was drafted in 1899, and copied various pieces of legislation directly from that of the Union of South Africa; Rhodesia was meant to be, in many ways, a shadow colony of the Cape. Many within the administrative framework of the BSAC assumed that Southern Rhodesia, when its \"development\" was \"suitably advanced\", would \"take its rightful place as a member of\" the Union of South Africa after the Second Boer War (1898-1902), when the four South African colonies joined under the auspices of one flag and began to work towards the creation of a unified administrative structure. The territory was made open to white settlement, and these settlers were then in turn given considerable administrative powers, including a franchise that, while on the surface non-racial, ensured \"a predominantly European electorate\" which \"operated to preclude Great Britain from modifying her policy in Southern Rhodesia and subsequently treating it as a territory inhabited mainly by Africans whose interests should be paramount and to whom British power should be transferred\".",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony in October 1923, subsequent to a referendum held the previous year. The British government took full command of the British South Africa Company's holdings, including both Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Northern Rhodesia retained its status as a colonial protectorate; Southern Rhodesia was given responsible self-government – with limitations and still annexed to the crown as a colony. Many studies of the country see it as a state that operated independently within the Commonwealth; nominally under the rule of the Crown, but technically able to do as it pleased. And in theory, Southern Rhodesia was able to govern itself, draft its own legislation, and elect its own parliamentary leaders. But in reality, this was self-government subject to supervision. Until the white minority settler government's declaration of unilateral independence in 1965, London remained in control of the colony's external affairs, and all legislation was subject to approval from the United Kingdom Government and the Queen.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1930, the Land Apportionment Act divided rural land along racial lines, creating four types of land: white-owned land that could not be acquired by Africans; purchase areas for those Africans who could afford to purchase land; Tribal Trust Lands designated as the African reserves; and Crown lands owned by the state, reserved for future use and public parks. Fifty one percent of the land was given to approximately 50,000 white inhabitants, with 29.8 per cent left for over a million Africans.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Many Rhodesians served on behalf of the United Kingdom during World War II, mainly in the East African Campaign against Axis forces in Italian East Africa.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1953, the British government consolidated the two colonies of Rhodesia with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which was dominated by Southern Rhodesia. This move was heavily opposed by the residents of Nyasaland, who feared coming under the domination of white Rhodesians. In 1962, however, with growing African nationalism and general dissent, the British government declared that Nyasaland had the right to secede from the Federation; soon afterwards, they said the same for Northern Rhodesia.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After African-majority governments had assumed control in neighbouring Northern Rhodesia and in Nyasaland, the white-minority Southern Rhodesian government led by Ian Smith made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965. The United Kingdom deemed this an act of rebellion, but did not re-establish control by force. The white minority government declared itself a republic in 1970. A civil war ensued, with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU and Robert Mugabe's ZANU using assistance from the governments of Zambia and Mozambique. Although Smith's declaration was not recognised by the United Kingdom nor any other foreign power, Southern Rhodesia dropped the designation \"Southern\", and claimed nation status as the Republic of Rhodesia in 1970 although this was not recognised internationally.",
"title": "Colonial era (1890–1980)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The country gained official independence as Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980. The government held independence celebrations in Rufaro stadium in Salisbury, the capital. Lord Christopher Soames, the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, watched as Charles, Prince of Wales, gave a farewell salute and the Rhodesian Signal Corps played \"God Save the Queen\". Many foreign dignitaries also attended, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, President Shehu Shagari of Nigeria, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, President Seretse Khama of Botswana, and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of Australia, representing the Commonwealth of Nations. Bob Marley sang 'Zimbabwe', a song he wrote, at the government's invitation in a concert at the country's independence festivities.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "President Shagari pledged $15 million at the celebration to train Zimbabweans in Zimbabwe and expatriates in Nigeria. Mugabe's government used part of the money to buy newspaper companies owned by South Africans, increasing the government's control over the media. The rest went to training students in Nigerian universities, government workers in the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria in Badagry, and soldiers in the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna. Later that year Mugabe commissioned a report by the BBC on press freedom in Zimbabwe. The BBC issued its report on 26 June, recommending the privatisation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and its independence from political interests.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Mugabe's government changed the capital's name from Salisbury to Harare on 18 April 1982 in celebration of the second anniversary of independence. The government renamed the main street in the capital, Jameson Avenue, in honour of Samora Machel, President of Mozambique.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1992, a World Bank study indicated that more than 500 health centres had been built since 1980. The percentage of children vaccinated increased from 25% in 1980 to 67% in 1988 and life expectancy increased from 55 to 59 years. Enrolment increased by 232 per cent one year after primary education was made free and secondary school enrolment increased by 33 per cent in two years. These social policies lead to an increase in the debt ratio. Several laws were passed in the 1980s in an attempt to reduce wage gaps. However, the gaps remained considerable. In 1988, the law gave women, at least in theory, the same rights as men. Previously, they could only take a few personal initiatives without the consent of their father or husband.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The new Constitution provided for an executive President as Head of State with a Prime Minister as Head of Government. Reverend Canaan Banana served as the first President. In government amended the Constitution in 1987 to provide for an Executive President and abolished the office of Prime Minister. The constitutional changes came into effect on 1 January 1988 with Robert Mugabe as president. The bicameral Parliament of Zimbabwe had a directly elected House of Assembly and an indirectly elected Senate, partly made up of tribal chiefs. The Constitution established two separate voters rolls, one for the black majority, who had 80% of the seats in Parliament, and the other for whites and other ethnic minorities, such as Coloureds, people of mixed race, and Asians, who held 20%. The government amended the Constitution in 1986, eliminating the voter rolls and replacing the white seats with seats filled by nominated members. Many white MPs joined ZANU which then reappointed them. In 1990 the government abolished the Senate and increased the House of Assembly's membership to include members nominated by the President.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Prime Minister Mugabe kept Peter Walls, the head of the army, in his government and put him in charge of integrating the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), and the Rhodesian Army. While Western media outlets praised Mugabe's efforts at reconciliation with the white minority, tension soon developed. On 17 March 1980, after several unsuccessful assassination attempts Mugabe asked Walls, \"Why are your men trying to kill me?\" Walls replied, \"If they were my men you would be dead.\" BBC News interviewed Walls on 11 August 1980. He told the BBC that he had asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to annul the 1980 election prior to the official announcement of the result on the grounds that Mugabe used intimidation to win the election. Walls said Thatcher had not replied to his request. On 12 August British government officials denied that they had not responded, saying Antony Duff, Deputy Governor of Salisbury, told Walls on 3 March that Thatcher would not annul the election.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Minister of Information Nathan Shamuyarira said the government would not be \"held ransom by racial misfits\" and told \"all those Europeans who do not accept the new order to pack their bags.\" He also said the government continued to consider taking \"legal or administrative action\" against Walls. Mugabe, returning from a visit with United States President Jimmy Carter in New York City, said, \"One thing is quite clear—we are not going to have disloyal characters in our society.\" Walls returned to Zimbabwe after the interview, telling Peter Hawthorne of Time magazine, \"To stay away at this time would have appeared like an admission of guilt.\" Mugabe drafted legislation that would exile Walls from Zimbabwe for life and Walls moved to South Africa.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Ethnic divisions soon came back to the forefront of national politics. Tension between ZAPU and ZANU erupted with guerrilla activity starting again in Matabeleland in south-western Zimbabwe. Nkomo (ZAPU) left for exile in Britain and did not return until Mugabe guaranteed his safety. In 1982 government security officials discovered large caches of arms and ammunition on properties owned by ZAPU, accusing Nkomo and his followers of plotting to overthrow the government. Mugabe fired Nkomo and his closest aides from the cabinet. Seven MPs, members of the Rhodesian Front, left Smith's party to sit as \"independents\" on 4 March 1982, signifying their dissatisfaction with his policies. As a result of what they saw as persecution of Nkomo and his party, PF-ZAPU supporters, army deserters began a campaign of dissidence against the government. Centring primarily in Matabeleland, home of the Ndebeles who were at the time PF-ZAPU's main followers, this dissidence continued through 1987. It involved attacks on government personnel and installations, armed banditry aimed at disrupting security and economic life in the rural areas, and harassment of ZANU-PF members.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Because of the unsettled security situation immediately after independence and democratic sentiments, the government kept in force a \"state of emergency\". This gave the government widespread powers under the \"Law and Order Maintenance Act,\" including the right to detain persons without charge which it used quite widely. In 1983 to 1984 the government declared a curfew in areas of Matabeleland and sent in the army in an attempt to suppress members of the Ndebele tribe. The pacification campaign, known as the Gukuruhundi, or strong wind, resulted in at least 20,000 civilian deaths perpetrated by an elite, North Korean-trained brigade, known in Zimbabwe as the Gukurahundi.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "ZANU-PF increased its majority in the 1985 elections, winning 67 of the 100 seats. The majority gave Mugabe the opportunity to start making changes to the constitution, including those with regard to land restoration. Fighting did not cease until Mugabe and Nkomo reached an agreement in December 1987 whereby ZAPU became part of ZANU-PF and the government changed the constitution to make Mugabe the country's first executive president and Nkomo one of two vice-presidents.",
"title": "Independence and the 1980s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Elections in March 1990 resulted in another overwhelming victory for Mugabe and his party, which won 117 of the 120 election seats. Election observers estimated voter turnout at only 54% and found the campaign neither free nor fair, though balloting met international standards. Unsatisfied with a de facto one-party state, Mugabe called on the ZANU-PF Central Committee to support the creation of a de jure one-party state in September 1990 and lost. The government began further amending the constitution. The judiciary and human rights advocates fiercely criticised the first amendments enacted in April 1991 because they restored corporal and capital punishment and denied recourse to the courts in cases of compulsory purchase of land by the government. The general health of the civilian population also began to significantly flounder and by 1997 25% of the population of Zimbabwe had been infected by HIV, the AIDS virus.",
"title": "1990s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "During the 1990s students, trade unionists, and workers often demonstrated to express their discontent with the government. Students protested in 1990 against proposals for an increase in government control of universities and again in 1991 and 1992 when they clashed with police. Trade unionists and workers also criticised the government during this time. In 1992 police prevented trade unionists from holding anti-government demonstrations. In 1994 widespread industrial unrest weakened the economy. In 1996 civil servants, nurses, and junior doctors went on strike over salary issues.",
"title": "1990s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On 9 December 1997 a national strike paralysed the country. Mugabe was panicked by demonstrations by ZANLA ex-combatants, war veterans, who had been the heart of incursions 20 years earlier in the Bush War. He agreed to pay them large gratuities and pensions, which proved to be a wholly unproductive and unbudgeted financial commitment. The discontent with the government spawned draconian government crackdowns which in turn started to destroy both the fabric of the state and of society. This in turn brought with it further discontent within the population. Thus a vicious downward spiral commenced.",
"title": "1990s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Although many whites had left Zimbabwe after independence, mainly for neighbouring South Africa, those who remained continued to wield disproportionate control of some sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. In the late-1990s whites accounted for less than 1% of the population but owned 70% of arable land. Mugabe raised this issue of land ownership by white farmers. In a calculated move, he began forcible land redistribution, which brought the government into headlong conflict with the International Monetary Fund. Amid a severe drought in the region, the police and military were instructed not to stop the invasion of white-owned farms by the so-called 'war veterans' and youth militia. This led to a mass migration of White Zimbabweans out of Zimbabwe. At present almost no arable land is in the possession of white farmers.",
"title": "1990s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The economy was run along corporatist lines with strict governmental controls on all aspects of the economy. Controls were placed on wages, prices and massive increases in government spending resulting in significant budget deficits. This experiment met with very mixed results and Zimbabwe fell further behind the first world and unemployment. Some market reforms in the 1990s were attempted. A 40 per cent devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar was allowed to occur and price and wage controls were removed. These policies also failed at that time. Growth, employment, wages, and social service spending contracted sharply, inflation did not improve, the deficit remained well above target, and many industrial firms, notably in textiles and footwear, closed in response to increased competition and high real interest rates. The incidence of poverty in the country increased during this time.",
"title": "1990s"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "However, Zimbabwe began experiencing a period of considerable political and economic upheaval in 1999. Opposition to President Mugabe and the ZANU-PF government grew considerably after the mid-1990s in part due to worsening economic and human rights conditions brought about by the seizure of farmland owned by white farmers and economic sanctions imposed by Western countries in response. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was established in September 1999 as an opposition party founded by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai.",
"title": "1999 to 2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The MDC's first opportunity to test opposition to the Mugabe government came in February 2000, when a referendum was held on a draft constitution proposed by the government. Among its elements, the new constitution would have permitted President Mugabe to seek two additional terms in office, granted government officials immunity from prosecution, and authorised government seizure of white-owned land. The referendum was handily defeated. Shortly thereafter, the government, through a loosely organised group of war veterans, some of the so-called war veterans judging from their age were not war veterans as they were too young to have fought in the chimurenga, sanctioned an aggressive land redistribution program often characterised by forced expulsion of white farmers and violence against both farmers and farm employees.",
"title": "1999 to 2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Parliamentary elections held in June 2000 were marred by localised violence, electoral irregularities, and government intimidation of opposition supporters. Nonetheless, the MDC succeeded in capturing 57 of 120 seats in the National Assembly.",
"title": "1999 to 2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Presidential elections were held in March 2002. In the months leading up to the poll, ZANU-PF, with the support of the army, security services, and especially the so-called 'war veterans', – very few of whom actually fought in the Second Chimurenga against the Smith regime in the 1970s – set about wholesale intimidation and suppression of the MDC-led opposition. Despite strong international criticism, these measures, together with organised subversion of the electoral process, ensured a Mugabe victory . The government's behaviour drew strong criticism from the EU and the US, which imposed limited sanctions against the leading members of the Mugabe regime. Since the 2002 election, Zimbabwe has suffered further economic difficulty and growing political chaos.",
"title": "2002"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Divisions within the opposition MDC had begun to fester early in the decade, after Morgan Tsvangirai (the president of the MDC) was lured into a government sting operation that videotaped him talking of Mr. Mugabe's removal from power. He was subsequently arrested and put on trial on treason charges. This crippled his control of party affairs and raised questions about his competence. It also catalysed a major split within the party. In 2004 he was acquitted, but not until after suffering serious abuse and mistreatment in prison. The opposing faction was led by Welshman Ncube who was the general secretary of the party. In mid-2004, vigilantes loyal to Mr. Tsvangirai began attacking members who were mostly loyal to Ncube, climaxing in a September raid on the party's Harare headquarters in which the security director was nearly thrown to his death.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "An internal party inquiry later established that aides to Tsvangirai had tolerated, if not endorsed, the violence. Divisive as the violence was, it was a debate over the rule of law that set off the party's final break-up in November 2005. These division severely weakened the opposition. In addition the government employed its own operatives to both spy on each side and to undermine each side via acts of espionage. Zimbabwean parliamentary election, 2005 were held in March 2005 in which ZANU-PF won a two-thirds majority, were again criticised by international observers as being flawed. Mugabe's political operatives were thus able to weaken the opposition internally and the security apparatus of the state was able to destabilise it externally by using violence in anti-Mugabe strongholds to prevent citizens from voting. Some voters were 'turned away' from polling station despite having proper identification, further guaranteeing that the government could control the results. Additionally Mugabe had started to appoint judges sympathetic to the government, making any judicial appeal futile. Mugabe was also able to appoint 30 of the members of parliament.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "As Senate elections approached further opposition splits occurred. Ncube's supporters argued that the M.D.C. should field a slate of candidates; Tsvangirai's argued for a boycott. When party leaders voted on the issue, Ncube's side narrowly won, but Mr. Tsvangirai declared that as president of the party he was not bound by the majority's decision. Again the opposition was weakened. As a result, the elections for a new Senate in November 2005 were largely boycotted by the opposition. Mugabe's party won 24 of the 31 constituencies where elections were held amid low voter turnout. Again, evidence surfaced of voter intimidation and fraud.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In May 2005 the government began Operation Murambatsvina. It was officially billed to rid urban areas of illegal structures, illegal business enterprises, and criminal activities. In practice its purpose was to punish political opponents. The UN estimates 700,000 people have been left without jobs or homes as a result. Families and traders, especially at the beginning of the operation, were often given no notice before police destroyed their homes and businesses. Others were able to salvage some possessions and building materials but often had nowhere to go, despite the government's statement that people should be returning to their rural homes. Thousands of families were left unprotected in the open in the middle of Zimbabwe's winter., . The government interfered with non-governmental organisation (NGO) efforts to provide emergency assistance to the displaced in many instances. Some families were removed to transit camps, where they had no shelter or cooking facilities and minimal food, supplies, and sanitary facilities. The operation continued into July 2005, when the government began a program to provide housing for the newly displaced.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Human Rights Watch said the evictions had disrupted treatment for people with HIV/AIDS in a country where 3,000 die from the disease each week and about 1.3 million children have been orphaned. The operation was \"the latest manifestation of a massive human rights problem that has been going on for years\", said Amnesty International. As of September 2006, housing construction fell far short of demand, and there were reports that beneficiaries were mostly civil servants and ruling party loyalists, not those displaced. The government campaign of forced evictions continued in 2006, albeit on a lesser scale.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In September 2005 Mugabe signed constitutional amendments that reinstituted a national senate (abolished in 1987) and that nationalised all land. This converted all ownership rights into leases. The amendments also ended the right of landowners to challenge government expropriation of land in the courts and marked the end of any hope of returning any land that had been hitherto grabbed by armed land invasions. Elections for the senate in November resulted in a victory for the government. The MDC split over whether to field candidates and partially boycotted the vote. In addition to low turnout there was widespread government intimidation. The split in the MDC hardened into factions, each of which claimed control of the party. The early months of 2006 were marked by food shortages and mass hunger. The sheer extremity of the siltation was revealed by the fact that in the courts, state witnesses said they were too weak from hunger to testify.",
"title": "2003–2005"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In August 2006 runaway inflation forced the government to replace its existing currency with a revalued one. In December 2006, ZANU-PF proposed the \"harmonisation\" of the parliamentary and presidential election schedules in 2010; the move was seen by the opposition as an excuse to extend Mugabe's term as president until 2010.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Morgan Tsvangirai was badly beaten on 12 March 2007 after being arrested and held at Machipisa Police Station in the Highfield suburb of Harare. The event garnered an international outcry and was considered particularly brutal and extreme, even considering the reputation of Mugabe's government. Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa Programme said \"We are very concerned by reports of continuing brutal attacks on opposition activists in Zimbabwe and call on the government to stop all acts of violence and intimidation against opposition activists\".",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The economy has shrunk by 50% from 2000 to 2007. In September 2007 the inflation rate was put at almost 8,000%, the world's highest. There are frequent power and water outages. Harare's drinking water became unreliable in 2006 and as a consequence dysentery and cholera swept the city in December 2006 and January 2007. Unemployment in formal jobs is running at a record 80%. There was widespread hunger, manipulated by the government so that opposition strongholds suffer the most. Availability of bread was severely constrained after a poor wheat harvest and the closure of all bakeries.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The country, which used to be one of Africa's richest, became one of its poorest. Many observers now view the country as a 'failed state'. The settlement of the Second Congo War brought back Zimbabwe's substantial military commitment, although some troops remain to secure the mining assets under their control. The government lacks the resources or machinery to deal with the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which affects 25% of the population. With all this and the forced and violent removal of white farmers in a brutal land redistribution program, Mugabe has earned himself widespread scorn from the international arena.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The regime has managed to cling to power by creating wealthy enclaves for government ministers, and senior party members. For example, Borrowdale Brook, a suburb of Harare is an oasis of wealth and privilege. It features mansions, manicured lawns, full shops with fully stocked shelves containing an abundance of fruit and vegetables, big cars and a golf club give is the home to President Mugabe's out-of-town retreat.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Zimbabwe's bakeries shut down in October 2007 and supermarkets warned that they would have no bread for the foreseeable future due to collapse in wheat production after the seizure of white-owned farms. The ministry of agriculture has also blamed power shortages for the wheat shortfall, saying that electricity cuts have affected irrigation and halved crop yields per acre. The power shortages are because Zimbabwe relies on Mozambique for some of its electricity and that due to an unpaid bill of $35 million Mozambique had reduced the amount of electrical power it supplies. On 4 December 2007, The United States imposed travel sanctions against 38 people with ties to President Mugabe because they \"played a central role in the regime's escalated human rights abuses.\"",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On 8 December 2007, Mugabe attended a meeting of EU and African leaders in Lisbon, prompting UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to decline to attend. While German chancellor Angela Merkel criticised Mugabe with her public comments, the leaders of other African countries offered him statements of support.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The educational system in Zimbabwe which was once regarded as among the best in Africa, went into crisis in 2007 because of the country's economic meltdown. One foreign reporter witnessed hundreds of children at Hatcliffe Extension Primary School in Epworth, 19 kilometres (12 miles) west of Harare, writing in the dust on the floor because they had no exercise books or pencils. The high school exam system unravelled in 2007. Examiners refused to mark examination papers when they were offered just Z$79 a paper, enough to buy three small candies. Corruption has crept into the system and may explain why in January 2007 thousands of pupils received no marks for subjects they had entered, while others were deemed \"excellent\" in subjects they had not sat. However, as of late the education system has recovered and is still considered the best in Southern Africa.",
"title": "2006 to 2007"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Zimbabwe held a presidential election along with a 2008 parliamentary election of 29 March. The three major candidates were incumbent President Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai (MDC-T), and Simba Makoni, an independent. As no candidate received an outright majority in the first round, a second round was held on 27 June 2008 between Tsvangirai (with 47.9% of the first round vote) and Mugabe (43.2%). Tsvangirai withdrew from the second round a week before it was scheduled to take place, citing violence against his party's supporters. The second round went ahead, despite widespread criticism, and led to victory for Mugabe.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Because of Zimbabwe's dire economic situation the election was expected to provide President Mugabe with his toughest electoral challenge to date. Mugabe's opponents were critical of the handling of the electoral process, and the government was accused of planning to rig the election; Human Rights Watch said that the election was likely to be \"deeply flawed\". After the first round, but before the counting was completed, Jose Marcos Barrica, the head of the Southern African Development Community observer mission, described the election as \"a peaceful and credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe.\"",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "No official results were announced for more than a month after the first round. The failure to release results was strongly criticised by the MDC, which unsuccessfully sought an order from the High Court to force their release. An independent projection placed Tsvangirai in the lead, but without the majority needed to avoid a second round. The MDC declared that Tsvangirai won a narrow majority in the first round and initially refused to participate in any second round. ZANU-PF has said that Mugabe will participate in a second round; the party alleged that some electoral officials, in connection with the MDC, fraudulently reduced Mugabe's score, and as a result a recount was conducted.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "After the recount and the verification of the results, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced on 2 May that Tsvangirai won 47.9% and Mugabe won 43.2%, thereby necessitating a run-off, which was to be held on 27 June 2008. Despite Tsvangirai's continuing claims to have won a first round majority, he refused to participate in the second round. The period following the first round was marked by serious political violence caused by ZANU-PF. ZANU-PF blamed the MDC supporters for perpetrating this violence; Western governments and prominent Western organisations have blamed ZANU-PF for the violence which seems very likely to be true. On 22 June 2008, Tsvangirai announced that he was withdrawing from the run-off, describing it as a \"violent sham\" and saying that his supporters risked being killed if they voted for him. The second round nevertheless went ahead as planned with Mugabe as the only actively participating candidate, although Tsvangirai's name remained on the ballot. Mugabe won the second round by an overwhelming margin and was sworn in for another term as president on 29 June.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The international reaction to the second round have varied. The United States and states of the European Union have called for increased sanctions. On 11 July, the United Nations Security Council voted to impose sanctions on the Zimbabwe; Russia and China vetoed. The African Union has called for a \"government of national unity.\"",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Preliminary talks to set up conditions for official negotiations began between leading negotiators from both parties on 10 July, and on 22 July, the three party leaders met for the first time in Harare to express their support for a negotiated settlement of disputes arising out of the presidential and parliamentary elections. Negotiations between the parties officially began on 25 July and are currently proceeding with very few details released from the negotiation teams in Pretoria, as coverage by the media is barred from the premises where the negotiations are taking place. The talks were mediated by South African President Thabo Mbeki.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On 15 September 2008, the leaders of the 14-member Southern African Development Community witnessed the signing of the power-sharing agreement, brokered by South African leader Thabo Mbeki. With symbolic handshake and warm smiles at the Rainbow Towers hotel, in Harare, Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed the deal to end the violent political crisis. As provided, Robert Mugabe will remain president, Morgan Tsvangirai will become prime minister, ZANU-PF and the MDC will share control of the police, Mugabe's Zanu (PF) will command the Army, and Arthur Mutambara becomes deputy prime minister.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In November 2008 the Air Force of Zimbabwe was sent, after some police officers began refusing orders to shoot the illegal miners at Marange diamond fields. Up to 150 of the estimated 30,000 illegal miners were shot from helicopter gunships. In 2008 some Zimbabwean lawyers and opposition politicians from Mutare claimed that Shiri was the prime mover behind the military assaults on illegal diggers in the diamond mines in the east of Zimbabwe. Estimates of the death toll by mid-December range from 83 reported by the Mutare City Council, based on a request for burial ground, to 140 estimated by the (then) opposition Movement for Democratic Change - Tsvangirai party.",
"title": "2008"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In January 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai announced that he would do as the leaders across Africa had insisted and join a coalition government as prime minister with his nemesis, President Robert Mugabe . On 11 February 2009 Tsvangirai was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. By 2009 inflation had peaked at 500 billion % per year under the Mugabe government and the Zimbabwe currency was worthless. The opposition shared power with the Mugabe regime between 2009 and 2013, Zimbabwe switched to using the US dollar as currency and the economy improved reaching a growth rate of 10% per year.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 2013 the Mugabe government won an election which The Economist described as \"rigged,\" doubled the size of the civil service and embarked on \"...misrule and dazzling corruption.\" However, the United Nations, African Union and SADC endorsed the elections as free and fair.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "By 2016 the economy had collapsed, nationwide protests took place throughout the country and the finance minister admitted \"Right now we literally have nothing.\" There was the introduction of bond notes to literally fight the biting cash crisis and liquidity crunch. Cash became scarce on the market in the year 2017.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "On Wednesday 15 November 2017 the military placed President Mugabe under house arrest and removed him from power. The military stated that the president was safe. The military placed tanks around government buildings in Harare and blocked the main road to the airport. Public opinion in the capital favored the dictators removal although they were uncertain about his replacement with another dictatorship. The Times reported that Emmerson Mnangagwa helped to orchestrate the coup. He had recently been sacked by Mr Mugabe so that the path could be smoothed for Grace Mugabe to replace her husband. A Zimbabwean army officer, Major General Sibusiso Moyo, went on television to say the military was targeting \"criminals\" around President Mugabe but not actively removing the president from power. However the head of the African Union described it as such.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Ugandan writer Charles Onyango-Obbo stated on Twitter \"If it looks like a coup, walks like a coup and quacks like a coup, then it's a coup\". Naunihal Singh, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of a book on military coups, described the situation in Zimbabwe as a coup. He tweeted that \"'The President is safe' is a classic coup catch-phrase\" of such an event.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Robert Mugabe resigned 21 November 2017. Second Vice-President Phelekezela Mphoko became the Acting President. Former Vice-President and new ZANU-PF -leader, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was sworn in as president on 24 November 2017.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "General elections were held on 30 July 2018 to elect the president and members of both houses of parliament. Ruling party ZANU-PF won the majority of seats in parliament, incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa was declared the winner after receiving 50.8% of votes. The opposition accused the government of rigging the vote. In subsequent riots by MDC supporters, the army opened fire and killed three people, while three others died of their injuries the following day.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In January 2019 following a 130% increase in the price of fuel thousands of Zimbabweans protested and the government responded with a coordinated crackdown that resulted in hundreds of arrests and multiple deaths.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In June 2019, former president Robert Mugabe died in Singapore, aged 95.",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Economic statistics 2021",
"title": "2009 to present"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "GDP growth in Zimbabwe is projected to reach 3.9% in 2021, a significant improvement after a two-year recession, according to the World Bank Zimbabwe Economic Update.",
"title": "2009 to present"
}
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| Until roughly 2,000 years ago, what would become Zimbabwe was populated by ancestors of the San people. Bantu inhabitants of the region arrived and developed ceramic production in the area. A series of trading empires emerged, including the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and Kingdom of Zimbabwe. In the 1880s, the British South Africa Company began its activities in the region, leading to the colonial era in Southern Rhodesia. In 1964, the colonial government declared itself independent as Rhodesia, but largely failed to secure international recognition and faced sustained internal opposition in the Bush War. After fifteen years of war, following the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 there was a transition to internationally recognised majority rule in 1980. The United Kingdom, which had never recognised Rhodesian independence, briefly imposed direct rule in order to grant independence on 18 April that year as the new country of Zimbabwe. In the 2000s Zimbabwe's economy began to deteriorate due to various factors, including the imposition of economic sanctions by western countries led by the United Kingdom and widespread corruption in government. Economic instability caused many Zimbabweans to emigrate. Prior to its recognized independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, the nation had been known by several names: Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe Rhodesia. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-22T14:17:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zimbabwe |
14,115 | History of Russia | The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. In 882, Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority, moving the governance center to Kiev by the end of the 10th century, and maintaining northern and southern parts with significant autonomy from each other. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasions in 1237–1240. After the 13th century, Moscow became a political and cultural magnet for the unification of Russian lands. By the end of the 15th century, many of the petty principalities around Moscow had been united with the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which took full control of its own sovereignty under Ivan the Great.
Ivan the Terrible transformed the Grand Duchy into the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. However, the death of Ivan's son Feodor I without issue in 1598 created a succession crisis and led Russia into a period of chaos and civil war known as the Time of Troubles, ending with the coronation of Michael Romanov as the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. During the rest of the seventeenth century, Russia completed the exploration and conquest of Siberia, claiming lands as far as the Pacific Ocean by the end of the century. Domestically, Russia faced numerous uprisings of the various ethnic groups under their control, as exemplified by the Cossack leader Stenka Razin, who led a revolt in 1670–1671. In 1721, in the wake of the Great Northern War, Tsar Peter the Great renamed the state as the Russian Empire; he is also noted for establishing St. Petersburg as the new capital of his Empire, and for his introducing Western European culture to Russia. In 1762, Russia came under the control of Catherine the Great, who continued the westernizing policies of Peter the Great, and ushered in the era of the Russian Enlightenment. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, repulsed an invasion by the French Emperor Napoleon, leading Russia into the status of one of the great powers.
Peasant revolts intensified during the nineteenth century, culminating with Alexander II abolishing Russian serfdom in 1861. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906, and the State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power. A combination of economic breakdown, mismanagement over Russia's involvement in World War I, and discontent with the autocratic system of government triggered the Russian Revolution in 1917. The end of the monarchy initially brought into office a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists, but their failed policies led to the October Revolution. In 1922, Soviet Russia, along with the Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, officially merging all four republics to form the Soviet Union as a single state. Between 1922 and 1991 the history of Russia essentially became the history of the Soviet Union. During this period, the Soviet Union was one of the victors in World War II after recovering from a massive surprise invasion in 1941 by Nazi Germany, which had previously signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The USSR's network of satellite states in Eastern Europe, which were brought into its sphere of influence in the closing stages of World War II, helped the country become a superpower competing with fellow superpower the United States and other Western countries in the Cold War.
By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of Soviet economic and political structures becoming acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which eventually led to the weakening of the communist party and dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-Soviet Russia. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself as the Russian Federation and became the primary successor state to the Soviet Union. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status. Scrapping the central planning and state-ownership of property of the Soviet era in the 1990s, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin, took political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an assertive foreign policy. Coupled with economic growth, Russia has since regained significant global status as a world power. Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula led to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to significantly expanded sanctions. Under Putin's leadership, corruption in Russia is rated as the worst in Europe, and Russia's human rights situation has been increasingly criticized by international observers.
The first human settlement on the territory of Russia dates back to the Oldowan period in the early Lower Paleolithic. About 2 million years ago, representatives of Homo erectus migrated from Western Asia to the North Caucasus (archaeological site of Kermek [ru] on the Taman Peninsula). At Bogatyri/Sinyaya balka [ru], in a skull of Elasmotherium caucasicum, which lived 1.5–1.2 million years ago, a stone tool was found. 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools have been discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in the territory of present-day Russia.
Fossils of Denisovans in Russia date to about 110,000 years ago. DNA from a bone fragment found in Denisova Cave, belonging to a female who died about 90,000 years ago, shows that she was a hybrid of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Russia was also home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals - the partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in Mezmaiskaya cave in Adygea showed a carbon-dated age of only 45,000 years. In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, uncovered a 40,000-year-old small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, which DNA analysis revealed to be a previously unknown species of human, which was named the Denisova hominin.
The first trace of Homo sapiens on the large expanse of Russian territory dates back to 45,000 years, in central Siberia (Ust'-Ishim man). The discovery of some of the earliest evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Europe was reported in 2007 from the Kostenki archaeological site near the Don River in Russia (dated to at least 40,000 years ago) and at Sungir (34,600 years ago). Humans reached Arctic Russia (Mamontovaya Kurya) by 40,000 years ago.
During the prehistoric eras the vast steppes of Southern Russia were home to tribes of nomadic pastoralists. (In classical antiquity, the Pontic Steppe was known as "Scythia".) Remnants of these long-gone steppe cultures were discovered in the course of the 20th century in such places as Ipatovo, Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk.
In the later part of the 8th century BCE, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and Phanagoria. Gelonus was described by Herodotus as a huge (Europe's biggest) earth- and wood-fortified grad inhabited around 500 BC by Heloni and Budini. In 513 BC, the king of the Achaemenid Empire, Darius I, would launch a military campaign around the Black Sea into Scythia, modern-day Ukraine, eventually reaching the Tanais river (now known as the Don).
Greeks, mostly from the city-state of Miletus, would colonize large parts of modern-day Crimea and the Sea of Azov during the seventh and sixth centuries BC, eventually unifying into the Bosporan Kingdom by 480 BC, and would be incorporated into the large Kingdom of Pontus in 107 BC. The Kingdom would eventually be conquered by the Roman Republic, and the Bosporan Kingdom would become a client state of the Roman Empire. At about the 2nd century AD Goths migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, a semi-legendary Gothic kingdom of Oium existed in Southern Russia until it was overrun by Huns. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, the Bosporan Kingdom was also overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which would often move on to Europe, as was the case with the Huns and Turkish Avars.
In the second millennium BC, the territories between the Kama and the Irtysh Rivers were the home of a Proto-Uralic-speaking population that had contacts with Proto-Indo-European speakers from the south. The woodland population is the ancestor of the modern Ugrian inhabitants of Trans-Uralia. Other researchers say that the Khanty people originated in the south Ural steppe and moved northwards into their current location about 500 AD.
A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas through to the 8th century. Noted for their laws, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism, the Khazars were the main commercial link between the Baltic and the Muslim Abbasid empire centered in Baghdad. They were important allies of the Eastern Roman Empire, and waged a series of successful wars against the Arab Caliphates. In the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism.
Some of the ancestors of the modern Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the Pripet Marshes. The Early East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia in two waves: one moving from Kiev (present-day Ukraine) towards present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk (present-day Belarus) towards Novgorod and Rostov.
From the 7th century onwards, East Slavs constituted the bulk of the population in Western Russia and slowly conquered and assimilated the native Finnic and Baltic tribes, such as the Merya, the Muromians, and the Meshchera.
Scandinavian Norsemen, known as Vikings in Western Europe and Varangians in the East, combined piracy and trade throughout Northern Europe. In the mid-9th century, they began to venture along the waterways from the eastern Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas. According to the legendary Calling of the Varangians, recorded in several Rus' chronicles such as the Novgorod First Chronicle and Primary Chronicle, the Varangians Rurik, Sineus and Truvor were invited in the 860s to restore order in three towns – either Novgorod (most texts) or Staraya Ladoga (Hypatian Codex); Beloozero; and Izborsk (most texts) or "Slovensk" (Pskov Third Chronicle), respectively. Their successors allegedly moved south and extended their authority to Kiev, which had been previously dominated by the Khazars.
Thus, the first East Slavic state, Rus', emerged in the 9th century along the Dnieper River valley. A coordinated group of princely states with a common interest in maintaining trade along the river routes, Kievan Rus' controlled the trade route for furs, wax, and slaves between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire along the Volkhov and Dnieper Rivers.
By the end of the 10th century, the minority Norse military aristocracy had merged with the native Slavic population, which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the course of the multiple campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople. One such campaign claimed the life of the foremost Slavic druzhina leader, Svyatoslav I, who was renowned for having crushed the power of the Khazars on the Volga.
Kievan Rus' is important for its introduction of a Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion, dramatically deepening a synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next thousand years. The region adopted Christianity in 988 by the official act of public baptism of Kiev inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I. Some years later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda, was introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. From the onset, the Kievan princes followed the Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them.
By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus' displayed an economy and achievements in architecture and literature superior to those that then existed in the western part of the continent. Compared with the languages of European Christendom, the Russian language was little influenced by the Greek and Latin of early Christian writings. This was because Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead. A nomadic Turkic people, the Kipchaks (also known as the Cumans), replaced the earlier Pechenegs as the dominant force in the south steppe regions neighbouring to Rus' at the end of the 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular attacks, especially in Kiev, was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic incursions caused a massive influx of Slavs to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, particularly to the area known as Zalesye.
Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal in the north-east, Novgorod in the north, and Halych-Volhynia in the south-west. Conquest by the Mongol Golden Horde in the 13th century was the final blow. Kiev was destroyed. Halych-Volhynia would eventually be absorbed into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while the Mongol-dominated Vladimir-Suzdal and independent Novgorod Republic, two regions on the periphery of Kiev, would establish the basis for the modern Russian nation.
The invading Mongols accelerated the fragmentation of the Rus'. In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River and were soundly defeated. In 1237–1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir (4 February 1238) and other major cities of northeast Russia, routed the Russians at the Sit' River, and then moved west into Poland and Hungary. By then they had conquered most of the Russian principalities. Only the Novgorod Republic escaped occupation and continued to flourish in the orbit of the Hanseatic League.
The impact of the Mongol invasion on the territories of Kievan Rus' was uneven. The advanced city culture was almost completely destroyed. As older centers such as Kiev and Vladimir never recovered from the devastation of the initial attack, the new cities of Moscow, Tver and Nizhny Novgorod began to compete for hegemony in the Mongol-dominated Rus' principalities under the suzerainty of the Golden Horde. Although a coalition of Rus' princes led by Dmitry Donskoy defeated Mongol warlord Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380, forces of the new khan Tokhtamysh and his Rus' allies immediately sacked Moscow in 1382 as punishment for resisting Mongol authority. Mongol domination of the Rus' principalities, along with tax collection by various overlords such as the Crimean Khans, continued into the early 16th century, despite later claims of Muscovite bookmen that the indecisive standoff at the Ugra in 1480 had signified "the end of the Tatar yoke" and the "liberation of Russia".
The Mongols dominated the lower reaches of the Volga and held Russia in sway from their western capital at Sarai, one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The princes had to pay tribute to the Mongols of the Golden Horde, commonly called Tatars; but in return they received charters authorizing them to act as deputies to the khans. In general, the princes were allowed considerable freedom to rule as they wished, while the Russian Orthodox Church even experienced a spiritual revival.
The Mongols left their impact on the Russians in such areas as military tactics and transportation. Under Mongol occupation, Muscovy also developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and military organization.
At the same time, Prince of Novgorod, Alexander Nevsky, managed to repel the offensive of the Northern Crusades against Novgorod from the West. Despite this, becoming the Grand Prince, Alexander declared himself a vassal to the Golden Horde, not having the strength to resist its power.
Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow (known as Muscovy in English), which first cooperated with and ultimately expelled the Tatars from Russia. Well-situated in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and marshes, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but soon it absorbed its parent state.
A major factor in the ascendancy of Moscow was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol overlords, who granted them the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and made them agents for collecting the Tatar tribute from the Russian principalities. The principality's prestige was further enhanced when it became the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the Metropolitan, fled from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299 and a few years later established the permanent headquarters of the Church in Moscow under the original title of Kiev Metropolitan.
By the middle of the 14th century, the power of the Mongols was declining, and the Grand Princes felt able to openly oppose the Mongol yoke. In 1380, at Battle of Kulikovo on the Don River, the Mongols were defeated, and although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it did bring great fame to the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy. Moscow's leadership in Russia was now firmly based and by the middle of the 14th century its territory had greatly expanded through purchase, war, and marriage.
In the 15th century, the grand princes of Moscow continued to consolidate Russian land to increase their population and wealth. The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III, who laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control over some of the semi-independent Upper Principalities in the upper Dnieper and Oka River basins.
Through the defections of some princes, border skirmishes, and a long war with the Novgorod Republic, Ivan III was able to annex Novgorod and Tver. As a result, the Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled in size under his rule. During his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Filofei (Philotheus of Pskov) composed a letter to Ivan III, with the prophecy that the latter's kingdom would be the Third Rome. The Fall of Constantinople and the death of the last Greek Orthodox Christian emperor contributed to this new idea of Moscow as New Rome and the seat of Orthodox Christianity, as did Ivan's 1472 marriage to Byzantine Princess Sophia Palaiologina.
Under Ivan III, the first central government bodies were created in Russia: Prikaz. The Sudebnik was adopted, the first set of laws since the 11th century. The double-headed eagle was adopted as the coat of arms of Russia.
Ivan proclaimed his absolute sovereignty over all Russian princes and nobles. Refusing further tribute to the Tatars, Ivan initiated a series of attacks that opened the way for the complete defeat of the declining Golden Horde, now divided into several Khanates and hordes. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern boundaries of their domain against attacks of the Crimean Tatars and other hordes. To achieve this aim, they sponsored the construction of the Great Abatis Belt and granted manors to nobles, who were obliged to serve in the military. The manor system provided a basis for an emerging cavalry-based army.
In this way, internal consolidation accompanied outward expansion of the state. By the 16th century, the rulers of Moscow considered the entire Russian territory their collective property. Various semi-independent princes still claimed specific territories, but Ivan III forced the lesser princes to acknowledge the grand prince of Moscow and his descendants as unquestioned rulers with control over military, judicial, and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Russian ruler emerged as a powerful, autocratic ruler, a tsar. The first Russian ruler to officially crown himself "Tsar" was Ivan IV.
Ivan III tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde over the Rus', renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Biographer Fennell concludes that his reign was "militarily glorious and economically sound," and especially points to his territorial annexations and his centralized control over local rulers. However, Fennell argues that his reign was also "a period of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was stamped out within the Russian lands. By his bigoted anti-Catholicism Ivan brought down the curtain between Russia and the west. For the sake of territorial aggrandizement he deprived his country of the fruits of Western learning and civilization."
The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV (1547–1584), known as "Ivan the Terrible". He strengthened the position of the monarch to an unprecedented degree, as he ruthlessly subordinated the nobles to his will, exiling or executing many on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, Ivan is often seen as a farsighted statesman who reformed Russia as he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik of 1550), established the first Russian feudal representative body (Zemsky Sobor), curbed the influence of the clergy, and introduced local self-management in rural regions. Tsar also created the first regular army in Russia: Streltsy.
His long Livonian War (1558–1583) for control of the Baltic coast and access to the sea trade ultimately proved a costly failure. Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia. These conquests complicated the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe via the Volga and Urals. Through these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Also around this period, the mercantile Stroganov family established a firm foothold in the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonise Siberia.
In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina, Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy (whom he suspected of treachery after prince Andrey Kurbsky's betrayal), culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. This combined with the military losses, epidemics, and poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars were able to sack central Russian regions and burn down Moscow in 1571. However, in 1572 the Russians defeated the Crimean Tatar army at the Battle of Molodi and Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.
At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish–Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.
The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor was followed by a period of civil wars and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles (1606–13). Extremely cold summers (1601–1603) wrecked crops, which led to the Russian famine of 1601–1603 and increased the social disorganization. Boris Godunov's reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign intrusion, devastation of many cities and depopulation of the rural regions. The country rocked by internal chaos also attracted several waves of interventions by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Polish–Lithuanian forces reached Moscow and installed the impostor False Dmitriy I in 1605, then supported False Dmitry II in 1607. The decisive moment came when a combined Russian-Swedish army was routed by the Polish forces under hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski at the Battle of Klushino on 4 July [O.S. 24 June] 1610. As the result of the battle, the Seven Boyars, a group of Russian nobles, deposed the tsar Vasily Shuysky on 27 July [O.S. 17 July] 1610, and recognized the Polish prince Władysław IV Vasa as the Tsar of Russia on 6 September [O.S. 27 August] 1610. The Poles occupied Moscow on 21 September [O.S. 11 September] 1610. Moscow revolted but riots there were brutally suppressed and the city was set on fire.
The crisis provoked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion, both in 1611 and 1612. A volunteer army, led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky, expelled the foreign forces from the capital on 4 November [O.S. 22 October] 1612.
The Russian statehood survived the "Time of Troubles" and the rule of weak or corrupt Tsars because of the strength of the government's central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the faction controlling the throne. However, the Time of Troubles caused the loss of much territory to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War.
In February 1613, after the chaos and expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, a national assembly elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.
The immediate task of the new monarch was to restore peace. Fortunately for Moscow, its major enemies, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which provided Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619.
Recovery of lost territories began in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1657) in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslav between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks. In the treaty, Russia granted protection to the Cossacks state in Left-bank Ukraine, formerly under Polish control. This triggered a prolonged Russo-Polish War (1654–1667), which ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo, where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev and Smolensk. The Russian conquest of Siberia, begun at the end of the 16th century, continued in the 17th century. By the end of the 1640s, the Russians reached the Pacific Ocean, the Russian explorer Semyon Dezhnev, discovered the strait between Asia and America. Russian expansion in the Far East faced resistance from Qing China. After the war between Russia and China, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed, delimiting the territories in the Amur region.
Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, enabling them to finish the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service from both the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In return, the tsars allowed the boyars to complete the process of enserfing the peasants.
In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one landlord to another. With the state now fully sanctioning serfdom, runaway peasants became state fugitives, and the power of the landlords over the peasants "attached" to their land had become almost complete. Together, the state and the nobles placed an overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants, whose rate was 100 times greater in the mid-17th century than it had been a century earlier. Likewise, middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes, and were forbidden to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and special taxes.
Riots among peasants and citizens of Moscow at this time were endemic and included the Salt Riot (1648), Copper Riot (1662), and the Moscow Uprising (1682). By far the greatest peasant uprising in 17th-century Europe erupted in 1667. As the free settlers of South Russia, the Cossacks, reacted against the growing centralization of the state, serfs escaped from their landlords and joined the rebels. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga River, inciting peasant uprisings and replacing local governments with Cossack rule. The tsar's army finally crushed his forces in 1670; a year later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Yet, less than half a century later, the strains of military expeditions produced another revolt in Astrakhan, ultimately subdued.
Much of Russia's expansion occurred in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian colonisation of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the Russo-Polish War (1654–1667) that incorporated left-bank Ukraine, and the Russian conquest of Siberia. Poland was divided in the 1790–1815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, south of Siberia.
Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672–1725) brought centralized autocracy into Russia and played a major role in bringing his country into the European state system. Russia was now the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of the land was unoccupied, and travel was slow. Much of its expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the reconquest of Kiev, and the pacification of the Siberian tribes. However, a population of only 14 million was stretched across this vast landscape. With a short growing season, grain yields trailed behind those in the West and potato farming was not yet widespread. As a result, the great majority of the population workforce was occupied with agriculture. Russia remained isolated from the sea trade and its internal trade, communication and manufacturing were seasonally dependent.
Peter reformed the Russian army and created the Russian navy. Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov. His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden resulting in the Great Northern War.
The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. There, in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with the Silent Sejm, the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor, and the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.
Peter re-organized his government based on the latest Western models, molding Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma (council of nobles) with a Senate, in effect a supreme council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect taxes. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign.
Administrative Collegia (ministries) were established in St. Petersburg, to replace the old governmental departments. In 1722, Peter promulgated his famous Table of ranks. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the country's administrative structure, in effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official. Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.
By then, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was heavily declining. Taking advantage, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722–1723), known as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great" by Russian histographers, in order to be the first Russian emperor to establish Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, by 12 years later, all the territories were ceded back to Persia, which was now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht and Treaty of Ganja and the Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire, the common neighbouring rivalling enemy.
Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession, but Russia had become a great power by the end of his reign. Peter I was succeeded by his second wife, Catherine I (1725–1727), who was merely a figurehead for a powerful group of high officials, then by his minor grandson, Peter II (1727–1730), then by his niece, Anna (1730–1740), daughter of Tsar Ivan V. The heir to Anna was soon deposed in a coup and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I, ruled from 1741 to 1762. During her reign, Russia took part in the Seven Years' War.
Nearly 40 years passed before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared. Catherine II, "the Great" (r. 1762–1796), was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown. Catherine overthrew him in a coup in 1762, becoming queen regnant. Catherine enthusiastically supported the ideals of The Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot. She patronized the arts, science and learning. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. Catherine promulgated the Charter to the Gentry reaffirming rights and freedoms of the Russian nobility and abolishing mandatory state service. She seized control of all the church lands, drastically reduced the size of the monasteries, and put the surviving clergy on a tight budget.
Catherine spent heavily to promote an expansive foreign policy. She extended Russian political control over the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with actions, including the support of the Targowica Confederation. The cost of her campaigns, plus the oppressive social system that required serfs to spend almost all their time laboring on the land of their lords, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773. Inspired by a Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!", the rebels threatened to take Moscow until Catherine crushed the rebellion. Like the other enlightened despots of Europe, Catherine made certain of her own power and formed an alliance with the nobility.
Catherine successfully waged two wars (1768–1774, 1787–1792) against the decaying Ottoman Empire and advanced Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea in 1783 and created the Black Sea fleet. Then, by allying with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated the territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where after a century of Russian rule non-Catholic, mainly Orthodox population prevailed during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe.
In accordance to Russia's treaty with the Georgians to protect them against any new invasion of their Persian suzerains and further political aspirations, Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had again invaded Georgia and established rule over it about a year prior, and had expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus.
In 1798–1799, Russian troops participated in the anti-French coalition, the troops under the command of Alexander Suvorov defeated the French in Northern Italy.
Russian emperors of the 18th century professed the ideas of Enlightened absolutism. However, Westernization and modernization affected only the upper classes of Russian society, while the bulk of the population, consisting of peasants, remained in a state of serfdom. Powerful Russians resented their privileged positions and alien ideas. The backlash was especially severe after the Napoleonic wars. It produced a powerful anti-western campaign that "led to a wholesale purge of Western specialists and their Russian followers in universities, schools, and government service". The mid-18th century was marked by the emergence of higher education in Russia. The first two major universities Saint Petersburg State University and Moscow State University were opened. Russian exploration of Siberia and the Far East continued. Great Northern Expedition laid the foundation for the development of Alaska by the Russians. By the end of the 18th century, Alaska became a Russian colony (Russian America). In the early 19th century, Alaska was used as a base for the First Russian circumnavigation. In 1819–1821, Russian sailors discovered Antarctica during an Antarctic expedition.
Russia was in a continuous state of financial crisis. While revenue rose from 9 million rubles in 1724 to 40 million in 1794, expenses grew more rapidly, reaching 49 million in 1794. The budget was allocated 46% to the military, 20% to government economic activities, 12% to administration, and 9% for the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg. The deficit required borrowing, primarily from Amsterdam; 5% of the budget was allocated to debt payments. Paper money was issued to pay for expensive wars, thus causing inflation. 18th-century Russia remained "a poor, backward, overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country".
By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia a major European power. Alexander I continued this policy, wresting Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812. His key advisor was a Polish nobleman Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.
After Russian armies liberated allied Georgia from Persian occupation in 1802, they clashed with Persia over control and consolidation over Georgia, as well as the Iranian territories that comprise modern-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan. They also became involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate and Circassia. In 1813, the war with Persia concluded with a Russian victory, forcing Qajar Iran to cede swaths of its territories in the Caucasus to Russia, which drastically increased its territory in the region. To the south-west, Russia tried to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front.
In European policy, Alexander I switched Russia back and forth four times in 1804–1812 from neutral peacemaker to anti-Napoleon to an ally of Napoleon, winding up in 1812 as Napoleon's enemy. In 1805, he joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after the massive defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz he switched and formed an alliance with Napoleon by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain, 1807–1812.
The alliance collapsed by 1810. Russia's economy had been hurt by Napoleon's Continental System, which cut off trade with Britain. As Esdaile notes, "Implicit in the idea of a Russian Poland was, of course, a war against Napoleon". Schroeder says Poland was the root cause of the conflict but Russia's refusal to support the Continental System was also a factor.
The invasion of Russia was a catastrophe for Napoleon and his 450,000 invasion troops. One major battle was fought at Borodino; casualties were very high, but it was indecisive, and Napoleon was unable to engage and defeat the Russian armies. He tried to force the Tsar to terms by capturing Moscow at the onset of winter, even though he had lost most of his men. Instead, the Russians retreated, burning crops and food supplies in a scorched earth policy that multiplied Napoleon's logistic problems: 85%–90% of Napoleon's soldiers died from disease, cold, starvation or ambush by peasant guerrillas. As Napoleon's forces retreated, Russian troops pursued them into Central and Western Europe, defeated Napoleon's army in the Battle of the Nations and finally captured Paris. Of a total population of around 43 million people, Russia lost about 1.5 million in the year 1812; of these about 250,000 to 300,000 were soldiers and the rest peasants and serfs.
After the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which made him the king of Congress Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia, to suppress revolutionary movements in Europe that he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. He helped Austria's Klemens von Metternich in suppressing all national and liberal movements.
Although the Russian Empire would play a leading role on behalf of conservatism as late as 1848, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, sea trade and colonialism which had begun in the second half of the 18th century, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, undermining its ability to field strong armies.
Russia's great power status obscured the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I was willing to discuss constitutional reforms, and though a few were introduced, no thoroughgoing changes were attempted.
The tsar was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825–1855), who at the onset of his reign was confronted with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers traveled in Europe in the course of the military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return. The result was the Decembrist Revolt (December 1825), the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother as a constitutional monarch. But the revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn away from liberal reforms and champion the reactionary doctrine "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality".
In 1826–1828, Russia fought another war against Persia. Russia lost almost all of its recently consolidated territories during the first year but regained them and won the war on highly favourable terms. At the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Russia gained Armenia, Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, and Iğdır. In the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gümüşhane and, posing as protector and saviour of the Greek Orthodox population, received extensive support from the region's Pontic Greeks. After a brief occupation, the Russian imperial army withdrew into Georgia. By the 1830s, Russia had conquered all Persian territories and major Ottoman territories in the Caucasus.
In 1831, Nicholas crushed the November Uprising in Poland. The Russian autocracy gave Polish artisans and gentry reason to rebel in 1863 by assailing the national core values of language, religion, and culture. The resulting January Uprising was a massive Polish revolt, which also was crushed. France, Britain and Austria tried to intervene in the crisis but were unable. The Russian patriotic press used the Polish uprising to unify the Russian nation, claiming it was Russia's God-given mission to save Poland and the world. Poland was punished by losing its distinctive political and judicial rights, with Russianization imposed on its schools and courts.
Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855) lavished attention on his army. In a nation of 60–70 million people, it included a million men. They had outdated equipment and tactics, but the tsar took pride in its smartness on parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were only trained in parade formations, and did poorly in battle. He put generals in charge of most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. The Army became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble youths from non-Russian areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and Georgia. On the other hand, many miscreants, petty criminals and undesirables were punished by local officials by enlisting them for life in the Army. Village oligarchies controlled employment, conscription for the army, and local patronage; they blocked reforms and sent the most unpromising peasant youth to the army. The conscription system was unpopular with people, as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the soldiers for six months of the year.
Finally the Crimean War at the end of his reign showed the world that Russia was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent. Despite his ambitions toward the south and Ottoman Empire, Russia had not built its railroad network in that direction, and communications were poor. The bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency and was unprepared for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army, although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels who pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of touch with the latest technology. The nation's leaders realized that reforms were urgently needed.
The early 19th century is the time when Russian literature becomes an independent and very striking phenomenon.
Westernizers favored imitating Western Europe while others renounced the West and called for a return of the traditions of the past. The latter path was championed by Slavophiles, who heaped scorn on the "decadent" West. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy and preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West. A forerunner of the movement was Pyotr Chaadayev. He exposed the cultural isolation of Russia, from the perspective of Western Europe, in his Philosophical Letters of 1831. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for the Russian mind. He called on Russia to emulate Western Europe, especially in rational and logical thought, its progressive spirit, its leadership in science, and indeed its leadership on the path to freedom. Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen were prominent Westernizers.
Since the war against Napoleon, Russia had become deeply involved in the affairs of Europe, as part of the "Holy Alliance." The Holy Alliance was formed to serve as the "policeman of Europe." However, to maintain the alliance required large armies. Prussia, Austria, Britain and France (the other members of the alliance) lacked large armies and needed Russia to supply the required numbers, which fit the philosophy of Nicholas I. The Tsar sent his army into Hungary in 1849 at the request of the Austrian Empire and broke the revolt there, while preventing its spread to Russian Poland. The Tsar cracked down on any signs of internal unrest.
Russia expected that in exchange for supplying the troops to be the policeman of Europe, it should have a free hand in dealing with the decaying Ottoman Empire—the "sick man of Europe." In 1853, Russia invaded Ottoman-controlled areas leading to the Crimean War. Britain and France came to the rescue of the Ottomans. After a grueling war fought largely in Crimea, with very high death rates from disease, the allies won.
Historian Orlando Figes points to the long-term damage Russia suffered:
When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, the demand for reform was widespread. The most pressing problem confronting the Government was serfdom. In 1859, there were 23 million serfs (out of a total population of 67 million). In anticipation of civil unrest that could ultimately foment a revolution, Alexander II chose to preemptively abolish serfdom with the emancipation reform in 1861. Emancipation brought a supply of free labor to the cities, stimulated industry, and the middle class grew in number and influence. The freed peasants had to buy land, allotted to them, from the landowners with the state assistance. The Government issued special bonds to the landowners for the land that they had lost, and collected a special tax from the peasants, called redemption payments, at a rate of 5% of the total cost of allotted land yearly. All the land turned over to the peasants was owned collectively by the mir, the village community, which divided the land among the peasants and supervised the various holdings.
Alexander was responsible for numerous reforms besides abolishing serfdom. He reorganized the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing capital punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some of the privileges of the nobility, and promoting the universities.
In foreign policy, he sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. He modernized the military command system. He sought peace, and joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. The Russian Empire expanded in Siberia and in the Caucasus and made gains at the expense of China. Faced with an uprising in Poland in 1863, he stripped that land of its separate Constitution and incorporated it directly into Russia. To counter the rise of a revolutionary and anarchistic movements, he sent thousands of dissidents into exile in Siberia and was proposing additional parliamentary reforms when he was assassinated in 1881.
In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. The Russo-Turkish War was popular among the Russian people, who supported the independence of their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Russia's victory in this war allowed a number of Balkan states to gain independence: Romania, Serbia, Montenegro. In addition, Bulgaria de facto became independent. However, the war increased tension with Austria-Hungary, which also had ambitions in the region. The Tsar was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but abided by the agreement.
During this period Russia expanded its empire into Central Asia, conquering the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, as well as the Trans-Caspian region. Russia's advance in Asia led to British fears that the Russians planned aggression against British India. Before 1815 London worried Napoleon would combine with Russia to do that in one mighty campaign. After 1815 London feared Russia alone would do it step by step. However historians report that the Russians never had any intention to move against India.
In the 1860s, a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. A term originally coined by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, Nihilists favoured the destruction of human institutions and laws, based on the assumption that they are artificial and corrupt. At its core, Russian nihilism was characterized by the belief that the world lacks comprehensible meaning, objective truth, or value. For some time, many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by what they regarded as the empty discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old values and shocked the Russian establishment. They became involved in the cause of reform and became major political forces. Their path was facilitated by the previous actions of the Decembrists, who revolted in 1825, and the financial and political hardship caused by the Crimean War, which caused many Russians to lose faith in political institutions. Russian nihilists created the manifesto «Catechism of a Revolutionary».
After the Nihilists failed to convert the aristocracy and landed gentry to the cause of reform, they turned to the peasants. Their campaign became known as the Narodnk ("Populist") movement. It was based on the belief that the common people had the wisdom and peaceful ability to lead the nation. As the Narodnik movement gained momentum, the government moved to extirpate it. In response to the growing reaction of the government, a radical branch of the Narodniks advocated and practiced terrorism. One after another, prominent officials were shot or killed by bombs. This represented the ascendancy of anarchism in Russia as a powerful revolutionary force. Finally, after several attempts, Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms in addition to the abolition of serfdom designed to ameliorate revolutionary demands.
The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th is known as the Silver Age of Russian culture. The Silver Age was dominated by the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism, Acmeism, and Russian Futurism, many poetic schools flourished, including the Mystical Anarchism tendency within the Symbolist movement. The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960.
Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character". A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia, and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China.
The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were hunted down and a policy of Russification was carried out.
Alexander was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894–1918). The Industrial Revolution, which began to exert a significant influence in Russia, was meanwhile creating forces that would finally overthrow the tsar. Politically, these opposition forces organized into three competing parties: The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and nobility, who wanted peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, founded the Constitutional Democratic party or Kadets in 1905. Followers of the Narodnik tradition established the Socialist-Revolutionary Party or Esers in 1901, advocating the distribution of land among the peasants who worked it. A third radical group founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP in 1898; this party was the primary exponent of Marxism in Russia. Gathering their support from the radical intellectuals and the urban working class, they advocated complete social, economic and political revolution.
In 1903, the RSDLP split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks, led by Yuli Martov. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar's regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks advocated the formation of a small elite of professional revolutionaries, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to seize power by force.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia continued its expansion in the Far East; Chinese Manchuria was in the zone of Russian interests. Russia took an active part in the intervention of the great powers in China to suppress the Boxer rebellion. During this war, Russia occupied Manchuria, which caused a clash of interests with Japan. In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War began, which ended extremely unfavourably for Russia.
The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the Russo-Japanese War was a major blow to the Russian State and increased the potential for unrest.
In January 1905, an incident known as "Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. When the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so aroused over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity.
In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the October Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma (legislature) to be called without delay. The right to vote was extended, and no law was to go into force without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate groups were satisfied; but the socialists rejected the concessions as insufficient and tried to organize new strikes. By the end of 1905, there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was strengthened.
On 28 June 1914, Bosnian Serbs assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary. Austro-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which it considered a Russian client-state. Russia had no treaty obligation to Serbia, and most Russian leaders wanted to avoid war. But in that crisis they had the support of France, and believed that supporting Serbia was important for Russia's credibility and for its goal of a leadership role in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas II mobilised Russian forces on 30 July 1914 to defend Serbia. Christopher Clark states: "The Russian general mobilisation [of 30 July] was one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis". Germany responded with its own mobilisation and declaration of War on 1 August 1914. At the opening of hostilities, the Russians took the offensive against both Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The very large but poorly led and under-equipped Russian army fought tenaciously. Casualties were enormous. In the 1914 campaign, Russian forces defeated Austro-Hungarian forces in the Battle of Galicia. The success of the Russian army forced the German army to withdraw troops from the western front to the Russian front. However, defeats in Poland by the Central Powers in the 1915 campaign, led to a major retreat of the Russian army. In 1916, the Russians again dealt a powerful blow to the Austrians during the Brusilov offensive.
By 1915, morale was worsening. Many recruits were sent to the front unarmed. Nevertheless, the Russian army fought on, and tied down large numbers of Germans and Austrians. When the homefront showed an occasional surge of patriotism, the tsar and his entourage failed to exploit it for military benefit. The Russian army neglected to rally the ethnic and religious minorities that were hostile to Austria, such as Poles. The tsar refused to cooperate with the national legislature, the Duma, and listened less to experts than to his wife, who was in thrall to her chief advisor, the holy man Grigori Rasputin. More than two million refugees fled. Repeated military failures and bureaucratic ineptitude soon turned large segments of the population against the government. The German and Ottoman fleets prevented Russia from importing urgently needed supplies through the Baltic and Black seas. By mid-1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties kept occurring, and inflation was mounting. Strikes increased among factory workers, and the peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless. Meanwhile, elite distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that Rasputin was gaining influence; his assassination in late 1916 ended the scandal but did not restore the autocracy's prestige.
In late February (3 March 1917), a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). On 23 February (8 March) 1917, thousands of female textile workers walked out of their factories protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them. Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. The tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators in the streets. His orders triggered the February Revolution, especially when soldiers sided with the strikers. On 2 March, Nicholas II abdicated.
To fill the vacuum of authority, the Duma declared a Provisional Government, headed by Prince Lvov, which was collectively known as the Russian Republic. Meanwhile, the socialists in Petrograd organized elections among workers and soldiers to form a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies, as an organ of popular power that could pressure the "bourgeois" Provisional Government.
In July, following a series of crises that undermined their authority with the public, the head of the Provisional Government resigned and was succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, who was more progressive than his predecessor but not radical enough for the Bolsheviks or many Russians discontented with the deepening economic crisis and the war. The socialist-led soviet in Petrograd joined with soviets that formed throughout the country to create a national movement.
The German government provided over 40 million gold marks to subsidize Bolshevik publications and activities subversive of the tsarist government, especially focusing on disgruntled soldiers and workers. In April 1917 Germany provided a special sealed train to carry Vladimir Lenin back to Russia from his exile in Switzerland. After many behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the soviets seized control of the government in November 1917 and drove Kerensky and his moderate provisional government into exile, in the events that would become known as the October Revolution.
When the national Constituent Assembly (elected in December 1917) refused to become a rubber stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by Lenin's troops and all vestiges of democracy were removed. With the handicap of the moderate opposition removed, Lenin was able to free his regime from the war problem by the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) with Germany. Russia lost much of her western borderlands. However, when Germany was defeated the Soviet government repudiated the Treaty.
The Bolshevik grip on power was by no means secure, and a lengthy struggle broke out between the new regime and its opponents, which included the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anti-Bolshevik White movement, and large numbers of peasants. At the same time the Allied powers sent several expeditionary armies to support the anti-Communist forces in an attempt to force Russia to rejoin the world war. The Bolsheviks fought against both these forces and national independence movements in the former Russian Empire. By 1921, they had defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the newly independent states under their control, with the exception of Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian Democratic Republic (which was annexed by Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the Polish–Soviet War). Finland also annexed the region Pechenga of the Russian Kola Peninsula; Soviet Russia and allied Soviet republics conceded the parts of its territory to Estonia (Petseri County and Estonian Ingria), Latvia (Pytalovo), and Turkey (Kars). Poland incorporated the contested territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the former parts of the Russian Empire (except Galicia) east to Curzon Line.
Both sides regularly committed brutal atrocities against civilians. During the civil war era for example, Petlyura and Denikin's forces massacred 100,000 to 150,000 Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were left homeless and tens of thousands became victims of serious illness. These massacres are now referred to as the White Terror (Russia).
Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror carried out by the Bolsheviks vary widely. One source asserts that the total number of victims could be 1.3 million, whereas others give estimates ranging from 10,000 in the initial period of repression to 140,000 and an estimate of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000, whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.
The Russian economy was devastated by the war, with factories and bridges destroyed, cattle and raw materials pillaged, mines flooded and machines damaged. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus alone in 1920. Millions more also died of widespread starvation. By 1922 there were at least 7,000,000 street children in Russia as a result of nearly ten years of devastation from the Great War and the civil war. Another one to two million people, known as the White émigrés, fled Russia, many were evacuated from Crimea in the 1920, some through the Far East, others west into the newly independent Baltic countries. These émigrés included a large percentage of the educated and skilled population.
The Soviet Union, established in December 1922 by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, was roughly coterminous with Russia before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At that time, the new nation included four constituent republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belarusian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR.
The constitution, adopted in 1924, established a federal system of government based on a pyramid of soviets in each constituent republic which culminated in the All-Union Congress of Soviets. However, while it appeared that the congress exercised sovereign power, this body was actually governed by the Communist Party, which in turn was controlled by the Politburo from Moscow.
The period from the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1921 is known as the period of war communism. Land, all industry, and small businesses were nationalized, and the money economy was restricted. Strong opposition soon developed. The peasants wanted cash payments for their products and resented having to surrender their surplus grain to the government as a part of its civil war policies. Confronted with peasant opposition, Lenin began a strategic retreat from war communism known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The peasants were freed from wholesale levies of grain and allowed to sell their surplus produce in the open market. Commerce was stimulated by permitting private retail trading. The state continued to be responsible for banking, transportation, heavy industry, and public utilities.
Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich peasants, or kulaks, who benefited from the NEP, the program proved highly beneficial and the economy revived. The NEP would later come under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's death in early 1924.
As the Russian Empire included during this period not only the region of Russia, but also today's territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia and the Caucasian and Central Asian countries, it is possible to examine the firm formation process in all those regions. One of the main determinants of firm creation for given regions of Russian Empire might be urban demand of goods and supply of industrial and organizational skill.
While the Russian economy was being transformed, the social life of the people underwent equally drastic changes. The Family Code of 1918 granted women equal status to men, and permitted a couple to take either the husband or wife's name. Divorce no longer required court procedure, and to make women completely free of the responsibilities of childbearing, abortion was made legal as early as 1920. As a side effect, the emancipation of women increased the labor market. Girls were encouraged to secure an education and pursue a career. Communal nurseries were set up for child care, and efforts were made to shift the center of people's social life from the home to educational and recreational groups, the soviet clubs.
The Soviet government pursued a policy of eliminating illiteracy (Likbez). After industrialization, massive urbanization began. In the field of national policy in the 1920s, the Korenizatsiya was carried out. However, from the mid-30s, the Stalinist government returned to the tsarist policy of Russification of the outskirts. In particular, the languages of all the nations of the USSR were translated into the Cyrillic alphabet Cyrillization.
The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually unrestrained power. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical programme of industrialisation into action.
In 1929, Stalin proposed the first five-year plan. Abolishing the NEP, it was the first of a number of plans aimed at swift accumulation of capital resources through the buildup of heavy industry, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of consumer goods. For the first time in history a government controlled all economic activity. The rapid growth of production capacity and the volume of production of heavy industry was of great importance for ensuring economic independence from western countries and strengthening the country's defense capability. At this time, the Soviet Union made the transition from an agrarian country to an industrial one.
As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms (kolkhozes). By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (kulaks) were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed. The combination of bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily established collective farms, and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine, and several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and parts of southwestern Russia. The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, fueling industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's urban population.
The NKVD gathered in tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to face arrest, deportation, or execution. Of the six original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin, high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were liquidated in the Great Purges. Purges in other Soviet republics also helped centralize control in the USSR.
Stalin destroyed the opposition in the party consisting of the old Bolsheviks during the Moscow trials. The NKVD under the leadership of Stalin's commissar Nikolai Yezhov carried out a series of massive repressive operations against the kulaks and various national minorities in the USSR. During the Great Purges of 1937–38, about 700,000 people were executed.
Penalties were introduced, and many citizens were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag system became an important component of the industrialization effort, especially in Siberia. An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.
After the partition of Poland in 1939, the NKVD executed 20,000 captured Polish officers in the Katyn massacre. In the late 30s - first half of the 40s, the Stalinist government carried out massive deportations of various nationalities. A number of ethnic groups were deported from their settlement to Central Asia.
The Soviet Union viewed the 1933 accession of fervently anti-Communist Hitler to power in Germany with alarm, especially since Hitler proclaimed the Drang nach Osten as one of the major objectives in his vision of the German strategy of Lebensraum. The Soviets supported the republicans of Spain who struggled against fascist German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938–1939, the Soviet Union successfully fought against Imperial Japan in the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts in the Russian Far East, which led to Soviet-Japanese neutrality and the tense border peace that lasted until August 1945.
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and, together with major Western European powers, signed the Munich Agreement following which Germany, Hungary and Poland divided parts of Czechoslovakia between themselves. German plans for further eastward expansion, as well as the lack of resolve from Western powers to oppose it, became more apparent. Despite the Soviet Union strongly opposing the Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence. Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet–German trade.
On 17 September 1939, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, stating as justification the "need to protect Ukrainians and Belarusians" there, after the "cessation of existence" of the Polish state. As a result, the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics' western borders were moved westward, and the new Soviet western border was drawn close to the original Curzon line. In the meantime negotiations with Finland over a Soviet-proposed land swap that would redraw the Soviet-Finnish border further away from Leningrad failed, and in December 1939 the USSR invaded Finland, beginning a campaign known as the Winter War (1939–1940), with the goal of annexing Finland into the Soviet Union. The war took a heavy death toll on the Red Army and the Soviets failed to conquer Finland, but forced Finland to sign the Moscow Peace Treaty and cede the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia. In summer 1940 the USSR issued an ultimatum to Romania forcing it to cede the territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. At the same time, the Soviet Union also occupied the three formerly independent Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).
The peace with Germany was tense, as both sides were preparing for the military conflict, and abruptly ended when the Axis forces led by Germany swept across the Soviet border on 22 June 1941. By the autumn the German army had seized Ukraine, laid a siege of Leningrad, and threatened to capture the capital, Moscow, itself. Despite the fact that in December 1941 the Red Army threw off the German forces from Moscow in a successful counterattack, the Germans retained the strategic initiative for approximately another year and held a deep offensive in the south-eastern direction, reaching the Volga and the Caucasus. However, two major German defeats in Stalingrad and Kursk proved decisive and reversed the course of the entire World War as the Germans never regained the strength to sustain their offensive operations and the Soviet Union recaptured the initiative for the rest of the conflict. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had broken through the German siege of Leningrad and liberated much of Ukraine, much of Western Russia and moved into Belarus. During the 1944 campaign, the Red Army defeated German forces in a series of offensive campaigns known as Stalin's ten blows. By the end of 1944, the front had moved beyond the 1939 Soviet frontiers into eastern Europe. Soviet forces drove into eastern Germany, capturing Berlin in May 1945. The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the Soviet Union.
As agreed at the Yalta Conference, three months after the Victory Day in Europe the USSR launched the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, defeating the Japanese troops in neighboring Manchuria, the last Soviet battle of World War II.
Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, the war resulted in around 26–27 million Soviet deaths (estimates vary) and had devastated the Soviet economy in the struggle. Some 70,000 settlements were destroyed. The occupied territories suffered from the ravages of German occupation and deportations of slave labor by Germany. Thirteen million Soviet citizens became victims of the repressive policies of Germany and its allies in occupied territories, where people died because of mass murders, famine, absence of medical aid and slave labor. The Holocaust, carried out by German Einsatzgruppen along with local collaborators, resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporarily occupied by Germany and its allies. During the occupation, the Leningrad region lost around a quarter of its population, Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population, and 3.6 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.
Collaboration among the major Allies had won the war and was supposed to serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and security. USSR became one of the founders of the UN and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. However, the conflict between Soviet and U.S. national interests, known as the Cold War, came to dominate the international stage.
The Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and secretly progressing. In April 1949 the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact. The Soviet Union established an Eastern counterpart to NATO in 1955, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The division of Europe into Western and Soviet blocks later took on a more global character, especially after 1949, when the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended with the testing of a Soviet bomb and the Communist takeover in China.
The foremost objectives of Soviet foreign policy were the maintenance and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony over Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union maintained its dominance over the Warsaw Pact through crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, suppressing the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and supporting the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s. The Soviet Union opposed the United States in a number of proxy conflicts all over the world, including the Korean War and Vietnam War.
As the Soviet Union continued to maintain tight control over its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Cold War gave way to Détente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in the 1970s. The nuclear race continued, the number of nuclear weapons in the hands of the USSR and the United States reached a menacing scale, giving them the ability to destroy the planet multiple times. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons in treaties such as SALT I, SALT II, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
U.S.–Soviet relations deteriorated following the beginning of the nine-year Soviet–Afghan War in 1979 and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, but improved as the communist bloc started to unravel in the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia lost the superpower status that it had won in the Second World War.
Nikita Khrushchev solidified his position in a speech before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 detailing Stalin's atrocities.
In 1964, Khrushchev was impeached by the Communist Party's Central Committee, charging him with a host of errors that included Soviet setbacks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. After a period of collective leadership led by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, Brezhnev took Khrushchev's place as Soviet leader. Brezhnev emphasized heavy industry, instituted the Soviet economic reform of 1965, and also attempted to ease relationships with the United States. Soviet science and industry peaked in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. The world's first nuclear power plant was established in 1954 in Obninsk, and the Baikal Amur Mainline was built. In the 1950s the USSR became a leading producer and exporter of petroleum and natural gas. In 1980 Moscow hosted the Summer Olympic Games.
While all modernized economies were rapidly moving to computerization after 1965, the USSR fell behind. Moscow's decision to copy the IBM 360 of 1965 proved a decisive mistake for it locked scientists into an antiquated system they were unable to improve. They had enormous difficulties in manufacturing the necessary chips reliably and in quantity, in programming workable and efficient programs, in coordinating entirely separate operations, and in providing support to computer users.
One of the greatest strengths of Soviet economy was its vast supplies of oil and gas; world oil prices quadrupled in 1973–1974, and rose again in 1979–1981, making the energy sector the chief driver of the Soviet economy, and was used to cover multiple weaknesses. At one point, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told the head of oil and gas production, "things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan." Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, an economist looking back three decades, in 2007 wrote:
The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial base for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States, and permitted the realization of such risky foreign-policy actions as the war in Afghanistan.
The Soviet space program, founded by Sergey Korolev, was especially successful. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space in the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1. Other achievements of Russian space program include: the first photo of the far side of the Moon; exploration of Venus; the first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov; first female spaceflight by Valentina Tereshkova. In 1970 and 1973, the world's first planetary rovers were sent to the moon: Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2. More recently, the Soviet Union produced the world's first space station, Salyut, which in 1986 was replaced by Mir, the first consistently inhabited long-term space station, that served from 1986 to 2001.
Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. After the rapid succession of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism, and made significant changes in the party leadership. However, Gorbachev's social reforms led to unintended consequences. His policy of glasnost facilitated public access to information after decades of government repression, and social problems received wider public attention, undermining the Communist Party's authority. Glasnost allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the surface, and many constituent republics, especially the Baltic republics, Georgian SSR and Moldavian SSR, sought greater autonomy, which Moscow was unwilling to provide. In the revolutions of 1989 the USSR lost its allies in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not sufficient, and the Soviet government left intact most of the fundamental elements of communist economy. Suffering from low pricing of petroleum and natural gas, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and outdated industry and pervasive corruption, the Soviet planned economy proved to be ineffective, and by 1990 the Soviet government had lost control over economic conditions. Due to price control, there were shortages of almost all products. Control over the constituent republics was also relaxed, and they began to assert their national sovereignty.
The tension between Soviet Union and Russian SFSR authorities came to be personified in the power struggle between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Squeezed out of Union politics by Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, who represented himself as a committed democrat, presented a significant opposition to Gorbachev's authority. In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new Supreme Soviet in May 1990. The following month, he secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of the budget. In the first Russian presidential election in 1991 Yeltsin became president of the Russian SFSR. At last Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. However, on 19 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev was attempted. The coup faced wide popular opposition and collapsed in three days, but disintegration of the Union became imminent. The Russian government took over most of the Soviet Union government institutions on its territory. Because of the dominant position of Russians in the Soviet Union, most gave little thought to any distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union before the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, only Russian SFSR lacked its own republic-level Communist Party branch, trade union councils, Academy of Sciences, and the like. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in Russia in 1991–1992, although no lustration has ever taken place, and many of its members became top Russian officials. However, as the Soviet government was still opposed to market reforms, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By December 1991, the shortages had resulted in the introduction of food rationing in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the first time since World War II. Russia received humanitarian food aid from abroad. After the Belavezha Accords, the Supreme Soviet of Russia withdrew Russia from the Soviet Union on 12 December. The Soviet Union officially ended on 25 December 1991, and the Russian Federation (formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) took power on 26 December. The Russian government lifted price control in January 1992. Prices rose dramatically, but shortages disappeared.
Although Yeltsin came to power on a wave of optimism, he never recovered his popularity after endorsing Yegor Gaidar's "shock therapy" of ending Soviet-era price controls, drastic cuts in state spending, and an open foreign trade regime in early 1992 (see Russian economic reform in the 1990s). The reforms immediately devastated the living standards of much of the population. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn that was, in some ways, more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression. Hyperinflation hit the ruble, due to monetary overhang from the days of the planned economy.
Meanwhile, the profusion of small parties and their aversion to coherent alliances left the legislature chaotic. During 1993, Yeltsin's rift with the parliamentary leadership led to the September–October 1993 constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed on 3 October, when Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: he called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents. As Yeltsin was taking the unconstitutional step of dissolving the legislature, Russia came close to a serious civil conflict. Yeltsin was then free to impose the current Russian constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December 1993. The cohesion of the Russian Federation was also threatened when the republic of Chechnya attempted to break away, leading to the First and Second Chechen Wars.
Economic reforms also consolidated a semi-criminal oligarchy with roots in the old Soviet system. Advised by Western governments, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Russia embarked on the largest and fastest privatization ever to reform the fully nationalized Soviet economy. By mid-decade, retail, trade, services, and small industry was in private hands. Most big enterprises were acquired by their old managers, engendering a new rich (Russian tycoons) in league with criminal mafias or Western investors. Corporate raiders such as Andrei Volgin engaged in hostile takeovers of corrupt corporations by the mid-1990s.
By the mid-1990s Russia had a system of multiparty electoral politics. But it was harder to establish a representative government because of the struggle between president and parliament and the anarchic party system.
Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the localities, bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms, and tax revenues had collapsed. Still in a deep depression, Russia's economy was hit further by the financial crash of 1998. At the end of 1999, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the government in the hands of the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In 2000, the new acting president won the presidential election on 26 March and won in a landslide four years later. The Second Chechen war ended with the victory of Russia. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, there was a rapprochement between Russia and the United States. Putin created a system of guided democracy in Russia by subjugating parliament, suppressing independent media and placing major oil and gas companies under state control.
International observers were alarmed by moves in late 2004 to further tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil society, and regional officeholders. In 2008, Dmitri Medvedev, Putin's head of staff, was elected President. In 2012, Putin became president again, prompting massive protests in Moscow.
Russia's long-term problems include a shrinking workforce, rampant corruption, and underinvestment in infrastructure. Nevertheless, reversion to a socialist command economy seemed almost impossible. The economic problems are aggravated by massive capital outflows, as well as extremely difficult conditions for doing business, due to pressure from the security forces Siloviki and government agencies.
Due to high oil prices, from 2000 to 2008, Russia's GDP at PPP doubled. Although high oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble initially drove this growth, since 2003 consumer demand and, more recently, investment have played a significant role. Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and industry. Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
In 2014, following a controversial referendum, in which separation was favored by a large majority of voters according to official results, the Russian leadership announced the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation, thus starting the Russo-Ukrainian War. Following Russia's annexation of Crimea and alleged Russian interference in the war in eastern Ukraine, Western sanctions were imposed on Russia.
On 4 December 2011, elections to the State Duma were held, as a result of which United Russia won for the third time in a row. The official voting results caused significant protests in the country; a number of political scientists and journalists noted various falsifications on election day. In 2012, according to another pre-election agreement, a "castling" took place; Vladimir Putin again became president and Dmitry Medvedev took over as chairman of the government, after which the protests acquired an anti-Putin orientation, but soon began to decline.
Since 2015, Russia has been conducting military intervention in Syria in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
In 2018, Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a fourth presidential term.
In 2022, Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine, which was denounced by NATO and the European Union. They aided Ukraine and imposed massive International sanctions during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A leading banker in Moscow said the damage might take a decade to recover, as half of its international trade has been lost. Despite international opposition, Russia officially annexed the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, along with most of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts on 30 September. According to the United Nations, Russia has committed war crimes during the invasion.
On 23 June 2023, the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, rebelled against the government. As of August 2023, the total number of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded during the Russian invasion of Ukraine was nearly 500,000. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. In 882, Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority, moving the governance center to Kiev by the end of the 10th century, and maintaining northern and southern parts with significant autonomy from each other. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasions in 1237–1240. After the 13th century, Moscow became a political and cultural magnet for the unification of Russian lands. By the end of the 15th century, many of the petty principalities around Moscow had been united with the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which took full control of its own sovereignty under Ivan the Great.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Ivan the Terrible transformed the Grand Duchy into the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. However, the death of Ivan's son Feodor I without issue in 1598 created a succession crisis and led Russia into a period of chaos and civil war known as the Time of Troubles, ending with the coronation of Michael Romanov as the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. During the rest of the seventeenth century, Russia completed the exploration and conquest of Siberia, claiming lands as far as the Pacific Ocean by the end of the century. Domestically, Russia faced numerous uprisings of the various ethnic groups under their control, as exemplified by the Cossack leader Stenka Razin, who led a revolt in 1670–1671. In 1721, in the wake of the Great Northern War, Tsar Peter the Great renamed the state as the Russian Empire; he is also noted for establishing St. Petersburg as the new capital of his Empire, and for his introducing Western European culture to Russia. In 1762, Russia came under the control of Catherine the Great, who continued the westernizing policies of Peter the Great, and ushered in the era of the Russian Enlightenment. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, repulsed an invasion by the French Emperor Napoleon, leading Russia into the status of one of the great powers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Peasant revolts intensified during the nineteenth century, culminating with Alexander II abolishing Russian serfdom in 1861. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906, and the State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power. A combination of economic breakdown, mismanagement over Russia's involvement in World War I, and discontent with the autocratic system of government triggered the Russian Revolution in 1917. The end of the monarchy initially brought into office a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists, but their failed policies led to the October Revolution. In 1922, Soviet Russia, along with the Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, officially merging all four republics to form the Soviet Union as a single state. Between 1922 and 1991 the history of Russia essentially became the history of the Soviet Union. During this period, the Soviet Union was one of the victors in World War II after recovering from a massive surprise invasion in 1941 by Nazi Germany, which had previously signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The USSR's network of satellite states in Eastern Europe, which were brought into its sphere of influence in the closing stages of World War II, helped the country become a superpower competing with fellow superpower the United States and other Western countries in the Cold War.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of Soviet economic and political structures becoming acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which eventually led to the weakening of the communist party and dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-Soviet Russia. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself as the Russian Federation and became the primary successor state to the Soviet Union. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status. Scrapping the central planning and state-ownership of property of the Soviet era in the 1990s, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin, took political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an assertive foreign policy. Coupled with economic growth, Russia has since regained significant global status as a world power. Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula led to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to significantly expanded sanctions. Under Putin's leadership, corruption in Russia is rated as the worst in Europe, and Russia's human rights situation has been increasingly criticized by international observers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first human settlement on the territory of Russia dates back to the Oldowan period in the early Lower Paleolithic. About 2 million years ago, representatives of Homo erectus migrated from Western Asia to the North Caucasus (archaeological site of Kermek [ru] on the Taman Peninsula). At Bogatyri/Sinyaya balka [ru], in a skull of Elasmotherium caucasicum, which lived 1.5–1.2 million years ago, a stone tool was found. 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools have been discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in the territory of present-day Russia.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Fossils of Denisovans in Russia date to about 110,000 years ago. DNA from a bone fragment found in Denisova Cave, belonging to a female who died about 90,000 years ago, shows that she was a hybrid of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Russia was also home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals - the partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in Mezmaiskaya cave in Adygea showed a carbon-dated age of only 45,000 years. In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, uncovered a 40,000-year-old small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, which DNA analysis revealed to be a previously unknown species of human, which was named the Denisova hominin.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The first trace of Homo sapiens on the large expanse of Russian territory dates back to 45,000 years, in central Siberia (Ust'-Ishim man). The discovery of some of the earliest evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Europe was reported in 2007 from the Kostenki archaeological site near the Don River in Russia (dated to at least 40,000 years ago) and at Sungir (34,600 years ago). Humans reached Arctic Russia (Mamontovaya Kurya) by 40,000 years ago.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During the prehistoric eras the vast steppes of Southern Russia were home to tribes of nomadic pastoralists. (In classical antiquity, the Pontic Steppe was known as \"Scythia\".) Remnants of these long-gone steppe cultures were discovered in the course of the 20th century in such places as Ipatovo, Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the later part of the 8th century BCE, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and Phanagoria. Gelonus was described by Herodotus as a huge (Europe's biggest) earth- and wood-fortified grad inhabited around 500 BC by Heloni and Budini. In 513 BC, the king of the Achaemenid Empire, Darius I, would launch a military campaign around the Black Sea into Scythia, modern-day Ukraine, eventually reaching the Tanais river (now known as the Don).",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Greeks, mostly from the city-state of Miletus, would colonize large parts of modern-day Crimea and the Sea of Azov during the seventh and sixth centuries BC, eventually unifying into the Bosporan Kingdom by 480 BC, and would be incorporated into the large Kingdom of Pontus in 107 BC. The Kingdom would eventually be conquered by the Roman Republic, and the Bosporan Kingdom would become a client state of the Roman Empire. At about the 2nd century AD Goths migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, a semi-legendary Gothic kingdom of Oium existed in Southern Russia until it was overrun by Huns. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, the Bosporan Kingdom was also overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which would often move on to Europe, as was the case with the Huns and Turkish Avars.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the second millennium BC, the territories between the Kama and the Irtysh Rivers were the home of a Proto-Uralic-speaking population that had contacts with Proto-Indo-European speakers from the south. The woodland population is the ancestor of the modern Ugrian inhabitants of Trans-Uralia. Other researchers say that the Khanty people originated in the south Ural steppe and moved northwards into their current location about 500 AD.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas through to the 8th century. Noted for their laws, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism, the Khazars were the main commercial link between the Baltic and the Muslim Abbasid empire centered in Baghdad. They were important allies of the Eastern Roman Empire, and waged a series of successful wars against the Arab Caliphates. In the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism.",
"title": "Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Some of the ancestors of the modern Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the Pripet Marshes. The Early East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia in two waves: one moving from Kiev (present-day Ukraine) towards present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk (present-day Belarus) towards Novgorod and Rostov.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "From the 7th century onwards, East Slavs constituted the bulk of the population in Western Russia and slowly conquered and assimilated the native Finnic and Baltic tribes, such as the Merya, the Muromians, and the Meshchera.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Scandinavian Norsemen, known as Vikings in Western Europe and Varangians in the East, combined piracy and trade throughout Northern Europe. In the mid-9th century, they began to venture along the waterways from the eastern Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas. According to the legendary Calling of the Varangians, recorded in several Rus' chronicles such as the Novgorod First Chronicle and Primary Chronicle, the Varangians Rurik, Sineus and Truvor were invited in the 860s to restore order in three towns – either Novgorod (most texts) or Staraya Ladoga (Hypatian Codex); Beloozero; and Izborsk (most texts) or \"Slovensk\" (Pskov Third Chronicle), respectively. Their successors allegedly moved south and extended their authority to Kiev, which had been previously dominated by the Khazars.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Thus, the first East Slavic state, Rus', emerged in the 9th century along the Dnieper River valley. A coordinated group of princely states with a common interest in maintaining trade along the river routes, Kievan Rus' controlled the trade route for furs, wax, and slaves between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire along the Volkhov and Dnieper Rivers.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "By the end of the 10th century, the minority Norse military aristocracy had merged with the native Slavic population, which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the course of the multiple campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople. One such campaign claimed the life of the foremost Slavic druzhina leader, Svyatoslav I, who was renowned for having crushed the power of the Khazars on the Volga.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Kievan Rus' is important for its introduction of a Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion, dramatically deepening a synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next thousand years. The region adopted Christianity in 988 by the official act of public baptism of Kiev inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I. Some years later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda, was introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. From the onset, the Kievan princes followed the Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus' displayed an economy and achievements in architecture and literature superior to those that then existed in the western part of the continent. Compared with the languages of European Christendom, the Russian language was little influenced by the Greek and Latin of early Christian writings. This was because Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead. A nomadic Turkic people, the Kipchaks (also known as the Cumans), replaced the earlier Pechenegs as the dominant force in the south steppe regions neighbouring to Rus' at the end of the 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular attacks, especially in Kiev, was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic incursions caused a massive influx of Slavs to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, particularly to the area known as Zalesye.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal in the north-east, Novgorod in the north, and Halych-Volhynia in the south-west. Conquest by the Mongol Golden Horde in the 13th century was the final blow. Kiev was destroyed. Halych-Volhynia would eventually be absorbed into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while the Mongol-dominated Vladimir-Suzdal and independent Novgorod Republic, two regions on the periphery of Kiev, would establish the basis for the modern Russian nation.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The invading Mongols accelerated the fragmentation of the Rus'. In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River and were soundly defeated. In 1237–1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir (4 February 1238) and other major cities of northeast Russia, routed the Russians at the Sit' River, and then moved west into Poland and Hungary. By then they had conquered most of the Russian principalities. Only the Novgorod Republic escaped occupation and continued to flourish in the orbit of the Hanseatic League.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The impact of the Mongol invasion on the territories of Kievan Rus' was uneven. The advanced city culture was almost completely destroyed. As older centers such as Kiev and Vladimir never recovered from the devastation of the initial attack, the new cities of Moscow, Tver and Nizhny Novgorod began to compete for hegemony in the Mongol-dominated Rus' principalities under the suzerainty of the Golden Horde. Although a coalition of Rus' princes led by Dmitry Donskoy defeated Mongol warlord Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380, forces of the new khan Tokhtamysh and his Rus' allies immediately sacked Moscow in 1382 as punishment for resisting Mongol authority. Mongol domination of the Rus' principalities, along with tax collection by various overlords such as the Crimean Khans, continued into the early 16th century, despite later claims of Muscovite bookmen that the indecisive standoff at the Ugra in 1480 had signified \"the end of the Tatar yoke\" and the \"liberation of Russia\".",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Mongols dominated the lower reaches of the Volga and held Russia in sway from their western capital at Sarai, one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The princes had to pay tribute to the Mongols of the Golden Horde, commonly called Tatars; but in return they received charters authorizing them to act as deputies to the khans. In general, the princes were allowed considerable freedom to rule as they wished, while the Russian Orthodox Church even experienced a spiritual revival.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Mongols left their impact on the Russians in such areas as military tactics and transportation. Under Mongol occupation, Muscovy also developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and military organization.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "At the same time, Prince of Novgorod, Alexander Nevsky, managed to repel the offensive of the Northern Crusades against Novgorod from the West. Despite this, becoming the Grand Prince, Alexander declared himself a vassal to the Golden Horde, not having the strength to resist its power.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow (known as Muscovy in English), which first cooperated with and ultimately expelled the Tatars from Russia. Well-situated in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and marshes, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but soon it absorbed its parent state.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A major factor in the ascendancy of Moscow was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol overlords, who granted them the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and made them agents for collecting the Tatar tribute from the Russian principalities. The principality's prestige was further enhanced when it became the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the Metropolitan, fled from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299 and a few years later established the permanent headquarters of the Church in Moscow under the original title of Kiev Metropolitan.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "By the middle of the 14th century, the power of the Mongols was declining, and the Grand Princes felt able to openly oppose the Mongol yoke. In 1380, at Battle of Kulikovo on the Don River, the Mongols were defeated, and although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it did bring great fame to the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy. Moscow's leadership in Russia was now firmly based and by the middle of the 14th century its territory had greatly expanded through purchase, war, and marriage.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the 15th century, the grand princes of Moscow continued to consolidate Russian land to increase their population and wealth. The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III, who laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control over some of the semi-independent Upper Principalities in the upper Dnieper and Oka River basins.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Through the defections of some princes, border skirmishes, and a long war with the Novgorod Republic, Ivan III was able to annex Novgorod and Tver. As a result, the Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled in size under his rule. During his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Filofei (Philotheus of Pskov) composed a letter to Ivan III, with the prophecy that the latter's kingdom would be the Third Rome. The Fall of Constantinople and the death of the last Greek Orthodox Christian emperor contributed to this new idea of Moscow as New Rome and the seat of Orthodox Christianity, as did Ivan's 1472 marriage to Byzantine Princess Sophia Palaiologina.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Under Ivan III, the first central government bodies were created in Russia: Prikaz. The Sudebnik was adopted, the first set of laws since the 11th century. The double-headed eagle was adopted as the coat of arms of Russia.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ivan proclaimed his absolute sovereignty over all Russian princes and nobles. Refusing further tribute to the Tatars, Ivan initiated a series of attacks that opened the way for the complete defeat of the declining Golden Horde, now divided into several Khanates and hordes. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern boundaries of their domain against attacks of the Crimean Tatars and other hordes. To achieve this aim, they sponsored the construction of the Great Abatis Belt and granted manors to nobles, who were obliged to serve in the military. The manor system provided a basis for an emerging cavalry-based army.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In this way, internal consolidation accompanied outward expansion of the state. By the 16th century, the rulers of Moscow considered the entire Russian territory their collective property. Various semi-independent princes still claimed specific territories, but Ivan III forced the lesser princes to acknowledge the grand prince of Moscow and his descendants as unquestioned rulers with control over military, judicial, and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Russian ruler emerged as a powerful, autocratic ruler, a tsar. The first Russian ruler to officially crown himself \"Tsar\" was Ivan IV.",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Ivan III tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde over the Rus', renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Biographer Fennell concludes that his reign was \"militarily glorious and economically sound,\" and especially points to his territorial annexations and his centralized control over local rulers. However, Fennell argues that his reign was also \"a period of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was stamped out within the Russian lands. By his bigoted anti-Catholicism Ivan brought down the curtain between Russia and the west. For the sake of territorial aggrandizement he deprived his country of the fruits of Western learning and civilization.\"",
"title": "Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV (1547–1584), known as \"Ivan the Terrible\". He strengthened the position of the monarch to an unprecedented degree, as he ruthlessly subordinated the nobles to his will, exiling or executing many on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, Ivan is often seen as a farsighted statesman who reformed Russia as he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik of 1550), established the first Russian feudal representative body (Zemsky Sobor), curbed the influence of the clergy, and introduced local self-management in rural regions. Tsar also created the first regular army in Russia: Streltsy.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "His long Livonian War (1558–1583) for control of the Baltic coast and access to the sea trade ultimately proved a costly failure. Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia. These conquests complicated the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe via the Volga and Urals. Through these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Also around this period, the mercantile Stroganov family established a firm foothold in the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonise Siberia.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina, Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy (whom he suspected of treachery after prince Andrey Kurbsky's betrayal), culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. This combined with the military losses, epidemics, and poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars were able to sack central Russian regions and burn down Moscow in 1571. However, in 1572 the Russians defeated the Crimean Tatar army at the Battle of Molodi and Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish–Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor was followed by a period of civil wars and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles (1606–13). Extremely cold summers (1601–1603) wrecked crops, which led to the Russian famine of 1601–1603 and increased the social disorganization. Boris Godunov's reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign intrusion, devastation of many cities and depopulation of the rural regions. The country rocked by internal chaos also attracted several waves of interventions by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Polish–Lithuanian forces reached Moscow and installed the impostor False Dmitriy I in 1605, then supported False Dmitry II in 1607. The decisive moment came when a combined Russian-Swedish army was routed by the Polish forces under hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski at the Battle of Klushino on 4 July [O.S. 24 June] 1610. As the result of the battle, the Seven Boyars, a group of Russian nobles, deposed the tsar Vasily Shuysky on 27 July [O.S. 17 July] 1610, and recognized the Polish prince Władysław IV Vasa as the Tsar of Russia on 6 September [O.S. 27 August] 1610. The Poles occupied Moscow on 21 September [O.S. 11 September] 1610. Moscow revolted but riots there were brutally suppressed and the city was set on fire.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The crisis provoked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion, both in 1611 and 1612. A volunteer army, led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky, expelled the foreign forces from the capital on 4 November [O.S. 22 October] 1612.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Russian statehood survived the \"Time of Troubles\" and the rule of weak or corrupt Tsars because of the strength of the government's central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the faction controlling the throne. However, the Time of Troubles caused the loss of much territory to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In February 1613, after the chaos and expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, a national assembly elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The immediate task of the new monarch was to restore peace. Fortunately for Moscow, its major enemies, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which provided Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Recovery of lost territories began in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1657) in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslav between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks. In the treaty, Russia granted protection to the Cossacks state in Left-bank Ukraine, formerly under Polish control. This triggered a prolonged Russo-Polish War (1654–1667), which ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo, where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev and Smolensk. The Russian conquest of Siberia, begun at the end of the 16th century, continued in the 17th century. By the end of the 1640s, the Russians reached the Pacific Ocean, the Russian explorer Semyon Dezhnev, discovered the strait between Asia and America. Russian expansion in the Far East faced resistance from Qing China. After the war between Russia and China, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed, delimiting the territories in the Amur region.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, enabling them to finish the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service from both the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In return, the tsars allowed the boyars to complete the process of enserfing the peasants.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one landlord to another. With the state now fully sanctioning serfdom, runaway peasants became state fugitives, and the power of the landlords over the peasants \"attached\" to their land had become almost complete. Together, the state and the nobles placed an overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants, whose rate was 100 times greater in the mid-17th century than it had been a century earlier. Likewise, middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes, and were forbidden to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and special taxes.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Riots among peasants and citizens of Moscow at this time were endemic and included the Salt Riot (1648), Copper Riot (1662), and the Moscow Uprising (1682). By far the greatest peasant uprising in 17th-century Europe erupted in 1667. As the free settlers of South Russia, the Cossacks, reacted against the growing centralization of the state, serfs escaped from their landlords and joined the rebels. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga River, inciting peasant uprisings and replacing local governments with Cossack rule. The tsar's army finally crushed his forces in 1670; a year later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Yet, less than half a century later, the strains of military expeditions produced another revolt in Astrakhan, ultimately subdued.",
"title": "Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Much of Russia's expansion occurred in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian colonisation of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the Russo-Polish War (1654–1667) that incorporated left-bank Ukraine, and the Russian conquest of Siberia. Poland was divided in the 1790–1815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, south of Siberia.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672–1725) brought centralized autocracy into Russia and played a major role in bringing his country into the European state system. Russia was now the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of the land was unoccupied, and travel was slow. Much of its expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the reconquest of Kiev, and the pacification of the Siberian tribes. However, a population of only 14 million was stretched across this vast landscape. With a short growing season, grain yields trailed behind those in the West and potato farming was not yet widespread. As a result, the great majority of the population workforce was occupied with agriculture. Russia remained isolated from the sea trade and its internal trade, communication and manufacturing were seasonally dependent.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Peter reformed the Russian army and created the Russian navy. Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov. His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a \"window to the sea\" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden resulting in the Great Northern War.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. There, in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with the Silent Sejm, the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor, and the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Peter re-organized his government based on the latest Western models, molding Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma (council of nobles) with a Senate, in effect a supreme council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect taxes. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Administrative Collegia (ministries) were established in St. Petersburg, to replace the old governmental departments. In 1722, Peter promulgated his famous Table of ranks. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the country's administrative structure, in effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official. Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "By then, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was heavily declining. Taking advantage, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722–1723), known as \"The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great\" by Russian histographers, in order to be the first Russian emperor to establish Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, by 12 years later, all the territories were ceded back to Persia, which was now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht and Treaty of Ganja and the Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire, the common neighbouring rivalling enemy.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession, but Russia had become a great power by the end of his reign. Peter I was succeeded by his second wife, Catherine I (1725–1727), who was merely a figurehead for a powerful group of high officials, then by his minor grandson, Peter II (1727–1730), then by his niece, Anna (1730–1740), daughter of Tsar Ivan V. The heir to Anna was soon deposed in a coup and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I, ruled from 1741 to 1762. During her reign, Russia took part in the Seven Years' War.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Nearly 40 years passed before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared. Catherine II, \"the Great\" (r. 1762–1796), was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown. Catherine overthrew him in a coup in 1762, becoming queen regnant. Catherine enthusiastically supported the ideals of The Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot. She patronized the arts, science and learning. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. Catherine promulgated the Charter to the Gentry reaffirming rights and freedoms of the Russian nobility and abolishing mandatory state service. She seized control of all the church lands, drastically reduced the size of the monasteries, and put the surviving clergy on a tight budget.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Catherine spent heavily to promote an expansive foreign policy. She extended Russian political control over the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with actions, including the support of the Targowica Confederation. The cost of her campaigns, plus the oppressive social system that required serfs to spend almost all their time laboring on the land of their lords, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773. Inspired by a Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, with the emphatic cry of \"Hang all the landlords!\", the rebels threatened to take Moscow until Catherine crushed the rebellion. Like the other enlightened despots of Europe, Catherine made certain of her own power and formed an alliance with the nobility.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Catherine successfully waged two wars (1768–1774, 1787–1792) against the decaying Ottoman Empire and advanced Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea in 1783 and created the Black Sea fleet. Then, by allying with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated the territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where after a century of Russian rule non-Catholic, mainly Orthodox population prevailed during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In accordance to Russia's treaty with the Georgians to protect them against any new invasion of their Persian suzerains and further political aspirations, Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had again invaded Georgia and established rule over it about a year prior, and had expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 1798–1799, Russian troops participated in the anti-French coalition, the troops under the command of Alexander Suvorov defeated the French in Northern Italy.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Russian emperors of the 18th century professed the ideas of Enlightened absolutism. However, Westernization and modernization affected only the upper classes of Russian society, while the bulk of the population, consisting of peasants, remained in a state of serfdom. Powerful Russians resented their privileged positions and alien ideas. The backlash was especially severe after the Napoleonic wars. It produced a powerful anti-western campaign that \"led to a wholesale purge of Western specialists and their Russian followers in universities, schools, and government service\". The mid-18th century was marked by the emergence of higher education in Russia. The first two major universities Saint Petersburg State University and Moscow State University were opened. Russian exploration of Siberia and the Far East continued. Great Northern Expedition laid the foundation for the development of Alaska by the Russians. By the end of the 18th century, Alaska became a Russian colony (Russian America). In the early 19th century, Alaska was used as a base for the First Russian circumnavigation. In 1819–1821, Russian sailors discovered Antarctica during an Antarctic expedition.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Russia was in a continuous state of financial crisis. While revenue rose from 9 million rubles in 1724 to 40 million in 1794, expenses grew more rapidly, reaching 49 million in 1794. The budget was allocated 46% to the military, 20% to government economic activities, 12% to administration, and 9% for the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg. The deficit required borrowing, primarily from Amsterdam; 5% of the budget was allocated to debt payments. Paper money was issued to pay for expensive wars, thus causing inflation. 18th-century Russia remained \"a poor, backward, overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country\".",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia a major European power. Alexander I continued this policy, wresting Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812. His key advisor was a Polish nobleman Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "After Russian armies liberated allied Georgia from Persian occupation in 1802, they clashed with Persia over control and consolidation over Georgia, as well as the Iranian territories that comprise modern-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan. They also became involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate and Circassia. In 1813, the war with Persia concluded with a Russian victory, forcing Qajar Iran to cede swaths of its territories in the Caucasus to Russia, which drastically increased its territory in the region. To the south-west, Russia tried to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In European policy, Alexander I switched Russia back and forth four times in 1804–1812 from neutral peacemaker to anti-Napoleon to an ally of Napoleon, winding up in 1812 as Napoleon's enemy. In 1805, he joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after the massive defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz he switched and formed an alliance with Napoleon by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain, 1807–1812.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The alliance collapsed by 1810. Russia's economy had been hurt by Napoleon's Continental System, which cut off trade with Britain. As Esdaile notes, \"Implicit in the idea of a Russian Poland was, of course, a war against Napoleon\". Schroeder says Poland was the root cause of the conflict but Russia's refusal to support the Continental System was also a factor.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The invasion of Russia was a catastrophe for Napoleon and his 450,000 invasion troops. One major battle was fought at Borodino; casualties were very high, but it was indecisive, and Napoleon was unable to engage and defeat the Russian armies. He tried to force the Tsar to terms by capturing Moscow at the onset of winter, even though he had lost most of his men. Instead, the Russians retreated, burning crops and food supplies in a scorched earth policy that multiplied Napoleon's logistic problems: 85%–90% of Napoleon's soldiers died from disease, cold, starvation or ambush by peasant guerrillas. As Napoleon's forces retreated, Russian troops pursued them into Central and Western Europe, defeated Napoleon's army in the Battle of the Nations and finally captured Paris. Of a total population of around 43 million people, Russia lost about 1.5 million in the year 1812; of these about 250,000 to 300,000 were soldiers and the rest peasants and serfs.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "After the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which made him the king of Congress Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia, to suppress revolutionary movements in Europe that he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. He helped Austria's Klemens von Metternich in suppressing all national and liberal movements.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Although the Russian Empire would play a leading role on behalf of conservatism as late as 1848, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, sea trade and colonialism which had begun in the second half of the 18th century, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, undermining its ability to field strong armies.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Russia's great power status obscured the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I was willing to discuss constitutional reforms, and though a few were introduced, no thoroughgoing changes were attempted.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The tsar was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825–1855), who at the onset of his reign was confronted with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers traveled in Europe in the course of the military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return. The result was the Decembrist Revolt (December 1825), the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother as a constitutional monarch. But the revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn away from liberal reforms and champion the reactionary doctrine \"Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality\".",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 1826–1828, Russia fought another war against Persia. Russia lost almost all of its recently consolidated territories during the first year but regained them and won the war on highly favourable terms. At the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Russia gained Armenia, Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, and Iğdır. In the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gümüşhane and, posing as protector and saviour of the Greek Orthodox population, received extensive support from the region's Pontic Greeks. After a brief occupation, the Russian imperial army withdrew into Georgia. By the 1830s, Russia had conquered all Persian territories and major Ottoman territories in the Caucasus.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1831, Nicholas crushed the November Uprising in Poland. The Russian autocracy gave Polish artisans and gentry reason to rebel in 1863 by assailing the national core values of language, religion, and culture. The resulting January Uprising was a massive Polish revolt, which also was crushed. France, Britain and Austria tried to intervene in the crisis but were unable. The Russian patriotic press used the Polish uprising to unify the Russian nation, claiming it was Russia's God-given mission to save Poland and the world. Poland was punished by losing its distinctive political and judicial rights, with Russianization imposed on its schools and courts.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855) lavished attention on his army. In a nation of 60–70 million people, it included a million men. They had outdated equipment and tactics, but the tsar took pride in its smartness on parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were only trained in parade formations, and did poorly in battle. He put generals in charge of most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. The Army became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble youths from non-Russian areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and Georgia. On the other hand, many miscreants, petty criminals and undesirables were punished by local officials by enlisting them for life in the Army. Village oligarchies controlled employment, conscription for the army, and local patronage; they blocked reforms and sent the most unpromising peasant youth to the army. The conscription system was unpopular with people, as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the soldiers for six months of the year.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Finally the Crimean War at the end of his reign showed the world that Russia was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent. Despite his ambitions toward the south and Ottoman Empire, Russia had not built its railroad network in that direction, and communications were poor. The bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency and was unprepared for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army, although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels who pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of touch with the latest technology. The nation's leaders realized that reforms were urgently needed.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The early 19th century is the time when Russian literature becomes an independent and very striking phenomenon.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Westernizers favored imitating Western Europe while others renounced the West and called for a return of the traditions of the past. The latter path was championed by Slavophiles, who heaped scorn on the \"decadent\" West. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy and preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West. A forerunner of the movement was Pyotr Chaadayev. He exposed the cultural isolation of Russia, from the perspective of Western Europe, in his Philosophical Letters of 1831. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for the Russian mind. He called on Russia to emulate Western Europe, especially in rational and logical thought, its progressive spirit, its leadership in science, and indeed its leadership on the path to freedom. Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen were prominent Westernizers.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Since the war against Napoleon, Russia had become deeply involved in the affairs of Europe, as part of the \"Holy Alliance.\" The Holy Alliance was formed to serve as the \"policeman of Europe.\" However, to maintain the alliance required large armies. Prussia, Austria, Britain and France (the other members of the alliance) lacked large armies and needed Russia to supply the required numbers, which fit the philosophy of Nicholas I. The Tsar sent his army into Hungary in 1849 at the request of the Austrian Empire and broke the revolt there, while preventing its spread to Russian Poland. The Tsar cracked down on any signs of internal unrest.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Russia expected that in exchange for supplying the troops to be the policeman of Europe, it should have a free hand in dealing with the decaying Ottoman Empire—the \"sick man of Europe.\" In 1853, Russia invaded Ottoman-controlled areas leading to the Crimean War. Britain and France came to the rescue of the Ottomans. After a grueling war fought largely in Crimea, with very high death rates from disease, the allies won.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Historian Orlando Figes points to the long-term damage Russia suffered:",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, the demand for reform was widespread. The most pressing problem confronting the Government was serfdom. In 1859, there were 23 million serfs (out of a total population of 67 million). In anticipation of civil unrest that could ultimately foment a revolution, Alexander II chose to preemptively abolish serfdom with the emancipation reform in 1861. Emancipation brought a supply of free labor to the cities, stimulated industry, and the middle class grew in number and influence. The freed peasants had to buy land, allotted to them, from the landowners with the state assistance. The Government issued special bonds to the landowners for the land that they had lost, and collected a special tax from the peasants, called redemption payments, at a rate of 5% of the total cost of allotted land yearly. All the land turned over to the peasants was owned collectively by the mir, the village community, which divided the land among the peasants and supervised the various holdings.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Alexander was responsible for numerous reforms besides abolishing serfdom. He reorganized the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing capital punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some of the privileges of the nobility, and promoting the universities.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In foreign policy, he sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. He modernized the military command system. He sought peace, and joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. The Russian Empire expanded in Siberia and in the Caucasus and made gains at the expense of China. Faced with an uprising in Poland in 1863, he stripped that land of its separate Constitution and incorporated it directly into Russia. To counter the rise of a revolutionary and anarchistic movements, he sent thousands of dissidents into exile in Siberia and was proposing additional parliamentary reforms when he was assassinated in 1881.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. The Russo-Turkish War was popular among the Russian people, who supported the independence of their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Russia's victory in this war allowed a number of Balkan states to gain independence: Romania, Serbia, Montenegro. In addition, Bulgaria de facto became independent. However, the war increased tension with Austria-Hungary, which also had ambitions in the region. The Tsar was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but abided by the agreement.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "During this period Russia expanded its empire into Central Asia, conquering the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, as well as the Trans-Caspian region. Russia's advance in Asia led to British fears that the Russians planned aggression against British India. Before 1815 London worried Napoleon would combine with Russia to do that in one mighty campaign. After 1815 London feared Russia alone would do it step by step. However historians report that the Russians never had any intention to move against India.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In the 1860s, a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. A term originally coined by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, Nihilists favoured the destruction of human institutions and laws, based on the assumption that they are artificial and corrupt. At its core, Russian nihilism was characterized by the belief that the world lacks comprehensible meaning, objective truth, or value. For some time, many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by what they regarded as the empty discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old values and shocked the Russian establishment. They became involved in the cause of reform and became major political forces. Their path was facilitated by the previous actions of the Decembrists, who revolted in 1825, and the financial and political hardship caused by the Crimean War, which caused many Russians to lose faith in political institutions. Russian nihilists created the manifesto «Catechism of a Revolutionary».",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "After the Nihilists failed to convert the aristocracy and landed gentry to the cause of reform, they turned to the peasants. Their campaign became known as the Narodnk (\"Populist\") movement. It was based on the belief that the common people had the wisdom and peaceful ability to lead the nation. As the Narodnik movement gained momentum, the government moved to extirpate it. In response to the growing reaction of the government, a radical branch of the Narodniks advocated and practiced terrorism. One after another, prominent officials were shot or killed by bombs. This represented the ascendancy of anarchism in Russia as a powerful revolutionary force. Finally, after several attempts, Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms in addition to the abolition of serfdom designed to ameliorate revolutionary demands.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th is known as the Silver Age of Russian culture. The Silver Age was dominated by the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism, Acmeism, and Russian Futurism, many poetic schools flourished, including the Mystical Anarchism tendency within the Symbolist movement. The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of \"Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character\". A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia, and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were hunted down and a policy of Russification was carried out.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Alexander was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894–1918). The Industrial Revolution, which began to exert a significant influence in Russia, was meanwhile creating forces that would finally overthrow the tsar. Politically, these opposition forces organized into three competing parties: The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and nobility, who wanted peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, founded the Constitutional Democratic party or Kadets in 1905. Followers of the Narodnik tradition established the Socialist-Revolutionary Party or Esers in 1901, advocating the distribution of land among the peasants who worked it. A third radical group founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP in 1898; this party was the primary exponent of Marxism in Russia. Gathering their support from the radical intellectuals and the urban working class, they advocated complete social, economic and political revolution.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In 1903, the RSDLP split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks, led by Yuli Martov. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar's regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks advocated the formation of a small elite of professional revolutionaries, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to seize power by force.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia continued its expansion in the Far East; Chinese Manchuria was in the zone of Russian interests. Russia took an active part in the intervention of the great powers in China to suppress the Boxer rebellion. During this war, Russia occupied Manchuria, which caused a clash of interests with Japan. In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War began, which ended extremely unfavourably for Russia.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the Russo-Japanese War was a major blow to the Russian State and increased the potential for unrest.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In January 1905, an incident known as \"Bloody Sunday\" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. When the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so aroused over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the October Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma (legislature) to be called without delay. The right to vote was extended, and no law was to go into force without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate groups were satisfied; but the socialists rejected the concessions as insufficient and tried to organize new strikes. By the end of 1905, there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was strengthened.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "On 28 June 1914, Bosnian Serbs assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary. Austro-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which it considered a Russian client-state. Russia had no treaty obligation to Serbia, and most Russian leaders wanted to avoid war. But in that crisis they had the support of France, and believed that supporting Serbia was important for Russia's credibility and for its goal of a leadership role in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas II mobilised Russian forces on 30 July 1914 to defend Serbia. Christopher Clark states: \"The Russian general mobilisation [of 30 July] was one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis\". Germany responded with its own mobilisation and declaration of War on 1 August 1914. At the opening of hostilities, the Russians took the offensive against both Germany and Austria-Hungary.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The very large but poorly led and under-equipped Russian army fought tenaciously. Casualties were enormous. In the 1914 campaign, Russian forces defeated Austro-Hungarian forces in the Battle of Galicia. The success of the Russian army forced the German army to withdraw troops from the western front to the Russian front. However, defeats in Poland by the Central Powers in the 1915 campaign, led to a major retreat of the Russian army. In 1916, the Russians again dealt a powerful blow to the Austrians during the Brusilov offensive.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "By 1915, morale was worsening. Many recruits were sent to the front unarmed. Nevertheless, the Russian army fought on, and tied down large numbers of Germans and Austrians. When the homefront showed an occasional surge of patriotism, the tsar and his entourage failed to exploit it for military benefit. The Russian army neglected to rally the ethnic and religious minorities that were hostile to Austria, such as Poles. The tsar refused to cooperate with the national legislature, the Duma, and listened less to experts than to his wife, who was in thrall to her chief advisor, the holy man Grigori Rasputin. More than two million refugees fled. Repeated military failures and bureaucratic ineptitude soon turned large segments of the population against the government. The German and Ottoman fleets prevented Russia from importing urgently needed supplies through the Baltic and Black seas. By mid-1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties kept occurring, and inflation was mounting. Strikes increased among factory workers, and the peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless. Meanwhile, elite distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that Rasputin was gaining influence; his assassination in late 1916 ended the scandal but did not restore the autocracy's prestige.",
"title": "Russian Empire (1721–1917)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "In late February (3 March 1917), a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). On 23 February (8 March) 1917, thousands of female textile workers walked out of their factories protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them. Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. The tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators in the streets. His orders triggered the February Revolution, especially when soldiers sided with the strikers. On 2 March, Nicholas II abdicated.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "To fill the vacuum of authority, the Duma declared a Provisional Government, headed by Prince Lvov, which was collectively known as the Russian Republic. Meanwhile, the socialists in Petrograd organized elections among workers and soldiers to form a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies, as an organ of popular power that could pressure the \"bourgeois\" Provisional Government.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In July, following a series of crises that undermined their authority with the public, the head of the Provisional Government resigned and was succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, who was more progressive than his predecessor but not radical enough for the Bolsheviks or many Russians discontented with the deepening economic crisis and the war. The socialist-led soviet in Petrograd joined with soviets that formed throughout the country to create a national movement.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The German government provided over 40 million gold marks to subsidize Bolshevik publications and activities subversive of the tsarist government, especially focusing on disgruntled soldiers and workers. In April 1917 Germany provided a special sealed train to carry Vladimir Lenin back to Russia from his exile in Switzerland. After many behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the soviets seized control of the government in November 1917 and drove Kerensky and his moderate provisional government into exile, in the events that would become known as the October Revolution.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "When the national Constituent Assembly (elected in December 1917) refused to become a rubber stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by Lenin's troops and all vestiges of democracy were removed. With the handicap of the moderate opposition removed, Lenin was able to free his regime from the war problem by the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) with Germany. Russia lost much of her western borderlands. However, when Germany was defeated the Soviet government repudiated the Treaty.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The Bolshevik grip on power was by no means secure, and a lengthy struggle broke out between the new regime and its opponents, which included the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anti-Bolshevik White movement, and large numbers of peasants. At the same time the Allied powers sent several expeditionary armies to support the anti-Communist forces in an attempt to force Russia to rejoin the world war. The Bolsheviks fought against both these forces and national independence movements in the former Russian Empire. By 1921, they had defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the newly independent states under their control, with the exception of Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian Democratic Republic (which was annexed by Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the Polish–Soviet War). Finland also annexed the region Pechenga of the Russian Kola Peninsula; Soviet Russia and allied Soviet republics conceded the parts of its territory to Estonia (Petseri County and Estonian Ingria), Latvia (Pytalovo), and Turkey (Kars). Poland incorporated the contested territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the former parts of the Russian Empire (except Galicia) east to Curzon Line.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Both sides regularly committed brutal atrocities against civilians. During the civil war era for example, Petlyura and Denikin's forces massacred 100,000 to 150,000 Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were left homeless and tens of thousands became victims of serious illness. These massacres are now referred to as the White Terror (Russia).",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror carried out by the Bolsheviks vary widely. One source asserts that the total number of victims could be 1.3 million, whereas others give estimates ranging from 10,000 in the initial period of repression to 140,000 and an estimate of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000, whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The Russian economy was devastated by the war, with factories and bridges destroyed, cattle and raw materials pillaged, mines flooded and machines damaged. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus alone in 1920. Millions more also died of widespread starvation. By 1922 there were at least 7,000,000 street children in Russia as a result of nearly ten years of devastation from the Great War and the civil war. Another one to two million people, known as the White émigrés, fled Russia, many were evacuated from Crimea in the 1920, some through the Far East, others west into the newly independent Baltic countries. These émigrés included a large percentage of the educated and skilled population.",
"title": "Russian Civil War (1917–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The Soviet Union, established in December 1922 by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, was roughly coterminous with Russia before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At that time, the new nation included four constituent republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belarusian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The constitution, adopted in 1924, established a federal system of government based on a pyramid of soviets in each constituent republic which culminated in the All-Union Congress of Soviets. However, while it appeared that the congress exercised sovereign power, this body was actually governed by the Communist Party, which in turn was controlled by the Politburo from Moscow.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The period from the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1921 is known as the period of war communism. Land, all industry, and small businesses were nationalized, and the money economy was restricted. Strong opposition soon developed. The peasants wanted cash payments for their products and resented having to surrender their surplus grain to the government as a part of its civil war policies. Confronted with peasant opposition, Lenin began a strategic retreat from war communism known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The peasants were freed from wholesale levies of grain and allowed to sell their surplus produce in the open market. Commerce was stimulated by permitting private retail trading. The state continued to be responsible for banking, transportation, heavy industry, and public utilities.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich peasants, or kulaks, who benefited from the NEP, the program proved highly beneficial and the economy revived. The NEP would later come under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's death in early 1924.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "As the Russian Empire included during this period not only the region of Russia, but also today's territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia and the Caucasian and Central Asian countries, it is possible to examine the firm formation process in all those regions. One of the main determinants of firm creation for given regions of Russian Empire might be urban demand of goods and supply of industrial and organizational skill.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "While the Russian economy was being transformed, the social life of the people underwent equally drastic changes. The Family Code of 1918 granted women equal status to men, and permitted a couple to take either the husband or wife's name. Divorce no longer required court procedure, and to make women completely free of the responsibilities of childbearing, abortion was made legal as early as 1920. As a side effect, the emancipation of women increased the labor market. Girls were encouraged to secure an education and pursue a career. Communal nurseries were set up for child care, and efforts were made to shift the center of people's social life from the home to educational and recreational groups, the soviet clubs.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Soviet government pursued a policy of eliminating illiteracy (Likbez). After industrialization, massive urbanization began. In the field of national policy in the 1920s, the Korenizatsiya was carried out. However, from the mid-30s, the Stalinist government returned to the tsarist policy of Russification of the outskirts. In particular, the languages of all the nations of the USSR were translated into the Cyrillic alphabet Cyrillization.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually unrestrained power. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical programme of industrialisation into action.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In 1929, Stalin proposed the first five-year plan. Abolishing the NEP, it was the first of a number of plans aimed at swift accumulation of capital resources through the buildup of heavy industry, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of consumer goods. For the first time in history a government controlled all economic activity. The rapid growth of production capacity and the volume of production of heavy industry was of great importance for ensuring economic independence from western countries and strengthening the country's defense capability. At this time, the Soviet Union made the transition from an agrarian country to an industrial one.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms (kolkhozes). By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (kulaks) were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed \"kulaks\" by the authorities were executed. The combination of bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily established collective farms, and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine, and several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and parts of southwestern Russia. The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, fueling industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's urban population.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The NKVD gathered in tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to face arrest, deportation, or execution. Of the six original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin, high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were liquidated in the Great Purges. Purges in other Soviet republics also helped centralize control in the USSR.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Stalin destroyed the opposition in the party consisting of the old Bolsheviks during the Moscow trials. The NKVD under the leadership of Stalin's commissar Nikolai Yezhov carried out a series of massive repressive operations against the kulaks and various national minorities in the USSR. During the Great Purges of 1937–38, about 700,000 people were executed.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Penalties were introduced, and many citizens were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag system became an important component of the industrialization effort, especially in Siberia. An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "After the partition of Poland in 1939, the NKVD executed 20,000 captured Polish officers in the Katyn massacre. In the late 30s - first half of the 40s, the Stalinist government carried out massive deportations of various nationalities. A number of ethnic groups were deported from their settlement to Central Asia.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "The Soviet Union viewed the 1933 accession of fervently anti-Communist Hitler to power in Germany with alarm, especially since Hitler proclaimed the Drang nach Osten as one of the major objectives in his vision of the German strategy of Lebensraum. The Soviets supported the republicans of Spain who struggled against fascist German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938–1939, the Soviet Union successfully fought against Imperial Japan in the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts in the Russian Far East, which led to Soviet-Japanese neutrality and the tense border peace that lasted until August 1945.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and, together with major Western European powers, signed the Munich Agreement following which Germany, Hungary and Poland divided parts of Czechoslovakia between themselves. German plans for further eastward expansion, as well as the lack of resolve from Western powers to oppose it, became more apparent. Despite the Soviet Union strongly opposing the Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence. Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet–German trade.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "On 17 September 1939, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, stating as justification the \"need to protect Ukrainians and Belarusians\" there, after the \"cessation of existence\" of the Polish state. As a result, the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics' western borders were moved westward, and the new Soviet western border was drawn close to the original Curzon line. In the meantime negotiations with Finland over a Soviet-proposed land swap that would redraw the Soviet-Finnish border further away from Leningrad failed, and in December 1939 the USSR invaded Finland, beginning a campaign known as the Winter War (1939–1940), with the goal of annexing Finland into the Soviet Union. The war took a heavy death toll on the Red Army and the Soviets failed to conquer Finland, but forced Finland to sign the Moscow Peace Treaty and cede the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia. In summer 1940 the USSR issued an ultimatum to Romania forcing it to cede the territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. At the same time, the Soviet Union also occupied the three formerly independent Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The peace with Germany was tense, as both sides were preparing for the military conflict, and abruptly ended when the Axis forces led by Germany swept across the Soviet border on 22 June 1941. By the autumn the German army had seized Ukraine, laid a siege of Leningrad, and threatened to capture the capital, Moscow, itself. Despite the fact that in December 1941 the Red Army threw off the German forces from Moscow in a successful counterattack, the Germans retained the strategic initiative for approximately another year and held a deep offensive in the south-eastern direction, reaching the Volga and the Caucasus. However, two major German defeats in Stalingrad and Kursk proved decisive and reversed the course of the entire World War as the Germans never regained the strength to sustain their offensive operations and the Soviet Union recaptured the initiative for the rest of the conflict. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had broken through the German siege of Leningrad and liberated much of Ukraine, much of Western Russia and moved into Belarus. During the 1944 campaign, the Red Army defeated German forces in a series of offensive campaigns known as Stalin's ten blows. By the end of 1944, the front had moved beyond the 1939 Soviet frontiers into eastern Europe. Soviet forces drove into eastern Germany, capturing Berlin in May 1945. The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the Soviet Union.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "As agreed at the Yalta Conference, three months after the Victory Day in Europe the USSR launched the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, defeating the Japanese troops in neighboring Manchuria, the last Soviet battle of World War II.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, the war resulted in around 26–27 million Soviet deaths (estimates vary) and had devastated the Soviet economy in the struggle. Some 70,000 settlements were destroyed. The occupied territories suffered from the ravages of German occupation and deportations of slave labor by Germany. Thirteen million Soviet citizens became victims of the repressive policies of Germany and its allies in occupied territories, where people died because of mass murders, famine, absence of medical aid and slave labor. The Holocaust, carried out by German Einsatzgruppen along with local collaborators, resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporarily occupied by Germany and its allies. During the occupation, the Leningrad region lost around a quarter of its population, Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population, and 3.6 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Collaboration among the major Allies had won the war and was supposed to serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and security. USSR became one of the founders of the UN and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. However, the conflict between Soviet and U.S. national interests, known as the Cold War, came to dominate the international stage.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "The Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and secretly progressing. In April 1949 the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact. The Soviet Union established an Eastern counterpart to NATO in 1955, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The division of Europe into Western and Soviet blocks later took on a more global character, especially after 1949, when the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended with the testing of a Soviet bomb and the Communist takeover in China.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The foremost objectives of Soviet foreign policy were the maintenance and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony over Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union maintained its dominance over the Warsaw Pact through crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, suppressing the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and supporting the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s. The Soviet Union opposed the United States in a number of proxy conflicts all over the world, including the Korean War and Vietnam War.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "As the Soviet Union continued to maintain tight control over its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Cold War gave way to Détente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in the 1970s. The nuclear race continued, the number of nuclear weapons in the hands of the USSR and the United States reached a menacing scale, giving them the ability to destroy the planet multiple times. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons in treaties such as SALT I, SALT II, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "U.S.–Soviet relations deteriorated following the beginning of the nine-year Soviet–Afghan War in 1979 and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, but improved as the communist bloc started to unravel in the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia lost the superpower status that it had won in the Second World War.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Nikita Khrushchev solidified his position in a speech before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 detailing Stalin's atrocities.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "In 1964, Khrushchev was impeached by the Communist Party's Central Committee, charging him with a host of errors that included Soviet setbacks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. After a period of collective leadership led by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, Brezhnev took Khrushchev's place as Soviet leader. Brezhnev emphasized heavy industry, instituted the Soviet economic reform of 1965, and also attempted to ease relationships with the United States. Soviet science and industry peaked in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. The world's first nuclear power plant was established in 1954 in Obninsk, and the Baikal Amur Mainline was built. In the 1950s the USSR became a leading producer and exporter of petroleum and natural gas. In 1980 Moscow hosted the Summer Olympic Games.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "While all modernized economies were rapidly moving to computerization after 1965, the USSR fell behind. Moscow's decision to copy the IBM 360 of 1965 proved a decisive mistake for it locked scientists into an antiquated system they were unable to improve. They had enormous difficulties in manufacturing the necessary chips reliably and in quantity, in programming workable and efficient programs, in coordinating entirely separate operations, and in providing support to computer users.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "One of the greatest strengths of Soviet economy was its vast supplies of oil and gas; world oil prices quadrupled in 1973–1974, and rose again in 1979–1981, making the energy sector the chief driver of the Soviet economy, and was used to cover multiple weaknesses. At one point, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told the head of oil and gas production, \"things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan.\" Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, an economist looking back three decades, in 2007 wrote:",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial base for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States, and permitted the realization of such risky foreign-policy actions as the war in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "The Soviet space program, founded by Sergey Korolev, was especially successful. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space in the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1. Other achievements of Russian space program include: the first photo of the far side of the Moon; exploration of Venus; the first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov; first female spaceflight by Valentina Tereshkova. In 1970 and 1973, the world's first planetary rovers were sent to the moon: Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2. More recently, the Soviet Union produced the world's first space station, Salyut, which in 1986 was replaced by Mir, the first consistently inhabited long-term space station, that served from 1986 to 2001.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. After the rapid succession of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism, and made significant changes in the party leadership. However, Gorbachev's social reforms led to unintended consequences. His policy of glasnost facilitated public access to information after decades of government repression, and social problems received wider public attention, undermining the Communist Party's authority. Glasnost allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the surface, and many constituent republics, especially the Baltic republics, Georgian SSR and Moldavian SSR, sought greater autonomy, which Moscow was unwilling to provide. In the revolutions of 1989 the USSR lost its allies in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not sufficient, and the Soviet government left intact most of the fundamental elements of communist economy. Suffering from low pricing of petroleum and natural gas, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and outdated industry and pervasive corruption, the Soviet planned economy proved to be ineffective, and by 1990 the Soviet government had lost control over economic conditions. Due to price control, there were shortages of almost all products. Control over the constituent republics was also relaxed, and they began to assert their national sovereignty.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "The tension between Soviet Union and Russian SFSR authorities came to be personified in the power struggle between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Squeezed out of Union politics by Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, who represented himself as a committed democrat, presented a significant opposition to Gorbachev's authority. In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new Supreme Soviet in May 1990. The following month, he secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of the budget. In the first Russian presidential election in 1991 Yeltsin became president of the Russian SFSR. At last Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. However, on 19 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev was attempted. The coup faced wide popular opposition and collapsed in three days, but disintegration of the Union became imminent. The Russian government took over most of the Soviet Union government institutions on its territory. Because of the dominant position of Russians in the Soviet Union, most gave little thought to any distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union before the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, only Russian SFSR lacked its own republic-level Communist Party branch, trade union councils, Academy of Sciences, and the like. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in Russia in 1991–1992, although no lustration has ever taken place, and many of its members became top Russian officials. However, as the Soviet government was still opposed to market reforms, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By December 1991, the shortages had resulted in the introduction of food rationing in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the first time since World War II. Russia received humanitarian food aid from abroad. After the Belavezha Accords, the Supreme Soviet of Russia withdrew Russia from the Soviet Union on 12 December. The Soviet Union officially ended on 25 December 1991, and the Russian Federation (formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) took power on 26 December. The Russian government lifted price control in January 1992. Prices rose dramatically, but shortages disappeared.",
"title": "Soviet Union (1922–1991)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Although Yeltsin came to power on a wave of optimism, he never recovered his popularity after endorsing Yegor Gaidar's \"shock therapy\" of ending Soviet-era price controls, drastic cuts in state spending, and an open foreign trade regime in early 1992 (see Russian economic reform in the 1990s). The reforms immediately devastated the living standards of much of the population. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn that was, in some ways, more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression. Hyperinflation hit the ruble, due to monetary overhang from the days of the planned economy.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Meanwhile, the profusion of small parties and their aversion to coherent alliances left the legislature chaotic. During 1993, Yeltsin's rift with the parliamentary leadership led to the September–October 1993 constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed on 3 October, when Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: he called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents. As Yeltsin was taking the unconstitutional step of dissolving the legislature, Russia came close to a serious civil conflict. Yeltsin was then free to impose the current Russian constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December 1993. The cohesion of the Russian Federation was also threatened when the republic of Chechnya attempted to break away, leading to the First and Second Chechen Wars.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Economic reforms also consolidated a semi-criminal oligarchy with roots in the old Soviet system. Advised by Western governments, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Russia embarked on the largest and fastest privatization ever to reform the fully nationalized Soviet economy. By mid-decade, retail, trade, services, and small industry was in private hands. Most big enterprises were acquired by their old managers, engendering a new rich (Russian tycoons) in league with criminal mafias or Western investors. Corporate raiders such as Andrei Volgin engaged in hostile takeovers of corrupt corporations by the mid-1990s.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "By the mid-1990s Russia had a system of multiparty electoral politics. But it was harder to establish a representative government because of the struggle between president and parliament and the anarchic party system.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the localities, bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms, and tax revenues had collapsed. Still in a deep depression, Russia's economy was hit further by the financial crash of 1998. At the end of 1999, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the government in the hands of the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "In 2000, the new acting president won the presidential election on 26 March and won in a landslide four years later. The Second Chechen war ended with the victory of Russia. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, there was a rapprochement between Russia and the United States. Putin created a system of guided democracy in Russia by subjugating parliament, suppressing independent media and placing major oil and gas companies under state control.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "International observers were alarmed by moves in late 2004 to further tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil society, and regional officeholders. In 2008, Dmitri Medvedev, Putin's head of staff, was elected President. In 2012, Putin became president again, prompting massive protests in Moscow.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Russia's long-term problems include a shrinking workforce, rampant corruption, and underinvestment in infrastructure. Nevertheless, reversion to a socialist command economy seemed almost impossible. The economic problems are aggravated by massive capital outflows, as well as extremely difficult conditions for doing business, due to pressure from the security forces Siloviki and government agencies.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "Due to high oil prices, from 2000 to 2008, Russia's GDP at PPP doubled. Although high oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble initially drove this growth, since 2003 consumer demand and, more recently, investment have played a significant role. Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and industry. Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "In 2014, following a controversial referendum, in which separation was favored by a large majority of voters according to official results, the Russian leadership announced the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation, thus starting the Russo-Ukrainian War. Following Russia's annexation of Crimea and alleged Russian interference in the war in eastern Ukraine, Western sanctions were imposed on Russia.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "On 4 December 2011, elections to the State Duma were held, as a result of which United Russia won for the third time in a row. The official voting results caused significant protests in the country; a number of political scientists and journalists noted various falsifications on election day. In 2012, according to another pre-election agreement, a \"castling\" took place; Vladimir Putin again became president and Dmitry Medvedev took over as chairman of the government, after which the protests acquired an anti-Putin orientation, but soon began to decline.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Since 2015, Russia has been conducting military intervention in Syria in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "In 2018, Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a fourth presidential term.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "In 2022, Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine, which was denounced by NATO and the European Union. They aided Ukraine and imposed massive International sanctions during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A leading banker in Moscow said the damage might take a decade to recover, as half of its international trade has been lost. Despite international opposition, Russia officially annexed the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, along with most of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts on 30 September. According to the United Nations, Russia has committed war crimes during the invasion.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "On 23 June 2023, the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, rebelled against the government. As of August 2023, the total number of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded during the Russian invasion of Ukraine was nearly 500,000.",
"title": "Russian Federation (1991–present)"
}
]
| The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. In 882, Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority, moving the governance center to Kiev by the end of the 10th century, and maintaining northern and southern parts with significant autonomy from each other. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasions in 1237–1240. After the 13th century, Moscow became a political and cultural magnet for the unification of Russian lands. By the end of the 15th century, many of the petty principalities around Moscow had been united with the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which took full control of its own sovereignty under Ivan the Great. Ivan the Terrible transformed the Grand Duchy into the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. However, the death of Ivan's son Feodor I without issue in 1598 created a succession crisis and led Russia into a period of chaos and civil war known as the Time of Troubles, ending with the coronation of Michael Romanov as the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. During the rest of the seventeenth century, Russia completed the exploration and conquest of Siberia, claiming lands as far as the Pacific Ocean by the end of the century. Domestically, Russia faced numerous uprisings of the various ethnic groups under their control, as exemplified by the Cossack leader Stenka Razin, who led a revolt in 1670–1671. In 1721, in the wake of the Great Northern War, Tsar Peter the Great renamed the state as the Russian Empire; he is also noted for establishing St. Petersburg as the new capital of his Empire, and for his introducing Western European culture to Russia. In 1762, Russia came under the control of Catherine the Great, who continued the westernizing policies of Peter the Great, and ushered in the era of the Russian Enlightenment. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, repulsed an invasion by the French Emperor Napoleon, leading Russia into the status of one of the great powers. Peasant revolts intensified during the nineteenth century, culminating with Alexander II abolishing Russian serfdom in 1861. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906, and the State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power. A combination of economic breakdown, mismanagement over Russia's involvement in World War I, and discontent with the autocratic system of government triggered the Russian Revolution in 1917. The end of the monarchy initially brought into office a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists, but their failed policies led to the October Revolution. In 1922, Soviet Russia, along with the Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, officially merging all four republics to form the Soviet Union as a single state. Between 1922 and 1991 the history of Russia essentially became the history of the Soviet Union. During this period, the Soviet Union was one of the victors in World War II after recovering from a massive surprise invasion in 1941 by Nazi Germany, which had previously signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The USSR's network of satellite states in Eastern Europe, which were brought into its sphere of influence in the closing stages of World War II, helped the country become a superpower competing with fellow superpower the United States and other Western countries in the Cold War. By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of Soviet economic and political structures becoming acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which eventually led to the weakening of the communist party and dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-Soviet Russia. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself as the Russian Federation and became the primary successor state to the Soviet Union. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status. Scrapping the central planning and state-ownership of property of the Soviet era in the 1990s, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin, took political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an assertive foreign policy. Coupled with economic growth, Russia has since regained significant global status as a world power. Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula led to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to significantly expanded sanctions. Under Putin's leadership, corruption in Russia is rated as the worst in Europe, and Russia's human rights situation has been increasingly criticized by international observers. | 2001-11-09T19:46:31Z | 2023-12-31T03:36:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia |
14,117 | History of Christianity | The history of Christianity follows the Christian religion from the first century to the twenty-first as it developed from its earliest beliefs and practices, spread geographically, and changed into its contemporary global forms.
Christianity originated with the ministry of Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer who proclaimed the imminent Kingdom of God and was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem in the Roman province of Judea. The earliest followers of Jesus were apocalyptic Jewish Christians. Christianity remained a Jewish sect, for centuries in some locations, diverging gradually from Judaism over doctrinal, social and historical differences.
In spite of occasional persecution in the Roman Empire, the religious movement spread as a grassroots movement that became established by the third century. The Roman Emperor Constantine I became the first Christian emperor and in 313, he issued the Edict of Milan expressing tolerance for all religions thereby legalizing Christian worship. Various Christological debates about the human and divine nature of Jesus occupied the Christian Church for three centuries, and seven ecumenical councils were called to resolve them.
Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization in Europe after the Fall of Rome. In the Early Middle Ages, missionary activities spread Christianity towards the west and the north. During the High Middle Ages, Eastern and Western Christianity grew apart, leading to the East–West Schism of 1054. Growing criticism of the Roman Catholic church and its corruption in the Late Middle Ages led to the Protestant Reformation and its related reform movements, which concluded with the European wars of religion, the development of tolerance as policy, and the Age of Enlightenment.
In the twenty-first century, traditional Christianity has declined in the West, while new forms have developed and expanded throughout the world. Today, there are more than two billion Christians worldwide and Christianity has become the world's largest, and most widespread religion. Within the last century, the center of growth has shifted from West to East and from the North to the global South.
Little is fully known of primitive Christianity. Sources on its first 150 years are fragmentary and scarce. This, along with a variety of complications, have limited scholars to what is probable, based largely on the book of Acts, whose historicity is debated as much as it is accepted.
Christianity began with the itinerant preaching and teaching of a deeply pious young Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth. According to the Gospels, Jesus was the Son of God, who was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem. His followers believed that he was raised from the dead and exalted by God, heralding the coming Kingdom of God. Theologian and minister Frances M. Young says this is what "lies at the heart of Christianity."
Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure. However, in the twenty-first century, tensions surround the figure of Jesus and the supernatural features of the gospels, creating, for many, a distinction between the 'Jesus of history' and the 'Christ of faith'. Yet, as Young has observed, "it is precisely Christology, the dogmas concerning the divinity and humanity of Christ, which have made Christianity what it is".
It was amongst a small group of Second Temple Jews, looking for an "anointed" leader (messiah or king) from the ancestral line of King David, that Christianity first formed in relative obscurity. Led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, they described themselves as "disciples of the Lord" and followers "of the Way". According to Acts 9 and 11, a settled community of disciples at Antioch were the first to be called "Christians". While there is evidence in the New Testament (Acts 10) suggesting the presence of Gentile Christians from the beginning, most early Christians were actively Jewish.
Geographically, Christianity began in Jerusalem in first-century Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The religious, social, and political climate of the area was diverse and often characterized by turmoil. The Roman Empire had only recently emerged from a long series of civil wars, and would experience two more major periods of civil war over the next centuries. Romans of this era feared civil disorder, giving their highest regard to peace, harmony and order. Piety equaled loyalty to family, class, city and emperor, and it was demonstrated by loyalty to the practices and rituals of the old religious ways.
While Christianity was largely tolerated, some also saw it as a threat to "Romanness" which produced localized persecution by mobs and governors. In 250, Decius made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman gods resulting in widespread persecution of Christians. Valerian pursued similar policies later that decade. The last and most severe official persecution, the Diocletianic Persecution, took place in 303–311.
From Jerusalem, Christianity spread into the Jewish diaspora communities outside the Palestinian homeland. Christianity and Judaism gradually grew apart over doctrinal, social and historical differences.
From its beginnings, the Christian church has seen itself as having a double mission: first, to fully live out its faith, and second, to pass it on, making Christianity a 'missionary' religion from its inception. Driven by a universalist logic, missions are a multi-cultural, often complex, historical process.
Outreach began in the urban landscape of the Roman Empire with the Apostles, and Paul. Christianity quickly spread itself geographically, with interaction sometimes producing conflict, and other times producing converts and accommodation.
Beginning with less than 1000 people, by the year 100, Christianity had grown to perhaps one hundred small household churches consisting of an average of around seventy (12–200) members each. It achieved critical mass in the hundred years between 150 and 250 when it moved from fewer than 50,000 adherents to over a million. This provided enough adopters for its growth rate to be self-sustaining.
Christianity quickly spread beyond the Roman Empire. Armenia, Persia (modern Iran), Ethiopia, Central Asia, India and China have evidence of early Christian communities. Catholic historian Robert Louis Wilken writes of first hand evidence for Christian communities in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Baghdad, Tibet, Georgia, and Socotra an island in the Arabian Sea.
Christine Trevett writes in the Cambridge History of Christianity that "Asia Minor and Achaea (Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Pergamum) were nurseries for Christianity". Conflicts over the nature of Christ's divinity emerged, and catholic leaders of the second century began forming 'official' statements of ‘orthodox’ Christian belief based on apostolic teaching as authoritative.
There is no archaeological evidence of Christianity in Egypt before the fourth century. However, religion scholar Birger Pearson writes that the literary evidence is "massive". Papyrologist Colin Roberts concludes that the earliest Egyptian ‘Christians’ were not a separate community but were instead part of the Jewish community of Alexandria.
Pearson has written that Egyptian Christianity probably began "...in the first century" in Alexandria. In this early period, Christianity expanded into the interior of Egypt where it produced a distinctive Coptic Christianity which is still active in the twenty-first century.
Egyptian Christians produced religious literature more abundantly than any other region during the second and third centuries. Alexandrian Christians like Clement and Origen wrote of the Church’s core faith as the same the world over. According to Pearson, "By the end of the third century, the Alexandrian church was at least as influential in the east as the Roman church was in the west".
Christianity in Antioch is mentioned in Paul's epistles written before 60 AD, and scholars generally see Antioch as a primary center of early Christianity. Christians in this region had little, if any, direct experience with persecution before the fourth century.
Most of what is known of early Christianity in Gaul (modern France) comes from a letter, most likely written by Irenaeus, describing the persecution of Christians in Lyon during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The letter theologically interprets the detailed suffering and martyrdom of Christians from Vienne and Lyons. There is nothing more of Christianity in Gaul beyond one inscription until the beginning of the fourth century.
The origins of Christianity in North Africa are unknown, but most scholars connect it to the Jewish communities of Carthage. There were disagreements, but Tertullian and Cyprian both proclaimed the unity of the Church. Christians were persecuted in Africa intermittently from 180 until 305.
Maureen Tilley in the Cambridge History of Christianity writes that persecution under Valerian, which started in 253, was aimed at high-ranking clergy. Persecution under Emperors Decius and Valerian created long-lasting problems for the African church when those who had recanted tried to rejoin the Church.
According to historian George Edmundson, there is an "enormous" amount of both modern scholarship and controversy on the founding of the church in Rome. It is likely the Christian message arrived in Rome very early. Edmundson writes that an established Christian church already existed in the city of Rome by 57 AD when Paul arrived there. Tradition and evidence support Peter as the founder of the church at Rome. Markus Vinzent has written that Rome was a melting pot of ideas, and the Christian church there was "fragmented and subject to repeated internal upheavals in the first three centuries [from] controversies imported by immigrants from around the empire".
According to historians Matthews and Platt, "Christianity rose from obscurity and gained much of its power from the tremendous moral force of its central beliefs and values". Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories. Groups formed by Paul the Apostle were heterogeneous, and the role of women was greater than in any form of Judaism or paganism at the time. Christianity was open to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free. There were no fees, and it was intellectually egalitarian, making philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people including those who might have lacked literacy.
Christianity in its first 300 years was also highly exclusive, as believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a "high boundary" that strongly excluded non-believers. In Daniel Praet's view, the exclusivity of Christian monotheism formed an important part of its success, enabling it to maintain its independence in a society that syncretized religion.
Christians offered last rites to the dying, buried them, distributed bread to the hungry, and showed the poor great generosity. Family had previously determined where and how one would be buried, but Christians gathered those not related by blood into a common burial space, used the same memorials for them all, and expanded the audience to include other Christians of their community thereby redefining the meaning of family. Classics scholar Kyle Harper [de; fr; nl] has written that Christianity replaced the ancient system where status determined sexual morality with a standard for all.
Emerging Christianity embraced some theological, ecclesiological and regional diversity, but ‘insider-outsider’ boundaries were still being determined in the early period. ‘Orthodoxy’ was not the exclusive property of one group, and many of the ideas in the heretical teachings overlapped traditional views. Early Christian authors defined orthodoxy based on agreement with what had been spoken and handed down by the apostles. Walter Bauer's thesis that heretical forms of Christianity were brought into line by a powerful, united, Roman church forcing its will on others is not supportable according to Markus Vinzent, since such unity did not exist before the eighth century.
The New Testament mentions bishops, (Episkopoi), as overseers and presbyters as elders or priests, with deacons as 'servants', sometimes using the terms interchangeably, demonstrating that the institutional church began its formation quickly and with some flexibility. According to Gerd Theissen, institutionalization began when itinerant preaching transformed into resident leadership (those living in a particular community over which they exercised leadership). A study by Edwin A. Judge, social scientist, shows that a fully organized church system had evolved before Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325.
In the first century, new religious texts were written in Greek. These became the "New Testament", and the Hebrew Scriptures became the "Old Testament". Even in the formative period, these texts had considerable authority, and those seen as "scriptural" were generally agreed upon. Linguistics scholar Stanley E. Porter says "the text of [most of] the Greek New Testament was relatively well established and fixed by the time of the second and third centuries".
When discussion of canonization began, there were disputes over whether or not to include some texts. The list of accepted books was established by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397.
Spanning two millennia, the Bible has become one of the most influential works ever written, having contributed to the formation of Western law, art, literature, literacy and education.
The earliest orthodox writers of the first and second centuries, outside the writers of the New Testament itself, were first called the Apostolic Fathers in the sixth century. The title "Church Father" is used by the Church to describe those who were the intellectual and spiritual teachers, leaders and philosophers of early Christianity. Writing from the first century to the close of the eighth, they defended their faith, wrote commentaries and sermons, recorded the Creeds and church history, and lived exemplary lives.
In the fourth and fifth centuries Rome faced unsolvable problems at all levels of society. Bureaucracy became increasingly incompetent and corrupt, there was rampant inflation, a crushing and inequitable tax system, and significant changes in an army without adequate leaders. Barbarians were relentless. They sacked Rome, invaded Britain, France, and Spain, seized land, and disrupted the empire's economy. The ageless Empire was crumbling. Matthews and Platt say it is symptomatic that during crises, Roman Senators still collected rent, sometimes doubling the fees, while the Church offered "shelter to the homeless, food for the hungry, and comfort to the grieving". After the political fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Christian church became the unifying influence in Europe, and western civilization's center shifted from the Mediterranean basin to the continent of Europe.
The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great became the first Christian emperor in 313, (although he did not become sole emperor until after defeating Licinius the emperor in the East in 324). In 313, he issued the Edict of Milan, which was already Licinius' policy, expressing tolerance for all religions, thereby legalizing Christian worship. Christianity did not become the official religion of the empire under Constantine, but the steps he took to support and protect it were vitally important in the history of Christianity.
He established equal footing for Christian clergy by granting them the same immunities pagan priests had long enjoyed. He gave bishops judicial power. By intervening in church disputes, he initiated a precedent. He wrote laws that favored Christianity, and he personally endowed Christians with gifts of money, land and government positions. Instead of rejecting state authority, bishops were grateful, and this change in attitude proved to be critical to the further growth of the Church.
Constantine's church building was influential in the spread of Christianity. He devoted imperial and public funds, endowed his churches with wealth and lands, and provided revenue for their clergy and upkeep. Cameron explains that, "In a sense he was simply following the example set by his pagan predecessors ... Nevertheless his activities set a pattern for others, and by the end of the fourth century every self-respecting city, however small, had at least one church".
Cameron concludes that Constantine brought the Christian church and the Roman state together "in a completely new way, and in this his reign was fundamental for subsequent history".
Christianity of this era did not have a central government, as the Bishop of Rome had not yet manifested as the singular leader, allowing Christianity to develop differently in its many separate locations. Some Germanic people adopted Arian Christianity while others, such as the Goths, adopted catholicism. Having one religion aided their unification into the distinct groups that became the future nations of Europe. A "seismic moment" in Christian history took place in 612 when the Visigothic King Sisebut declared the obligatory conversion of all Jews in Spain, over-riding Pope Gregory who had reiterated the traditional ban against forced conversion of the Jews in 591. Armenia adopted Christianity in this period, making it their state religion, as did Georgia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 had little direct impact on the Eastern Roman Empire. With an "autocratic government, stable farm economy, Greek intellectual heritage and ... Orthodox Christianity", it had great wealth and economic resources enabling it to survive until 1453. In the sixth century, East influenced West when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I attempted to reunite empire by taking over both territory and the Church. From the 600s to the 700s, Roman Popes had to be approved by the Eastern emperor before they could be installed, requiring consistency with Eastern policy including the requirement that pagans convert. This had not previously been a requirement in the West.
During Antiquity, the Eastern church produced multiple doctrinal controversies that the orthodox called heresies, and ecumenical councils were convened to resolve these often heated disagreements. The first was between Arianism, which said the divine nature of Jesus was not equal to the Father's, and orthodox trinitarianism which says they are equal. Arianism spread throughout most of the Roman Empire from the fourth century onwards. The First Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) resulted in a condemnation of Arian teachings and produced the Nicene Creed.
The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth ecumenical councils are characterized by attempts to explain Jesus' human and divine natures. One such attempt created the Nestorian controversy, then schism, then a communion of churches, including the Armenian, Assyrian, and Egyptian churches. This resulted in what is today known as Oriental Orthodoxy, one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity these controversies produced, along with the Church of the East in Persia and Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium.
Late Roman culture was a synthesis of Christian and Greco-Roman. In this era, Christian intellectuals adapted Greek philosophy and Roman traditions to Christian use, took from Rome the class structure of aristocratic landowners and dependent laborers, and saw the Church emerge as a state within the State.
Whether or not the Roman Empire of this period officially made Christianity its state religion continues to be debated. Substantial growth in the third and fourth centuries had made Christianity the majority religion by the mid-fourth century, and after Constantine until the Fall of Empire, all emperors were Christian except Julian. Christian Emperors wanted the empire to become a Christian empire.
According to Bart Ehrman biblical scholar, "Constantine did not make Christianity the one official and viable religion". Of those that followed Constantine, historian Michele Renee Salzman has written that "When the Theodosian Code was published in 438, no emperor had as yet legislated enforced conversion... no emperor was willing to legalize the enforced conversion of pagans until [the Eastern emperor] Justinian in A.D. 529".
Even though Christians only made up around ten percent of the Roman population by the time of Constantine, they spread a belief they universally held: that Constantine's conversion was evidence the Christian God had conquered the pagan gods in Heaven. This "triumph of Christianity" became the primary narrative of the late antique age. Historian Peter Brown surmises that it was for this reason that, except for a few instances involving violent politics, "In most areas, polytheists were not molested" they were ignored; fourth century Christians focused on heretics instead.
Following what Salzman calls "a carrot and stick" policy, Christian emperors wrote laws offering incentives for supporting Christianity and laws that negatively impacted those who did not. Constantine never outlawed paganism, but consensus is that he did write the first laws prohibiting sacrifice which, thereafter, largely disappeared by the mid fourth century. Eusebius also attributes to Constantine a widespread temple destruction, however, while the destruction of temples is in 43 written sources, only four have been confirmed. Trombley and MacMullen say this is common because of conflicts in the sources. For example, the ancient chronicler Malalas claimed Constantine destroyed all the temples; then he said Theodisius destroyed them all; then he said Constantine converted them all to churches.
What is known with some certainty is that Constantine was vigorous in reclaiming confiscated properties for the Church, and he used reclamation to justify the destruction of some pagan temples such as Aphrodite's temple in Jerusalem. For the most part, Constantine simply neglected them. With the exception of a few temples, it was the eighth century when temples began being converted into churches in any number.
In the fourth century, Augustine argued that the Jewish people should be left alone. According to Anna Sapir Abulafia, most scholars agree that Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom lived in relative peace with one another until the thirteenth century. In these earlier centuries, scattered violence toward Jews occasionally took place during riots led by mobs, local leaders, and lower level clergy without the support of church leaders who generally followed Augustine's teachings.
Sometime before the fifth century, some churchmen reinterpreted millennialism, which is the hope of the thousand-year reign of the Messiah on earth centered in Jerusalem and ruling with the Jews, and added supersessionism, which sees the Church as the metaphorical Israel in place of the Jews. Supersessionism has never been an official or a universal doctrine, but has been a part of Christian thought through much of history. Many Jewish writers trace antisemitism to this doctrine.
Christian monasticism emerged in the third century, and by the fifth century, was a dominant force in all areas of late antique culture. Monastics developed a health care system which allowed the sick to remain within the monastery as a special class afforded special benefits and care. This destigmatized illness and formed the basis for future public health care. The first public hospital (the Basiliad) was founded by Basil the Great in 369. Central figures in the development of monasticism were Basil in the East and, in the West, Benedict, who created the Rule of Saint Benedict, which would become the most common rule throughout the Middle Ages and the starting point for other monastic rules.
With few exceptions, most organized societies c.600 called themselves Christian if they were headed by Christian leaders, not because populations were fully converted. This era is most characterized by the uniting of classical Graeco-Roman thinking, Germanic energy and Christian ethos into a new civilization centered in Europe.
After the fall of Rome, the Church, and what Matthews and Platt call its "spreading network of monasteries and convents", provided what little security there was. The Church was like an early version of a welfare state sponsoring public hospitals, orphanages, hospices, and hostels or inns. It supplied food for all during famine and regularly distributed food to the poor.
Monasteries actively preserved ancient texts, classical craft and artistic skills, while maintaining an intellectual culture, and supporting literacy, within their schools, scriptoria and libraries. They were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness, teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making, and various other skills. Medical practice was highly important and medieval monasteries are best known for their contributions to medical tradition. They also made advances in sciences such as astronomy, and St. Benedict's Rule (480–543) impacted politics and law. The formation of these organized bodies of believers gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence, distinct from political and familial authority, thereby revolutionizing social history.
The conversion of the Irish is "one of the defining aspects of the early medieval period" writes archaeologist Lorcan Harney. Christianization was diverse, embraced syncretization with prior beliefs, and was not the result of force. Archaeology indicates Christianity had become an established minority faith in some parts of Britain before Irish missionaries went to Iona (from 563) and converted many Picts. The Gregorian mission landed in 596, and converted the Kingdom of Kent and the court of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria.
The Frankish King Clovis I converted from Paganism to Roman Catholicism around 498-508, becoming the first to unite all of the Frankish tribes under one ruler. Clovis' descendent Charlemagne began the Carolingian Renaissance, sometimes called a Christian renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural revival of literature, arts, and scriptural studies, a renovation of law and the courts, and the promotion of literacy.
Modern western universities have their origins directly in the Medieval Church. The earliest were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Oxford (1096), and the University of Paris where the faculty was of international renown (c. 1150). Matthews and Platt say "these were the first Western schools of higher education since the sixth century". They began as cathedral schools, then formed into self-governing corporations with charters. Divided into faculties which specialized in law, medicine, theology or liberal arts, each held the famous quodlibeta theological debates amongst faculty and students, and awarded degrees, including Masters and Doctors.
According to Brown, by the time of Justinian I (527–565), Constantinople was the largest and most prosperous city in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and "the preeminent model for earthly power". In the same period, the "Church of the East" within the Persian/Sasanian Empire spread over modern Iraq, Iran, and parts of Central Asia. The shattering of the Sassanian Empire in the early 600s led upper-class refugees to move further east to China, entering Hsian-fu in 635.
In the 720s, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian banned the pictorial representation of Christ, saints, and biblical scenes destroying much early artistic history. The West condemned Leo's iconoclasm.
Throughout the Balkan Peninsula, and the area north of the Danube, Christianization and political centralization went hand in hand creating what is now East-Central Europe. Local elites wanted to convert because they gained prestige and power through matrimonial alliances and participation in imperial rituals.
Saints Cyril and Methodius played the key missionary roles in spreading Christianity to the people beginning in 863. For three and a half years they translated the Gospels into the Old Church Slavonic language, developing the first Slavic alphabet using Cyrillic script. It became the first literary language of the Slavs and, eventually, the educational foundation for all Slavic nations.
Between 1150 and 1200, Christian scholars traveled to formerly Moslem locations in Sicily and Spain. Evacuating Islamists had left behind their libraries, and among the treasure trove of books, the searchers found the works of Aristotle and Euclid and more. What had been lost to the West after the empire fell, was found, and the future would be forever changed.
Insights gained from Aristotle dramatically impacted the Church, triggering a period of upheaval that Matthews and Platt say, one "modern historian has called the twelfth century renaissance". This included the beginning of Scholasticism and the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Historians of science David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant have described what followed as a "medieval scientific revival". Along with Noah Efron, they credit multiple medieval Christian scientists with the early "tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science" which eventually led to the scientific revolution in the West.
Thereafter, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became the age of synthesis of the secular and Christian which formed the foundation of future Western civilization. Between 1000 and 1300, the Church became the leading institution of a western world becoming increasingly refined, educated and secular, while after 1300, the Church was riddled with corruption and entered into a decline. The intense and rapid changes of this period are considered some of the most significant in the history of Christianity.
East and West, the Church of 1100-1200 had immense authority. The key to its power in Europe was three monastic reformation movements that swept the continent. Owing to its stricter adherence to the reformed Benedictine rule, the Abbey of Cluny, first established in 910, became the leading centre of Western monasticism into the early twelfth century. The Cistercian movement was the second wave of reform after 1098, when they became a primary force of technological advancement and diffusion in medieval Europe.
Beginning in the twelfth century, the pastoral Franciscan Order was instituted by the followers of Francis of Assisi; later, the Dominican Order was begun by St. Dominic. Called Mendicant orders, they represented a change in understanding a monk's calling as contemplative, instead seeing it as a call to actively reform the world through preaching, missionary activity, and education.
This new calling to reform the world led the Dominicans to dominate the new universities, travel about preaching against heresy, and to participate in the Medieval Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern crusades. Christian policy denying the existence of witches and witchcraft would later be challenged by the Dominicans allowing them to participate in witch trials.
According to Matthews and Platt, the Church had influence in every facet of medieval life due not only to monastic reform, but also to the "tireless work of the clergy and the powerful effect of the Christian belief system". Most medieval people believed that participating in the sacraments, (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, marriage, last rights, and ordination for priests), and living morally, granted them Heaven. Confession and penance had become widespread from the eleventh century, and by 1300, were an integral part of both ritual and belief.
Gregorian Reform established new law requiring the consent of both parties before a marriage could be performed, a minimum age for marriage, and codified marriage as a sacrament. That made the union a binding contract, making abandonment prosecutable with dissolution of marriage overseen by Church authorities. Although the Church abandoned tradition to allow women the same rights as men to dissolve a marriage, in practice men were granted dissolutions more frequently than women.
Throughout the Middle Ages, abbesses and female superiors of monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots.
The veneration of Mary developed within the monasteries in western medieval Europe. Rachel Fulton writes that medieval European Christians praised Mary for making God tangible.
Christian mysticism abounded in the Middle Ages, particularly among nuns and monks, inspiring believers to transcend the material realm. People equated the purpose of Scripture with that of the Church. "Yet so benevolently disguised", Christopher Ocker writes, "the Bible could infiltrate and unsettle any region of late medieval Europe’s cultural worlds".
Scholars of the Renaissance created textual criticism which revealed writing errors by medieval monks and exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. Popes of the Middle Ages had depended upon the document to prove their political authority.
The church became a leading patron of art and architecture and commissioned and supported such artists as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation leading to the development of classical music and all its derivatives.
It was in these same centuries that western society also changed dramatically. Western kings were becoming more secular, and their primary focus shifted away from building Christendom into centralizing power in their own nation-states. Fueled by belief that unity and peace necessitated one religion, the State defined minorities as a threat to the social order, then used stereotyping, propaganda and the new courts of inquisition to prosecute them. This attacked the older, local, kinship-based systems, and took over their legal, military, and social power. Persecution became a core element and a functional tool of power in the political development of Western society. By the 1300s, segregation and discrimination in law, politics, and the economy, had become established in all European states.
The church did not have the leading role in persecution, but it supported the State through an increasingly complex Canon law. By the 14th century, Canon law had become intricate enough that most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians. The church of this era had developed into a large, multilevel organization with the Pope at the peak of a strict hierarchy. Supporting him were layers of staff, administrators and advisers: the papal curia. An entire system of courts formed the judicial branch.
Canon law of the Catholic Church (Latin: jus canonicum) was the first modern Western legal system, and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, predating European common law and civil law traditions. Justinian I's reforms had a clear effect on the evolution of jurisprudence, and Leo III's Ecloga influenced the formation of legal institutions in the Slavic world.
The Medieval Inquisition, including the Episcopal Inquisition (1184–1230) and the later Papal Inquisition (1230s–1240s), was a type of criminal court established from around 1184 and run by the Roman Catholic Church, and local secular leaders dealing largely, but not exclusively, with religious issues such as heresy. Local law delivered the accused to the court, sometimes using torture for interrogation, while religious inquisitors stood by as recording witnesses.
Inquisition was not a unified institution. Many parts of Europe had erratic inquisitions or none at all. Jurisdiction was local, limited, and lack of support and opposition often obstructed it. Inquisition was contested stridently, in and outside the church. Opponents charged heresy inquisitions with proving the Roman church was "unchristian" and "a destroyer of its gospel legacy, or even the real enemy of Christ".
After decades of calling upon secular rulers for aid in dealing with the Cathars, also known as Albigensians, and getting no response, Pope Innocent III and the king of France, Philip Augustus, joined in 1209 in a military campaign that was put about as necessary for eliminating the Albigensian heresy. Once begun, the campaign quickly took a political turn. Scholars disagree on whether the course of the war was determined more by the Pope or King Philip.
Throughout the campaign, Innocent vacillated, sometimes taking the side favoring crusade, then siding against it and calling for its end. In 1229, when the crusade finally did end, the campaign no longer had crusade status, and its fighters were not rewarded with dispensations. The army had seized and occupied the lands of nobles who had not sponsored Cathars, but had been in the good graces of the church, which had been unable to protect them. The entire region came under the rule of the French king and became southern France. Catharism continued for another hundred years (until 1350).
"From its pinnacle of power and prestige in 1200 ... the Church entered a period of decline in about 1300" write Matthews and Platt. The popes of the fourteenth century focused on politics and power in an effort to centralize power into the papal position and build a papal monarchy. Elite Italian families used their wealth to secure episcopal offices. These Popes were greedy and corrupt and so caught up in politics that they ignored the pressing needs of the Church and the people it served.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries people experienced plague, famine and war that ravaged most of the continent. There was social unrest, urban riots, peasant revolts and renegade feudal armies. They faced all of this with a church unable to provide much moral leadership because of its own internal conflict and corruption. Devoted and virtuous nuns and monks became increasingly rare, and monastic reform, which had been a major force, becomes largely absent.
Popes lost power to the secular kings. Pope Boniface VII (1294-1303) wrote a papal bull in 1302 claiming papal superiority over all secular rulers. Philip IV, king of France, answered by sending an army to arrest him. Boniface fled for his life.
In 1309, Pope Clement V moved to Avignon in southern France in search of relief from Rome's factional politics. Seven popes resided there in the Avignon Papacy until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377. After his death, the papal conclave met in 1378, in Rome, and elected an Italian Urban VI to succeed Gregory. The French cardinals did not approve, so they held a second conclave electing Robert of Geneva instead. This began the Western Schism.
In 1409, the Pisan council called for the resignation of both popes, electing a third to replace them. Both Popes refused to resign, giving the Church three popes. The pious became disgusted, leading to more loss of papal prestige. Five years later, the Holy Roman Emperor called the Council of Constance (1414–1418), and forty years after the original split, resolved the conflict by electing Pope Martin V in 1417.
Around the same time as these events, John Wycliffe (1320–1384), an English scholastic philosopher and theologian, had urged the church to give up its property (which produced much of the church's wealth), and to once again embrace poverty and simplicity, to stop being subservient to the state and its politics, and to deny papal authority. He was accused of heresy, convicted and sentenced to death, but died before implementation. The Lollards followed his teachings, played a role in the English Reformation, and were persecuted for heresy after Wycliffe's death.
Jan Hus (1369–1415), a Czech based in Prague, was influenced by Wycliffe and spoke out against the abuses and corruption he saw in the Catholic Church there. He was also accused of heresy and condemned to death. After his death, Hus became a powerful symbol of Czech nationalism and the impetus for the Bohemian/Czech and German Reformations.
The rise of Islam (600 to 1517) had unleashed a series of Arab military campaigns that conquered Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia by 650, and added North Africa and most of Spain by 740. Only the Franks and Constantinople had been able to withstand this medieval juggernaut.
After 1071, when the Seljuk Turks closed Christian pilgrimages and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, the Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from Pope Urban II. Jaroslav Folda writes that Urban II responded by calling upon the knights of Christendom at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, to "go to the aid of their brethren in the Holy Land and to liberate the Christian Holy sites from the heathen". The First Crusade captured Antioch in 1099, then Jerusalem, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Second Crusade occurred in 1145 when Edessa was taken by Islamic forces.
When the Pope, Blessed Eugenius III (1145–1153), called for the Second Crusade, Saxon nobles in Eastern Europe refused to go. These rulers saw crusade as a tool for territorial expansion, alliance building, and the empowerment of their own church and state. The free barbarian people around the Baltic Sea had been raiding the countries that surrounded them, stealing crucial resources, killing, and enslaving captives since the days of Charlemagne (747–814). Subduing the Baltic area was therefore more important to the Eastern nobles.
In 1147, Eugenius' Divini dispensatione, gave the eastern nobles crusade indulgences for the Baltic area. The Northern, (or Baltic), Crusades followed, taking place, off and on, with and without papal support, from 1147 to 1316. According to Fonnesberg-Schmidt, "While the theologians maintained that conversion should be voluntary, there was a widespread pragmatic acceptance of conversion obtained through political pressure or military coercion" from the Baltic wars.
In the Levant, Christians held Jerusalem until 1187 and the Third Crusade when Richard the Lionheart defeated the significantly larger army of the Ayyubid Sultanate led by Saladin. The Fourth Crusade, begun by Innocent III in 1202 was subverted by the Venetians. They funded it, then ran out of money and instructed the crusaders to go to Constantinople and get money there. Crusaders sacked the city and other parts of Asia Minor, established the Latin Empire of Constantinople in Greece and Asia Minor, and contributed to the downfall of the Byzantine Empire. Five numbered crusades to the Holy Land culminated in the siege of Acre of 1219, essentially ending Western presence in the Holy Land. Crusades led to the development of national identities in European nations, increased division with the East, and produced cultural change for all involved.
Between 711 and 718, the Iberian peninsula had been conquered by Muslims in the Umayyad conquest. The military struggle to reclaim the peninsula from Muslim rule took place for centuries until the Christian Kingdoms reconquered the Moorish state of Al-Ándalus in 1492.
Isabel and Ferdinand married in 1469, united Spain with themselves as the first king and queen, fought the Muslims in the Reconquista and soon after established the Spanish Inquisition.
The Spanish inquisition was originally authorized by the Pope in answer to royal fears that Conversos or Marranos (Jewish converts) were spying and conspiring with the Muslims to sabotage the new state. "New Christians" had begun to appear as a socio-religious designation and legal distinction. Muslim converts were known as Moriscos.
Early inquisitors proved so severe that the Pope soon opposed the Spanish Inquisition and attempted to shut it down. Ferdinand declined, and is said to have pressured the Pope so that, in October 1483, a papal bull conceded control of the inquisition to the Spanish crown. According to Spanish historian José Casanova, the Spanish inquisition became the first truly national, unified and centralized state institution.
The Church of the East played a major role in the history of Christianity in Asia. Between the 9th and 14th centuries, it represented the world's largest Christian denomination in terms of geographical extent. It established dioceses and communities stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and today's Iraq and Iran, to India (the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians of Kerala), the Mongol kingdoms in Central Asia, the Turkic tribes in Central Asia, and China during the Tang dynasty (7th–9th centuries). In the 13th and 14th centuries, the church experienced a final period of expansion under the Mongol Empire, where influential Church of the East clergy sat in the Mongol court.
By the end of the first millennium in the East, a rich and varied culture, characterized by ethnic diversity, and centered around Constantinople, a famously prosperous and powerful city with numerous market places, massive walls and magnificent monuments, had fully developed. Its material blessings were attributed to it being protected by God. Jonathan Shepard writes that even the "furthest-flung outsiders could make the connection between Byzantine prosperity, striking-power and religious devotion".
But Byzantium had reached its greatest territorial extension in the sixth century under Justinian I, and for the next 800 years, it steadily contracted under the onslaught of its hostile neighbors in both East and West.
Many differences between East and West had existed since Antiquity. Disagreements over whether Pope or Patriarch should lead the Church, whether that should be done in Latin or Greek, whether priests must remain celibate and other points of doctrine such as the Filioque Clause which was added to the Nicene creed by the west, were intensified by cultural, geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic differences. Eventually, this produced the East–West Schism, also known as the "Great Schism" of 1054, which separated the Church into Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
In a defining moment in 1380, Grand Prince Dmitrii of Moscow faced the army of the Golden Horde on Kulikovo Field near the Don River, there defeating the Mongols. Michael Angold writes that this began a period of transformation fusing state power and religious mission: thereafter "a disparate collection of warring principalities" formed "into an Orthodox nation, unified under tsar and patriarch and self-consciously promoting both a national faith and an ideology of a faithful nation".
After 1302, the Ottoman Empire was built upon the ruins of what had once been the great Byzantine Empire. Historians Matthews and Platt write that, by 1330, the Ottomans had "absorbed Asia Minor, and by 1390 Serbia and Bulgaria were Turkish provinces. In 1453, when the Turks finally took Constantinople, they ravaged the city for days... [ending] the last living vestige of Ancient Rome ... ".
The flight of Eastern Christians from Constantinople, and the manuscripts they carried with them, is one of the factors that prompted the literary renaissance in the West.
The establishment of sovereign states was the single most important political development of the sixteenth century, however, for the Church, it was the breakup of Christendom. In the 1500s, the Church experienced the results of what had begun 200 years before. While losing power, prestige and influence to the ascending stars of secular kings and their newly unified kingdoms, the dream of Christendom ended. The cumulative effects marked the next century in four ways: the development of political absolutism beginning in 1600, the return of the aristocracy to prominence, the rise of the middle class, and the Enlightenment.
Following the geographic discoveries of the 1400s and 1500s, increasing population and inflation led the emerging nation-states of Portugal, Spain, and France, the Dutch Republic, and England to explore, conquer, colonize and exploit the newly discovered territories. While colonialism was driven by economics and politics, it also opened the door for Christian missions. According to historical theologian Justo González, colonialism and missions each sometimes aided and sometimes impeded the other.
The history of the Inquisition divides into two major parts: its Papal creation in the early thirteenth century, and its transformation into permanent secular governmental bureaucracies between 1478 and 1542.
Historian Helen Rawlings says, "the Spanish Inquisition was different [from earlier inquisitions] in one fundamental respect: it was responsible to the crown rather than the Pope and was used to consolidate state interest.
The Portuguese Inquisition, in close relationship with the Church, was also controlled by the crown who established a government board, known as the General Council, to oversee it. The Grand Inquisitor, chosen by the king, was nearly always a member of the royal family.
T. F. Mayer, historian, writes that "the Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Naples, Venice and Florence". Its activity was primarily bureaucratic. The Roman Inquisition is probably best known for its condemnation of Galileo.
Until the 1300s, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was that witches did not exist. While historians have been unable to pinpoint a single cause of what became known as the "witch frenzy", scholars have noted that, without changing church doctrine, a new but common stream of thought developed at every level of society that witches were both real and malevolent. Records show the belief in magic had remained so widespread among the rural people that it has convinced some historians Christianization had not been as successful as previously supposed.
The break up of Christendom culminates in the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648). Beginning with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenburg in 1517, there was no actual schism until 1521 when edicts handed down by the Diet of Worms condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas.
Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and many others protested against corruptions such as simony (the buying and selling of church offices), the holding of multiple church offices by one person at the same time, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant position later included the Five solae (sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria), the priesthood of all believers, Law and Gospel, and the two kingdoms doctrine.
Three important traditions to emerge directly from the Reformation were the Lutheran, Reformed, and the Anglican traditions. Beginning in 1519, Huldrych Zwingli spread John Calvin's teachings in Switzerland leading to the Swiss Reformation.
At the same time in Germany and Switzerland, a collection of loosely related groups that included Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists, began the Radical Reformation. They opposed Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican church-state theories, supporting instead a full separation from the state. According to historian George Huntston Williams, members of the Radical Reformation are doctrinally halfway between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Reformers were swiftly opposed with unbending resistance from the established church. The Roman Catholic Church struck back by launching its own Counter-Reformation, beginning with Pope Paul III (1534 - 1549), the first in a series of 10 reforming popes from 1534-1605. In an effort to reclaim morality, a list of books detrimental to faith or morals was established, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which included the works of Luther, Calvin and other Protestants along with writings condemned as obscene.
New monastic orders arose including the Jesuits. Resembling a military company in its hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, their vow of loyalty to the Pope set them apart from other monastic orders, leading them to be called "the shock troops of the papacy". Jesuits soon became the Church's chief weapon against Protestantism.
Monastic reform also led to the development of new, yet orthodox forms of spirituality, such as that of the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality.
The Council of Trent (1545–1563) denied each Protestant claim, and laid the foundation of Roman Catholic policies up to the twenty-first century.
Reforming zeal and Catholic denial spread through much of Europe, and became entangled with local politics. Already involved in dynastic wars, the quarreling royal houses became polarized into the two religious camps. "Religious" wars resulted. Ranging from international wars to internal conflicts, war began in the Holy Roman Empire with the minor Knights' Revolt in 1522, then intensified in the First Schmalkaldic War (1546-1547) and the Second Schmalkaldic War (1552-1555). Seven years after the Peace of Augsburg, France became the centre of religious wars which lasted 36 years. The final wave was the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The involvement of foreign powers made it the largest and most disastrous.
The causes of these wars were mixed. Many scholars see them as fought to obtain security and freedom for differing religious confessions, however, scholars have largely interpreted these wars as struggles for political independence that coincided with the break up of medieval empires into the modern nation states.
War had been fueled by the "unquestioning assumption that a single religion should exist within each community" say Matthews and Platt. However, debate on toleration now occupied the attention of every version of the Christian faith. Debate centered on defining the role of individual conscience, determining whether peace required allowing only one faith and the need to punish heretics, or if ancient opinions defending leniency, based on the parable of the tares, should be revived.
This world changing debate was not confined to religion. It became necessary to rethink on a political level, all of the State's reasons for persecution. Many began arguing in favor of tolerance on a non-religious basis.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) gave the Holy Roman Empire what Mout describes as "a highly durable legal and constitutional foundation for a form of toleration". Over the next two and a half centuries, many other treaties and political declarations of tolerance followed, until concepts of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of thought became established in most western countries.
There has long been an established consensus that the Enlightenment was anti-Christian, anti-Church and anti-religious. However, twenty-first century scholars tend to see the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment as complex with many regional and national variations. According to Helena Rosenblatt, the Enlightenment was not just a war with Christianity, since many changes to the Church were advocated by Christian moderates.
In Margaret Jacob's view, critique of Christianity began among the more extreme Protestant reformers who were enraged by fear, tyranny and persecution. Absolutism, supported by Catholicism, caused the virulent anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian sentiment that emerged in the 1680s.
Enlightenment shifted the paradigm, and various ground-breaking discoveries such as Galileo's, led to the Scientific revolution (1600-1750) and an upsurge in skepticism. Virtually everything in western culture was subjected to systematic doubt including religious beliefs. Biblical criticism emerged.
Spinoza, an Amsterdam Jew, who published against religion, along with Hobbes and others, supported a matter based (materialistic) mechanistic universe with no need of God. After 1750, secularization at every level of European society can be observed.
In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing observations made with his new telescope that planets moved. Since Aristotle's rediscovery in the 1100s, western scientists, along with the Catholic Church, had adopted Aristotle's physics and cosmology with the earth fixed in place. Jeffrey Foss writes that, by Galileo's time the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe was "fully integrated with Catholic theology".
The majority of Galileo's fellow scientists had no telescope, and Galileo had no theory of physics to explain how planets could orbit the sun, since according to Aristotelian physics, that was impossible. (The physics would not be resolved for another hundred years.) Galileo's peers rejected his assertions and alerted the authorities. The Church forbade Galileo from teaching it. Instead, Galileo published his books. He was summoned before the Roman Inquisition twice. First warned, he was next sentenced to house arrest on a charge of "grave suspicion of heresy".
French historian Louis Châtellier [fr] writes that Galileo's condemnation - as a devoted Catholic - caused much consternation and private discussion about whether the judges were condemning Galileo, or the "new science" and anyone who attempted to displace Aristotle. Châtellier concludes, "...the relationship between scientific thinkers and ecclesiastical authorities [became] marked by reciprocal mistrust" which has waxed and waned into the modern day.
"So turbulent was the period between 1760 and 1830 that today it is considered a historical watershed" write Matthews and Platt. Monarchies fell, old societies were swept away, the class system realigned, and the changed social order altered the world.
The old religion moved to the New World with vitality. Throughout the revolutionary period, English speaking Protestant Christianity was the majority religion and played the most visible role in supporting revolution. Martin Marty writes that, in addition to being a political and economic revolution, the War of Independence and its aftermath included the legal assurance of religious freedom marking a "new order of ages".
Change also took the form of a revival known as the First Great Awakening, which swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. Both religious and political in nature, it had roots in German Pietism and British Evangelicalism, and was a response to the extreme rationalism of biblical criticism, the anti-Christian tenets of the Enlightenment, and its threat of assimilation by the modern state.
Beginning among the Presbyterians, revival quickly spread to Congregationalists (Puritans) and Baptists, creating American Evangelicalism and Wesleyan Methodism. Battles over the movement and its dramatic style raged at both the congregational and denominational levels. This caused the division of American Protestantism into political 'Parties', for the first time, which eventually led to critical support for the American Revolution.
In places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where one denomination received state funding, churches now began to lobby local legislatures to end that inequity by applying the Reformation principle separating church and state. Theological pluralism became the new norm.
The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s) extolled moral reform as the Christian alternative to armed revolution. They established societies, separate from any church, to begin social reform movements concerning abolition, women's rights, temperance and to "teach the poor to read". These were pioneers in developing nationally integrated forms of organization which produced the mergers and business consolidations that reshaped the American economy. Here lie the beginnings of the Latter Day Saint movement, the Restoration Movement and the Holiness movement.
The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 and was most notable for taking the movement throughout the world, especially in English speaking countries. The Fourth Great Awakening of the sixties - what political scientist Hugh Heclo describes as "a plastic term reaching backward to the mid-1950s and forward to the mid-1970s" - remains a debated concept.
Restorationists were prevalent in America, but they have not described themselves as a reform movement but have, instead, described themselves as restoring the Church to its original form as found in the book of Acts. It gave rise to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, Adventism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Matthews and Platt have written that, during this period of "revolution and reaction, the West turned away from the past" in the hope of creating a new order of social justice. For over 300 years, Christian Europe had participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historian Christopher Brown has written in the Cambridge History of Christianity that Christianity was, therefore, as complicit in the expansion of slavery as it was central to its demise.
Moral objections surfaced very soon after the establishment of the trade. In the earliest instances, denunciations came from Catholic priests. Next, emerging in the Religious Society of Friends, and followed by Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, abolitionists campaigned, wrote and spread pamphlets against the Atlantic slave trade. Quakers helped guide these tracts into print and organized the first anti-slavery societies. Moral reform of the Second Great Awakening also aided abolition.
The first black abolitionists were Calvinist theologians who found no justification for slavery in the Bible. In the years after the American Revolution, black congregations sprang up around the English speaking world led by black preachers who brought revival, promoted communal and cultural autonomy, and provided the institutional base for keeping abolitionism alive.
Abolitionism did not flourish in the societies of absolutist states. It was the Protestant revivalists who followed the Quaker example, and the new American republic, that led to the "gradual but comprehensive abolition of slavery".
In its first hundred years, Protestantism did not develop foreign missions. The beginning of American Protestant missions abroad followed the sailing of William Carey from England to India in 1793 after the Great awakening. At the same time, a great effort was also being made to evangelize America. Missionaries played a crucial role in the acculturation of the American Indians.
The history of boarding schools for the indigenous populations in Canada and the US is mixed. While the majority of native children did not attend boarding school at all, of those that did, recent studies indicate a few found happiness and refuge while many others found suffering, forced assimilation, and abuse. Over time, many missionaries came to respect the virtues of native culture. "After 1828, most missionaries found it difficult to defend the policies of their government" writes McLoughlin.
Revolution broke the power of the Old World aristocracy, offered hope to the disenfranchised, and enabled the middle class to reap the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Scholars have since identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation, work ethic, economic development, and the development of the state system. Weber says this contributed to economic growth and the development of banking across Northern Europe.
In the early twentieth century, the study of two highly influential religious movements - the social gospel movement (1870s–1920s) and the global ecumenical movement (beginning in 1910) - provided the context for the development of American sociology as an academic discipline.
Liberal Christianity, sometimes called liberal theology, is an umbrella term for religious movements within late 18th, 19th and 20th-century Christianity. According to theologian Theo Hobson, liberal Christianity has two traditions. Before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, liberalism was synonymous with Christian Idealism in that it imagined a liberal State with political and cultural liberty.
The second tradition was from seventeenth century rationalism's efforts to wean Christianity from its "irrational cultic" roots. Lacking any grounding in Christian "practice, ritual, sacramentalism, church and worship", liberal Christianity lost touch with the fundamental necessity of faith and ritual in maintaining Christianity. This led to the birth of fundamentalism and liberalism's decline.
Fundamentalist Christianity is a movement that arose mainly within British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century in reaction to modernism. Before 1919, fundamentalism was loosely organized and undisciplined. Its most significant early movements were the holiness movement and the millenarian movement with its premillennial expectations of the second coming.
In 1925, fundamentalists participated in the Scopes trial, and by 1930, the movement appeared to be dying. Then in the 1930s, Neo-orthodoxy began uniting moderates of both sides. In the 1940s, "new-evangelicalism" established itself as separate from fundamentalism. Today, fundamentalism is less about doctrine than political activism.
Pope Pius XI declared – Mit brennender Sorge – that Fascist governments had hidden "pagan intentions" and expressed the irreconcilability of the Catholic position with totalitarian fascist state worship which placed the nation above God, fundamental human rights, and dignity.
Catholic priests were executed in concentration camps alongside Jews; 2,600 Catholic priests were imprisoned in Dachau, and 2,000 of them were executed (cf. Priesterblock). A further 2,700 Polish priests were executed (a quarter of all Polish priests), and 5,350 Polish nuns were either displaced, imprisoned, or executed. Many Catholic laymen and clergy played notable roles in sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, including Pope Pius XII. The head rabbi of Rome became a Catholic in 1945 and, in honour of the actions the pope undertook to save Jewish lives, he took the name Eugenio (the pope's first name).
Most leaders and members of the largest Protestant church in Germany, the German Evangelical Church, which had a long tradition of nationalism and support of the state, supported the Nazis when they came to power. A smaller contingent, about a third of German Protestants, formed the Confessing Church which opposed Nazism. In a study of sermon content, William Skiles says "Confessing Church pastors opposed the Nazi regime on three fronts... first, they expressed harsh criticism of Nazi persecution of Christians and the German churches; second, they condemned National Socialism as a false ideology that worships false gods; and third, they challenged Nazi anti-Semitic ideology by supporting Jews as the chosen people of God and Judaism as a historic foundation of Christianity".
Nazis interfered in The Confessing Church's affairs, harassed its members, executed mass arrests and targeted well known pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, was arrested, found guilty in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.
The Russian Orthodox Church held a privileged position in the Russian Empire, expressed in the motto of the late empire from 1833: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Populism. Nevertheless, the Church reform of Peter I in the early 18th century had placed the Orthodox authorities under the control of the tsar. An ober-procurator appointed by the tsar ran the committee which governed the Church between 1721 and 1918: the Most Holy Synod. The Church became involved in the various campaigns of russification and contributed to anti-semitism.
The Bolsheviks and other Russian revolutionaries saw the Church, like the tsarist state, as an enemy of the people. Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden and sometimes led to imprisonment. Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals, as well as execution.
In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, one journalist reported 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. This included people like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna who was at this point a monastic. Recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables. More than 100,000 Russian clergymen were executed between 1937 and 1941.
Under the state atheism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Christians of many denominations experienced persecution, with many churches and monasteries being destroyed, as well as clergy being executed.
Contemporary Christianity has been challenged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to affirm religion "within the context of modern secularity". Theologian William Meyer says this has become "the critical fault line in the contemporary world".
The traditional church, characterized by Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, functions within society, engaging it directly through preaching, teaching ministries and service programs like local food banks. Theologically, churches seek to embrace secular method and rationality while continuing to refuse the secular worldview. Sociologists Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers write that this type of Christianity has been declining in the West.
Christian sects, such as the Amish and Mennonites, traditionally withdraw from, and minimize interaction with, society at large. According to the National Institute of Health, "The Old Order Amish are the fastest growing religious subpopulation in the United States".
Theologian Allan Anderson has written that the 1960s saw the rise of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity. This mystical type of Christianity emphasizes the inward experience of personal piety and spirituality. In 2000, approximately one quarter of all Christians worldwide were part of Pentecostalism and its associated movements. By 2025, Pentecostals are expected to comprise one-third of the nearly three billion Christians worldwide. Deininger writes that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in global Christianity.
New forms of religion which embrace the sacred as a deeper understanding of the self have begun. This "spirituality" is private and individualistic, and differs radically from Christian tradition, dogma and ritual. Theologian John Carman writes that Christianity has itself taken many new directions resulting from "the appeal to inner experience, the renewed interest in human nature, and the influence of social conditions upon ethical reflection".
In the twentieth century, liberal Christianity embraced the Social Gospel and liberation theology movements. These movements tend to be highly critical of traditional Christian ethics, and instead make the "kingdom ideals" of Jesus their goal. First focusing on the community's sins, rather than the individual's failings, they seek to foster social justice, expose institutionalized sin, and redeem the institutions of society. Ethicist Philip Wogaman says the social gospel and liberation theology redefined justice in the process.
Originating in America in 1966, Black theology developed a combined social gospel and liberation theology that mixes Christianity with questions of civil rights, aspects of the Black Power movement, and responses to black Islamists claiming Christianity was a "white man's" religion. Spreading to the United Kingdom, then parts of Africa, confronting apartheid in South Africa, Black theology explains Christianity as liberation for this life not just the next.
Racial violence over the last several decades demonstrates how troubled issues of race remain in the twenty-first century. Paul Harvey says that, in 1960s America, "The religious power of the civil rights movement transformed the American conception of race." Then the social power of the religious right responded in the 1970s by recapturing and recasting many evangelical concepts in political terms that included support of racial separation. The Prosperity Gospel has since developed and become a dominant force in American religious life. It has a multi-cultural demographic, and its "modern idiom", (positive thinking, evangelical tradition and New Thought), is based on self-empowerment and positive confession, and promotes racial reconciliation.
Feminist theology began in 1960. In the last years of the twentieth century, the re-examination of old religious texts through diversity, otherness, and difference developed womanist theology of African-American women, the "mujerista" theology of Hispanic women, and insights from Asian feminist theology.
After World War II, Christian missionaries played a transformative role for many colonial societies moving them toward independence through the development of decolonization. In the mid to late 1990s, postcolonial theology emerged globally from multiple sources. Biblical scholars Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore write that it analyzes structures of power and ideology in order to recover what colonialism erased or suppressed in indigenous cultures.
On 11 October 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. The council was "pastoral" in nature, interpreting dogma in terms of its scriptural roots, revising liturgical practices, and providing guidance for articulating traditional Church teachings in contemporary times. The council is perhaps best known for its instructions that the Mass may be celebrated in the vernacular as well as in Latin.
On 21 November 1964, the Second Vatican Council published the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Roman Catholic goals are to establish full communion amongst all the various Christian churches. Amongst Evangelicals, there is no agreed upon definition, strategy or goal. Different theologies on the nature of the church have produced some hostility toward the formalism of the WCC. In the twenty-first century, sentiment is widespread that ecumenism has stalled.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestant missionaries worked with indigenous people to translate the Bible into approximately 90% of those native languages in their locations. This also generated a written grammar, a lexicon of native traditions, and a dictionary of their language, which was taught in missionary schools.
Local native cultures responded with "movements of indigenization and cultural liberation" says Sanneh. This led to the development of national literatures, the spread of literacy, mass printing and the development of voluntary organizations which were instrumental in generating a democratic legacy. According to Sanneh, that means western missionaries began the "largest, most diverse and most vigorous movement of cultural renewal in [the] history" of Africa.
In 1900 under colonial rule there were just under 9 million Christians in Africa. By 1960, and the end of colonialism there were about 60 million. By 2005, African Christians had increased to 393 million, about half of the continent's total population at that time. Population in Africa has continued to grow with the percentage of Christians remaining at about half in 2022. According to Isichei, "The expansion of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa has been so dramatic that it has been called 'the fourth great age of Christian expansion'."
Historian Philip Jenkins observes that Christianity is growing rapidly in China and some other Asian countries. Sociologist and specialist in Chinese religion Fenggang Yang from Purdue University writes that Christianity, specifically Pentecostalism, is "spreading among the Chinese of South-East Asia". Social Anthropologist Juliette Koning and sociologist Heidi Dahles of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam agree there has been a "rapid expansion of charismatic Christianity from the 1980s onwards" in South East Asia. Allan Anderson and Edmond Tang have reported in their book Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia that "Asia has the second largest number of Pentecostals/charismatics of any continent in the world, and seems to be fast catching up with the largest, Latin America."
It has been reported in America Magazine that increasing numbers of young people in China are becoming Christians. The Council on Foreign Relations says the "number of Chinese Protestants has grown by an average of 10 percent annually since 1979".
According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity has grown in India in recent years. While the exact number is not available, religion scholar William R. Burrow of Colorado State University has estimated that about 8% have converted to Christianity.
In his 2013 book The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution, American journalist John L. Allen Jr. has written that anti-Christian persecution in the twenty-first century by Islamic terrorists, narco-terrorists, paramilitary bands, nationalistic forces and various police states are a common enough occurrence for it to be a category of human rights concern. In 2013, 17 Middle Eastern Muslim majority states reported 28 of the 29 types of religious discrimination against 45 of the 47 religious minorities, including Christianity.
Web | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Christianity follows the Christian religion from the first century to the twenty-first as it developed from its earliest beliefs and practices, spread geographically, and changed into its contemporary global forms.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Christianity originated with the ministry of Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer who proclaimed the imminent Kingdom of God and was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem in the Roman province of Judea. The earliest followers of Jesus were apocalyptic Jewish Christians. Christianity remained a Jewish sect, for centuries in some locations, diverging gradually from Judaism over doctrinal, social and historical differences.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In spite of occasional persecution in the Roman Empire, the religious movement spread as a grassroots movement that became established by the third century. The Roman Emperor Constantine I became the first Christian emperor and in 313, he issued the Edict of Milan expressing tolerance for all religions thereby legalizing Christian worship. Various Christological debates about the human and divine nature of Jesus occupied the Christian Church for three centuries, and seven ecumenical councils were called to resolve them.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization in Europe after the Fall of Rome. In the Early Middle Ages, missionary activities spread Christianity towards the west and the north. During the High Middle Ages, Eastern and Western Christianity grew apart, leading to the East–West Schism of 1054. Growing criticism of the Roman Catholic church and its corruption in the Late Middle Ages led to the Protestant Reformation and its related reform movements, which concluded with the European wars of religion, the development of tolerance as policy, and the Age of Enlightenment.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the twenty-first century, traditional Christianity has declined in the West, while new forms have developed and expanded throughout the world. Today, there are more than two billion Christians worldwide and Christianity has become the world's largest, and most widespread religion. Within the last century, the center of growth has shifted from West to East and from the North to the global South.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Little is fully known of primitive Christianity. Sources on its first 150 years are fragmentary and scarce. This, along with a variety of complications, have limited scholars to what is probable, based largely on the book of Acts, whose historicity is debated as much as it is accepted.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Christianity began with the itinerant preaching and teaching of a deeply pious young Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth. According to the Gospels, Jesus was the Son of God, who was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem. His followers believed that he was raised from the dead and exalted by God, heralding the coming Kingdom of God. Theologian and minister Frances M. Young says this is what \"lies at the heart of Christianity.\"",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure. However, in the twenty-first century, tensions surround the figure of Jesus and the supernatural features of the gospels, creating, for many, a distinction between the 'Jesus of history' and the 'Christ of faith'. Yet, as Young has observed, \"it is precisely Christology, the dogmas concerning the divinity and humanity of Christ, which have made Christianity what it is\".",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "It was amongst a small group of Second Temple Jews, looking for an \"anointed\" leader (messiah or king) from the ancestral line of King David, that Christianity first formed in relative obscurity. Led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, they described themselves as \"disciples of the Lord\" and followers \"of the Way\". According to Acts 9 and 11, a settled community of disciples at Antioch were the first to be called \"Christians\". While there is evidence in the New Testament (Acts 10) suggesting the presence of Gentile Christians from the beginning, most early Christians were actively Jewish.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Geographically, Christianity began in Jerusalem in first-century Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The religious, social, and political climate of the area was diverse and often characterized by turmoil. The Roman Empire had only recently emerged from a long series of civil wars, and would experience two more major periods of civil war over the next centuries. Romans of this era feared civil disorder, giving their highest regard to peace, harmony and order. Piety equaled loyalty to family, class, city and emperor, and it was demonstrated by loyalty to the practices and rituals of the old religious ways.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "While Christianity was largely tolerated, some also saw it as a threat to \"Romanness\" which produced localized persecution by mobs and governors. In 250, Decius made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman gods resulting in widespread persecution of Christians. Valerian pursued similar policies later that decade. The last and most severe official persecution, the Diocletianic Persecution, took place in 303–311.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "From Jerusalem, Christianity spread into the Jewish diaspora communities outside the Palestinian homeland. Christianity and Judaism gradually grew apart over doctrinal, social and historical differences.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From its beginnings, the Christian church has seen itself as having a double mission: first, to fully live out its faith, and second, to pass it on, making Christianity a 'missionary' religion from its inception. Driven by a universalist logic, missions are a multi-cultural, often complex, historical process.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Outreach began in the urban landscape of the Roman Empire with the Apostles, and Paul. Christianity quickly spread itself geographically, with interaction sometimes producing conflict, and other times producing converts and accommodation.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Beginning with less than 1000 people, by the year 100, Christianity had grown to perhaps one hundred small household churches consisting of an average of around seventy (12–200) members each. It achieved critical mass in the hundred years between 150 and 250 when it moved from fewer than 50,000 adherents to over a million. This provided enough adopters for its growth rate to be self-sustaining.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Christianity quickly spread beyond the Roman Empire. Armenia, Persia (modern Iran), Ethiopia, Central Asia, India and China have evidence of early Christian communities. Catholic historian Robert Louis Wilken writes of first hand evidence for Christian communities in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Baghdad, Tibet, Georgia, and Socotra an island in the Arabian Sea.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Christine Trevett writes in the Cambridge History of Christianity that \"Asia Minor and Achaea (Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Pergamum) were nurseries for Christianity\". Conflicts over the nature of Christ's divinity emerged, and catholic leaders of the second century began forming 'official' statements of ‘orthodox’ Christian belief based on apostolic teaching as authoritative.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "There is no archaeological evidence of Christianity in Egypt before the fourth century. However, religion scholar Birger Pearson writes that the literary evidence is \"massive\". Papyrologist Colin Roberts concludes that the earliest Egyptian ‘Christians’ were not a separate community but were instead part of the Jewish community of Alexandria.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Pearson has written that Egyptian Christianity probably began \"...in the first century\" in Alexandria. In this early period, Christianity expanded into the interior of Egypt where it produced a distinctive Coptic Christianity which is still active in the twenty-first century.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Egyptian Christians produced religious literature more abundantly than any other region during the second and third centuries. Alexandrian Christians like Clement and Origen wrote of the Church’s core faith as the same the world over. According to Pearson, \"By the end of the third century, the Alexandrian church was at least as influential in the east as the Roman church was in the west\".",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Christianity in Antioch is mentioned in Paul's epistles written before 60 AD, and scholars generally see Antioch as a primary center of early Christianity. Christians in this region had little, if any, direct experience with persecution before the fourth century.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Most of what is known of early Christianity in Gaul (modern France) comes from a letter, most likely written by Irenaeus, describing the persecution of Christians in Lyon during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The letter theologically interprets the detailed suffering and martyrdom of Christians from Vienne and Lyons. There is nothing more of Christianity in Gaul beyond one inscription until the beginning of the fourth century.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The origins of Christianity in North Africa are unknown, but most scholars connect it to the Jewish communities of Carthage. There were disagreements, but Tertullian and Cyprian both proclaimed the unity of the Church. Christians were persecuted in Africa intermittently from 180 until 305.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Maureen Tilley in the Cambridge History of Christianity writes that persecution under Valerian, which started in 253, was aimed at high-ranking clergy. Persecution under Emperors Decius and Valerian created long-lasting problems for the African church when those who had recanted tried to rejoin the Church.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to historian George Edmundson, there is an \"enormous\" amount of both modern scholarship and controversy on the founding of the church in Rome. It is likely the Christian message arrived in Rome very early. Edmundson writes that an established Christian church already existed in the city of Rome by 57 AD when Paul arrived there. Tradition and evidence support Peter as the founder of the church at Rome. Markus Vinzent has written that Rome was a melting pot of ideas, and the Christian church there was \"fragmented and subject to repeated internal upheavals in the first three centuries [from] controversies imported by immigrants from around the empire\".",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "According to historians Matthews and Platt, \"Christianity rose from obscurity and gained much of its power from the tremendous moral force of its central beliefs and values\". Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories. Groups formed by Paul the Apostle were heterogeneous, and the role of women was greater than in any form of Judaism or paganism at the time. Christianity was open to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free. There were no fees, and it was intellectually egalitarian, making philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people including those who might have lacked literacy.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Christianity in its first 300 years was also highly exclusive, as believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a \"high boundary\" that strongly excluded non-believers. In Daniel Praet's view, the exclusivity of Christian monotheism formed an important part of its success, enabling it to maintain its independence in a society that syncretized religion.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Christians offered last rites to the dying, buried them, distributed bread to the hungry, and showed the poor great generosity. Family had previously determined where and how one would be buried, but Christians gathered those not related by blood into a common burial space, used the same memorials for them all, and expanded the audience to include other Christians of their community thereby redefining the meaning of family. Classics scholar Kyle Harper [de; fr; nl] has written that Christianity replaced the ancient system where status determined sexual morality with a standard for all.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Emerging Christianity embraced some theological, ecclesiological and regional diversity, but ‘insider-outsider’ boundaries were still being determined in the early period. ‘Orthodoxy’ was not the exclusive property of one group, and many of the ideas in the heretical teachings overlapped traditional views. Early Christian authors defined orthodoxy based on agreement with what had been spoken and handed down by the apostles. Walter Bauer's thesis that heretical forms of Christianity were brought into line by a powerful, united, Roman church forcing its will on others is not supportable according to Markus Vinzent, since such unity did not exist before the eighth century.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The New Testament mentions bishops, (Episkopoi), as overseers and presbyters as elders or priests, with deacons as 'servants', sometimes using the terms interchangeably, demonstrating that the institutional church began its formation quickly and with some flexibility. According to Gerd Theissen, institutionalization began when itinerant preaching transformed into resident leadership (those living in a particular community over which they exercised leadership). A study by Edwin A. Judge, social scientist, shows that a fully organized church system had evolved before Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the first century, new religious texts were written in Greek. These became the \"New Testament\", and the Hebrew Scriptures became the \"Old Testament\". Even in the formative period, these texts had considerable authority, and those seen as \"scriptural\" were generally agreed upon. Linguistics scholar Stanley E. Porter says \"the text of [most of] the Greek New Testament was relatively well established and fixed by the time of the second and third centuries\".",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "When discussion of canonization began, there were disputes over whether or not to include some texts. The list of accepted books was established by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Spanning two millennia, the Bible has become one of the most influential works ever written, having contributed to the formation of Western law, art, literature, literacy and education.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The earliest orthodox writers of the first and second centuries, outside the writers of the New Testament itself, were first called the Apostolic Fathers in the sixth century. The title \"Church Father\" is used by the Church to describe those who were the intellectual and spiritual teachers, leaders and philosophers of early Christianity. Writing from the first century to the close of the eighth, they defended their faith, wrote commentaries and sermons, recorded the Creeds and church history, and lived exemplary lives.",
"title": "Origins to 312"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the fourth and fifth centuries Rome faced unsolvable problems at all levels of society. Bureaucracy became increasingly incompetent and corrupt, there was rampant inflation, a crushing and inequitable tax system, and significant changes in an army without adequate leaders. Barbarians were relentless. They sacked Rome, invaded Britain, France, and Spain, seized land, and disrupted the empire's economy. The ageless Empire was crumbling. Matthews and Platt say it is symptomatic that during crises, Roman Senators still collected rent, sometimes doubling the fees, while the Church offered \"shelter to the homeless, food for the hungry, and comfort to the grieving\". After the political fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Christian church became the unifying influence in Europe, and western civilization's center shifted from the Mediterranean basin to the continent of Europe.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great became the first Christian emperor in 313, (although he did not become sole emperor until after defeating Licinius the emperor in the East in 324). In 313, he issued the Edict of Milan, which was already Licinius' policy, expressing tolerance for all religions, thereby legalizing Christian worship. Christianity did not become the official religion of the empire under Constantine, but the steps he took to support and protect it were vitally important in the history of Christianity.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "He established equal footing for Christian clergy by granting them the same immunities pagan priests had long enjoyed. He gave bishops judicial power. By intervening in church disputes, he initiated a precedent. He wrote laws that favored Christianity, and he personally endowed Christians with gifts of money, land and government positions. Instead of rejecting state authority, bishops were grateful, and this change in attitude proved to be critical to the further growth of the Church.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Constantine's church building was influential in the spread of Christianity. He devoted imperial and public funds, endowed his churches with wealth and lands, and provided revenue for their clergy and upkeep. Cameron explains that, \"In a sense he was simply following the example set by his pagan predecessors ... Nevertheless his activities set a pattern for others, and by the end of the fourth century every self-respecting city, however small, had at least one church\".",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Cameron concludes that Constantine brought the Christian church and the Roman state together \"in a completely new way, and in this his reign was fundamental for subsequent history\".",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Christianity of this era did not have a central government, as the Bishop of Rome had not yet manifested as the singular leader, allowing Christianity to develop differently in its many separate locations. Some Germanic people adopted Arian Christianity while others, such as the Goths, adopted catholicism. Having one religion aided their unification into the distinct groups that became the future nations of Europe. A \"seismic moment\" in Christian history took place in 612 when the Visigothic King Sisebut declared the obligatory conversion of all Jews in Spain, over-riding Pope Gregory who had reiterated the traditional ban against forced conversion of the Jews in 591. Armenia adopted Christianity in this period, making it their state religion, as did Georgia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 had little direct impact on the Eastern Roman Empire. With an \"autocratic government, stable farm economy, Greek intellectual heritage and ... Orthodox Christianity\", it had great wealth and economic resources enabling it to survive until 1453. In the sixth century, East influenced West when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I attempted to reunite empire by taking over both territory and the Church. From the 600s to the 700s, Roman Popes had to be approved by the Eastern emperor before they could be installed, requiring consistency with Eastern policy including the requirement that pagans convert. This had not previously been a requirement in the West.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "During Antiquity, the Eastern church produced multiple doctrinal controversies that the orthodox called heresies, and ecumenical councils were convened to resolve these often heated disagreements. The first was between Arianism, which said the divine nature of Jesus was not equal to the Father's, and orthodox trinitarianism which says they are equal. Arianism spread throughout most of the Roman Empire from the fourth century onwards. The First Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) resulted in a condemnation of Arian teachings and produced the Nicene Creed.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth ecumenical councils are characterized by attempts to explain Jesus' human and divine natures. One such attempt created the Nestorian controversy, then schism, then a communion of churches, including the Armenian, Assyrian, and Egyptian churches. This resulted in what is today known as Oriental Orthodoxy, one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity these controversies produced, along with the Church of the East in Persia and Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Late Roman culture was a synthesis of Christian and Greco-Roman. In this era, Christian intellectuals adapted Greek philosophy and Roman traditions to Christian use, took from Rome the class structure of aristocratic landowners and dependent laborers, and saw the Church emerge as a state within the State.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Whether or not the Roman Empire of this period officially made Christianity its state religion continues to be debated. Substantial growth in the third and fourth centuries had made Christianity the majority religion by the mid-fourth century, and after Constantine until the Fall of Empire, all emperors were Christian except Julian. Christian Emperors wanted the empire to become a Christian empire.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "According to Bart Ehrman biblical scholar, \"Constantine did not make Christianity the one official and viable religion\". Of those that followed Constantine, historian Michele Renee Salzman has written that \"When the Theodosian Code was published in 438, no emperor had as yet legislated enforced conversion... no emperor was willing to legalize the enforced conversion of pagans until [the Eastern emperor] Justinian in A.D. 529\".",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Even though Christians only made up around ten percent of the Roman population by the time of Constantine, they spread a belief they universally held: that Constantine's conversion was evidence the Christian God had conquered the pagan gods in Heaven. This \"triumph of Christianity\" became the primary narrative of the late antique age. Historian Peter Brown surmises that it was for this reason that, except for a few instances involving violent politics, \"In most areas, polytheists were not molested\" they were ignored; fourth century Christians focused on heretics instead.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Following what Salzman calls \"a carrot and stick\" policy, Christian emperors wrote laws offering incentives for supporting Christianity and laws that negatively impacted those who did not. Constantine never outlawed paganism, but consensus is that he did write the first laws prohibiting sacrifice which, thereafter, largely disappeared by the mid fourth century. Eusebius also attributes to Constantine a widespread temple destruction, however, while the destruction of temples is in 43 written sources, only four have been confirmed. Trombley and MacMullen say this is common because of conflicts in the sources. For example, the ancient chronicler Malalas claimed Constantine destroyed all the temples; then he said Theodisius destroyed them all; then he said Constantine converted them all to churches.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "What is known with some certainty is that Constantine was vigorous in reclaiming confiscated properties for the Church, and he used reclamation to justify the destruction of some pagan temples such as Aphrodite's temple in Jerusalem. For the most part, Constantine simply neglected them. With the exception of a few temples, it was the eighth century when temples began being converted into churches in any number.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the fourth century, Augustine argued that the Jewish people should be left alone. According to Anna Sapir Abulafia, most scholars agree that Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom lived in relative peace with one another until the thirteenth century. In these earlier centuries, scattered violence toward Jews occasionally took place during riots led by mobs, local leaders, and lower level clergy without the support of church leaders who generally followed Augustine's teachings.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Sometime before the fifth century, some churchmen reinterpreted millennialism, which is the hope of the thousand-year reign of the Messiah on earth centered in Jerusalem and ruling with the Jews, and added supersessionism, which sees the Church as the metaphorical Israel in place of the Jews. Supersessionism has never been an official or a universal doctrine, but has been a part of Christian thought through much of history. Many Jewish writers trace antisemitism to this doctrine.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Christian monasticism emerged in the third century, and by the fifth century, was a dominant force in all areas of late antique culture. Monastics developed a health care system which allowed the sick to remain within the monastery as a special class afforded special benefits and care. This destigmatized illness and formed the basis for future public health care. The first public hospital (the Basiliad) was founded by Basil the Great in 369. Central figures in the development of monasticism were Basil in the East and, in the West, Benedict, who created the Rule of Saint Benedict, which would become the most common rule throughout the Middle Ages and the starting point for other monastic rules.",
"title": "Late antiquity to Early Medieval Christianity (313 – 600)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "With few exceptions, most organized societies c.600 called themselves Christian if they were headed by Christian leaders, not because populations were fully converted. This era is most characterized by the uniting of classical Graeco-Roman thinking, Germanic energy and Christian ethos into a new civilization centered in Europe.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "After the fall of Rome, the Church, and what Matthews and Platt call its \"spreading network of monasteries and convents\", provided what little security there was. The Church was like an early version of a welfare state sponsoring public hospitals, orphanages, hospices, and hostels or inns. It supplied food for all during famine and regularly distributed food to the poor.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Monasteries actively preserved ancient texts, classical craft and artistic skills, while maintaining an intellectual culture, and supporting literacy, within their schools, scriptoria and libraries. They were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness, teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making, and various other skills. Medical practice was highly important and medieval monasteries are best known for their contributions to medical tradition. They also made advances in sciences such as astronomy, and St. Benedict's Rule (480–543) impacted politics and law. The formation of these organized bodies of believers gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence, distinct from political and familial authority, thereby revolutionizing social history.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The conversion of the Irish is \"one of the defining aspects of the early medieval period\" writes archaeologist Lorcan Harney. Christianization was diverse, embraced syncretization with prior beliefs, and was not the result of force. Archaeology indicates Christianity had become an established minority faith in some parts of Britain before Irish missionaries went to Iona (from 563) and converted many Picts. The Gregorian mission landed in 596, and converted the Kingdom of Kent and the court of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Frankish King Clovis I converted from Paganism to Roman Catholicism around 498-508, becoming the first to unite all of the Frankish tribes under one ruler. Clovis' descendent Charlemagne began the Carolingian Renaissance, sometimes called a Christian renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural revival of literature, arts, and scriptural studies, a renovation of law and the courts, and the promotion of literacy.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Modern western universities have their origins directly in the Medieval Church. The earliest were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Oxford (1096), and the University of Paris where the faculty was of international renown (c. 1150). Matthews and Platt say \"these were the first Western schools of higher education since the sixth century\". They began as cathedral schools, then formed into self-governing corporations with charters. Divided into faculties which specialized in law, medicine, theology or liberal arts, each held the famous quodlibeta theological debates amongst faculty and students, and awarded degrees, including Masters and Doctors.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "According to Brown, by the time of Justinian I (527–565), Constantinople was the largest and most prosperous city in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and \"the preeminent model for earthly power\". In the same period, the \"Church of the East\" within the Persian/Sasanian Empire spread over modern Iraq, Iran, and parts of Central Asia. The shattering of the Sassanian Empire in the early 600s led upper-class refugees to move further east to China, entering Hsian-fu in 635.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the 720s, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian banned the pictorial representation of Christ, saints, and biblical scenes destroying much early artistic history. The West condemned Leo's iconoclasm.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Throughout the Balkan Peninsula, and the area north of the Danube, Christianization and political centralization went hand in hand creating what is now East-Central Europe. Local elites wanted to convert because they gained prestige and power through matrimonial alliances and participation in imperial rituals.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Saints Cyril and Methodius played the key missionary roles in spreading Christianity to the people beginning in 863. For three and a half years they translated the Gospels into the Old Church Slavonic language, developing the first Slavic alphabet using Cyrillic script. It became the first literary language of the Slavs and, eventually, the educational foundation for all Slavic nations.",
"title": "Early to High Middle Ages (600 – 1100)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Between 1150 and 1200, Christian scholars traveled to formerly Moslem locations in Sicily and Spain. Evacuating Islamists had left behind their libraries, and among the treasure trove of books, the searchers found the works of Aristotle and Euclid and more. What had been lost to the West after the empire fell, was found, and the future would be forever changed.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Insights gained from Aristotle dramatically impacted the Church, triggering a period of upheaval that Matthews and Platt say, one \"modern historian has called the twelfth century renaissance\". This included the beginning of Scholasticism and the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Historians of science David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant have described what followed as a \"medieval scientific revival\". Along with Noah Efron, they credit multiple medieval Christian scientists with the early \"tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science\" which eventually led to the scientific revolution in the West.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Thereafter, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became the age of synthesis of the secular and Christian which formed the foundation of future Western civilization. Between 1000 and 1300, the Church became the leading institution of a western world becoming increasingly refined, educated and secular, while after 1300, the Church was riddled with corruption and entered into a decline. The intense and rapid changes of this period are considered some of the most significant in the history of Christianity.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "East and West, the Church of 1100-1200 had immense authority. The key to its power in Europe was three monastic reformation movements that swept the continent. Owing to its stricter adherence to the reformed Benedictine rule, the Abbey of Cluny, first established in 910, became the leading centre of Western monasticism into the early twelfth century. The Cistercian movement was the second wave of reform after 1098, when they became a primary force of technological advancement and diffusion in medieval Europe.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Beginning in the twelfth century, the pastoral Franciscan Order was instituted by the followers of Francis of Assisi; later, the Dominican Order was begun by St. Dominic. Called Mendicant orders, they represented a change in understanding a monk's calling as contemplative, instead seeing it as a call to actively reform the world through preaching, missionary activity, and education.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "This new calling to reform the world led the Dominicans to dominate the new universities, travel about preaching against heresy, and to participate in the Medieval Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern crusades. Christian policy denying the existence of witches and witchcraft would later be challenged by the Dominicans allowing them to participate in witch trials.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "According to Matthews and Platt, the Church had influence in every facet of medieval life due not only to monastic reform, but also to the \"tireless work of the clergy and the powerful effect of the Christian belief system\". Most medieval people believed that participating in the sacraments, (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, marriage, last rights, and ordination for priests), and living morally, granted them Heaven. Confession and penance had become widespread from the eleventh century, and by 1300, were an integral part of both ritual and belief.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Gregorian Reform established new law requiring the consent of both parties before a marriage could be performed, a minimum age for marriage, and codified marriage as a sacrament. That made the union a binding contract, making abandonment prosecutable with dissolution of marriage overseen by Church authorities. Although the Church abandoned tradition to allow women the same rights as men to dissolve a marriage, in practice men were granted dissolutions more frequently than women.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Throughout the Middle Ages, abbesses and female superiors of monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The veneration of Mary developed within the monasteries in western medieval Europe. Rachel Fulton writes that medieval European Christians praised Mary for making God tangible.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Christian mysticism abounded in the Middle Ages, particularly among nuns and monks, inspiring believers to transcend the material realm. People equated the purpose of Scripture with that of the Church. \"Yet so benevolently disguised\", Christopher Ocker writes, \"the Bible could infiltrate and unsettle any region of late medieval Europe’s cultural worlds\".",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Scholars of the Renaissance created textual criticism which revealed writing errors by medieval monks and exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. Popes of the Middle Ages had depended upon the document to prove their political authority.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The church became a leading patron of art and architecture and commissioned and supported such artists as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation leading to the development of classical music and all its derivatives.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "It was in these same centuries that western society also changed dramatically. Western kings were becoming more secular, and their primary focus shifted away from building Christendom into centralizing power in their own nation-states. Fueled by belief that unity and peace necessitated one religion, the State defined minorities as a threat to the social order, then used stereotyping, propaganda and the new courts of inquisition to prosecute them. This attacked the older, local, kinship-based systems, and took over their legal, military, and social power. Persecution became a core element and a functional tool of power in the political development of Western society. By the 1300s, segregation and discrimination in law, politics, and the economy, had become established in all European states.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The church did not have the leading role in persecution, but it supported the State through an increasingly complex Canon law. By the 14th century, Canon law had become intricate enough that most bishops and Popes were trained lawyers rather than theologians. The church of this era had developed into a large, multilevel organization with the Pope at the peak of a strict hierarchy. Supporting him were layers of staff, administrators and advisers: the papal curia. An entire system of courts formed the judicial branch.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Canon law of the Catholic Church (Latin: jus canonicum) was the first modern Western legal system, and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, predating European common law and civil law traditions. Justinian I's reforms had a clear effect on the evolution of jurisprudence, and Leo III's Ecloga influenced the formation of legal institutions in the Slavic world.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Medieval Inquisition, including the Episcopal Inquisition (1184–1230) and the later Papal Inquisition (1230s–1240s), was a type of criminal court established from around 1184 and run by the Roman Catholic Church, and local secular leaders dealing largely, but not exclusively, with religious issues such as heresy. Local law delivered the accused to the court, sometimes using torture for interrogation, while religious inquisitors stood by as recording witnesses.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Inquisition was not a unified institution. Many parts of Europe had erratic inquisitions or none at all. Jurisdiction was local, limited, and lack of support and opposition often obstructed it. Inquisition was contested stridently, in and outside the church. Opponents charged heresy inquisitions with proving the Roman church was \"unchristian\" and \"a destroyer of its gospel legacy, or even the real enemy of Christ\".",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "After decades of calling upon secular rulers for aid in dealing with the Cathars, also known as Albigensians, and getting no response, Pope Innocent III and the king of France, Philip Augustus, joined in 1209 in a military campaign that was put about as necessary for eliminating the Albigensian heresy. Once begun, the campaign quickly took a political turn. Scholars disagree on whether the course of the war was determined more by the Pope or King Philip.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Throughout the campaign, Innocent vacillated, sometimes taking the side favoring crusade, then siding against it and calling for its end. In 1229, when the crusade finally did end, the campaign no longer had crusade status, and its fighters were not rewarded with dispensations. The army had seized and occupied the lands of nobles who had not sponsored Cathars, but had been in the good graces of the church, which had been unable to protect them. The entire region came under the rule of the French king and became southern France. Catharism continued for another hundred years (until 1350).",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "\"From its pinnacle of power and prestige in 1200 ... the Church entered a period of decline in about 1300\" write Matthews and Platt. The popes of the fourteenth century focused on politics and power in an effort to centralize power into the papal position and build a papal monarchy. Elite Italian families used their wealth to secure episcopal offices. These Popes were greedy and corrupt and so caught up in politics that they ignored the pressing needs of the Church and the people it served.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries people experienced plague, famine and war that ravaged most of the continent. There was social unrest, urban riots, peasant revolts and renegade feudal armies. They faced all of this with a church unable to provide much moral leadership because of its own internal conflict and corruption. Devoted and virtuous nuns and monks became increasingly rare, and monastic reform, which had been a major force, becomes largely absent.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Popes lost power to the secular kings. Pope Boniface VII (1294-1303) wrote a papal bull in 1302 claiming papal superiority over all secular rulers. Philip IV, king of France, answered by sending an army to arrest him. Boniface fled for his life.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In 1309, Pope Clement V moved to Avignon in southern France in search of relief from Rome's factional politics. Seven popes resided there in the Avignon Papacy until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377. After his death, the papal conclave met in 1378, in Rome, and elected an Italian Urban VI to succeed Gregory. The French cardinals did not approve, so they held a second conclave electing Robert of Geneva instead. This began the Western Schism.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In 1409, the Pisan council called for the resignation of both popes, electing a third to replace them. Both Popes refused to resign, giving the Church three popes. The pious became disgusted, leading to more loss of papal prestige. Five years later, the Holy Roman Emperor called the Council of Constance (1414–1418), and forty years after the original split, resolved the conflict by electing Pope Martin V in 1417.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Around the same time as these events, John Wycliffe (1320–1384), an English scholastic philosopher and theologian, had urged the church to give up its property (which produced much of the church's wealth), and to once again embrace poverty and simplicity, to stop being subservient to the state and its politics, and to deny papal authority. He was accused of heresy, convicted and sentenced to death, but died before implementation. The Lollards followed his teachings, played a role in the English Reformation, and were persecuted for heresy after Wycliffe's death.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Jan Hus (1369–1415), a Czech based in Prague, was influenced by Wycliffe and spoke out against the abuses and corruption he saw in the Catholic Church there. He was also accused of heresy and condemned to death. After his death, Hus became a powerful symbol of Czech nationalism and the impetus for the Bohemian/Czech and German Reformations.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The rise of Islam (600 to 1517) had unleashed a series of Arab military campaigns that conquered Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia by 650, and added North Africa and most of Spain by 740. Only the Franks and Constantinople had been able to withstand this medieval juggernaut.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "After 1071, when the Seljuk Turks closed Christian pilgrimages and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, the Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from Pope Urban II. Jaroslav Folda writes that Urban II responded by calling upon the knights of Christendom at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, to \"go to the aid of their brethren in the Holy Land and to liberate the Christian Holy sites from the heathen\". The First Crusade captured Antioch in 1099, then Jerusalem, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Second Crusade occurred in 1145 when Edessa was taken by Islamic forces.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "When the Pope, Blessed Eugenius III (1145–1153), called for the Second Crusade, Saxon nobles in Eastern Europe refused to go. These rulers saw crusade as a tool for territorial expansion, alliance building, and the empowerment of their own church and state. The free barbarian people around the Baltic Sea had been raiding the countries that surrounded them, stealing crucial resources, killing, and enslaving captives since the days of Charlemagne (747–814). Subduing the Baltic area was therefore more important to the Eastern nobles.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In 1147, Eugenius' Divini dispensatione, gave the eastern nobles crusade indulgences for the Baltic area. The Northern, (or Baltic), Crusades followed, taking place, off and on, with and without papal support, from 1147 to 1316. According to Fonnesberg-Schmidt, \"While the theologians maintained that conversion should be voluntary, there was a widespread pragmatic acceptance of conversion obtained through political pressure or military coercion\" from the Baltic wars.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In the Levant, Christians held Jerusalem until 1187 and the Third Crusade when Richard the Lionheart defeated the significantly larger army of the Ayyubid Sultanate led by Saladin. The Fourth Crusade, begun by Innocent III in 1202 was subverted by the Venetians. They funded it, then ran out of money and instructed the crusaders to go to Constantinople and get money there. Crusaders sacked the city and other parts of Asia Minor, established the Latin Empire of Constantinople in Greece and Asia Minor, and contributed to the downfall of the Byzantine Empire. Five numbered crusades to the Holy Land culminated in the siege of Acre of 1219, essentially ending Western presence in the Holy Land. Crusades led to the development of national identities in European nations, increased division with the East, and produced cultural change for all involved.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Between 711 and 718, the Iberian peninsula had been conquered by Muslims in the Umayyad conquest. The military struggle to reclaim the peninsula from Muslim rule took place for centuries until the Christian Kingdoms reconquered the Moorish state of Al-Ándalus in 1492.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Isabel and Ferdinand married in 1469, united Spain with themselves as the first king and queen, fought the Muslims in the Reconquista and soon after established the Spanish Inquisition.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Spanish inquisition was originally authorized by the Pope in answer to royal fears that Conversos or Marranos (Jewish converts) were spying and conspiring with the Muslims to sabotage the new state. \"New Christians\" had begun to appear as a socio-religious designation and legal distinction. Muslim converts were known as Moriscos.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Early inquisitors proved so severe that the Pope soon opposed the Spanish Inquisition and attempted to shut it down. Ferdinand declined, and is said to have pressured the Pope so that, in October 1483, a papal bull conceded control of the inquisition to the Spanish crown. According to Spanish historian José Casanova, the Spanish inquisition became the first truly national, unified and centralized state institution.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The Church of the East played a major role in the history of Christianity in Asia. Between the 9th and 14th centuries, it represented the world's largest Christian denomination in terms of geographical extent. It established dioceses and communities stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and today's Iraq and Iran, to India (the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians of Kerala), the Mongol kingdoms in Central Asia, the Turkic tribes in Central Asia, and China during the Tang dynasty (7th–9th centuries). In the 13th and 14th centuries, the church experienced a final period of expansion under the Mongol Empire, where influential Church of the East clergy sat in the Mongol court.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "By the end of the first millennium in the East, a rich and varied culture, characterized by ethnic diversity, and centered around Constantinople, a famously prosperous and powerful city with numerous market places, massive walls and magnificent monuments, had fully developed. Its material blessings were attributed to it being protected by God. Jonathan Shepard writes that even the \"furthest-flung outsiders could make the connection between Byzantine prosperity, striking-power and religious devotion\".",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "But Byzantium had reached its greatest territorial extension in the sixth century under Justinian I, and for the next 800 years, it steadily contracted under the onslaught of its hostile neighbors in both East and West.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Many differences between East and West had existed since Antiquity. Disagreements over whether Pope or Patriarch should lead the Church, whether that should be done in Latin or Greek, whether priests must remain celibate and other points of doctrine such as the Filioque Clause which was added to the Nicene creed by the west, were intensified by cultural, geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic differences. Eventually, this produced the East–West Schism, also known as the \"Great Schism\" of 1054, which separated the Church into Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "In a defining moment in 1380, Grand Prince Dmitrii of Moscow faced the army of the Golden Horde on Kulikovo Field near the Don River, there defeating the Mongols. Michael Angold writes that this began a period of transformation fusing state power and religious mission: thereafter \"a disparate collection of warring principalities\" formed \"into an Orthodox nation, unified under tsar and patriarch and self-consciously promoting both a national faith and an ideology of a faithful nation\".",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "After 1302, the Ottoman Empire was built upon the ruins of what had once been the great Byzantine Empire. Historians Matthews and Platt write that, by 1330, the Ottomans had \"absorbed Asia Minor, and by 1390 Serbia and Bulgaria were Turkish provinces. In 1453, when the Turks finally took Constantinople, they ravaged the city for days... [ending] the last living vestige of Ancient Rome ... \".",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The flight of Eastern Christians from Constantinople, and the manuscripts they carried with them, is one of the factors that prompted the literary renaissance in the West.",
"title": "The rise and fall of Christendom (1100 – 1500)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The establishment of sovereign states was the single most important political development of the sixteenth century, however, for the Church, it was the breakup of Christendom. In the 1500s, the Church experienced the results of what had begun 200 years before. While losing power, prestige and influence to the ascending stars of secular kings and their newly unified kingdoms, the dream of Christendom ended. The cumulative effects marked the next century in four ways: the development of political absolutism beginning in 1600, the return of the aristocracy to prominence, the rise of the middle class, and the Enlightenment.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Following the geographic discoveries of the 1400s and 1500s, increasing population and inflation led the emerging nation-states of Portugal, Spain, and France, the Dutch Republic, and England to explore, conquer, colonize and exploit the newly discovered territories. While colonialism was driven by economics and politics, it also opened the door for Christian missions. According to historical theologian Justo González, colonialism and missions each sometimes aided and sometimes impeded the other.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The history of the Inquisition divides into two major parts: its Papal creation in the early thirteenth century, and its transformation into permanent secular governmental bureaucracies between 1478 and 1542.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Historian Helen Rawlings says, \"the Spanish Inquisition was different [from earlier inquisitions] in one fundamental respect: it was responsible to the crown rather than the Pope and was used to consolidate state interest.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The Portuguese Inquisition, in close relationship with the Church, was also controlled by the crown who established a government board, known as the General Council, to oversee it. The Grand Inquisitor, chosen by the king, was nearly always a member of the royal family.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "T. F. Mayer, historian, writes that \"the Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Naples, Venice and Florence\". Its activity was primarily bureaucratic. The Roman Inquisition is probably best known for its condemnation of Galileo.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Until the 1300s, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was that witches did not exist. While historians have been unable to pinpoint a single cause of what became known as the \"witch frenzy\", scholars have noted that, without changing church doctrine, a new but common stream of thought developed at every level of society that witches were both real and malevolent. Records show the belief in magic had remained so widespread among the rural people that it has convinced some historians Christianization had not been as successful as previously supposed.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The break up of Christendom culminates in the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648). Beginning with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenburg in 1517, there was no actual schism until 1521 when edicts handed down by the Diet of Worms condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and many others protested against corruptions such as simony (the buying and selling of church offices), the holding of multiple church offices by one person at the same time, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant position later included the Five solae (sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria), the priesthood of all believers, Law and Gospel, and the two kingdoms doctrine.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Three important traditions to emerge directly from the Reformation were the Lutheran, Reformed, and the Anglican traditions. Beginning in 1519, Huldrych Zwingli spread John Calvin's teachings in Switzerland leading to the Swiss Reformation.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "At the same time in Germany and Switzerland, a collection of loosely related groups that included Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists, began the Radical Reformation. They opposed Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican church-state theories, supporting instead a full separation from the state. According to historian George Huntston Williams, members of the Radical Reformation are doctrinally halfway between Protestantism and Catholicism.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Reformers were swiftly opposed with unbending resistance from the established church. The Roman Catholic Church struck back by launching its own Counter-Reformation, beginning with Pope Paul III (1534 - 1549), the first in a series of 10 reforming popes from 1534-1605. In an effort to reclaim morality, a list of books detrimental to faith or morals was established, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which included the works of Luther, Calvin and other Protestants along with writings condemned as obscene.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "New monastic orders arose including the Jesuits. Resembling a military company in its hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, their vow of loyalty to the Pope set them apart from other monastic orders, leading them to be called \"the shock troops of the papacy\". Jesuits soon became the Church's chief weapon against Protestantism.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Monastic reform also led to the development of new, yet orthodox forms of spirituality, such as that of the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "The Council of Trent (1545–1563) denied each Protestant claim, and laid the foundation of Roman Catholic policies up to the twenty-first century.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Reforming zeal and Catholic denial spread through much of Europe, and became entangled with local politics. Already involved in dynastic wars, the quarreling royal houses became polarized into the two religious camps. \"Religious\" wars resulted. Ranging from international wars to internal conflicts, war began in the Holy Roman Empire with the minor Knights' Revolt in 1522, then intensified in the First Schmalkaldic War (1546-1547) and the Second Schmalkaldic War (1552-1555). Seven years after the Peace of Augsburg, France became the centre of religious wars which lasted 36 years. The final wave was the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The involvement of foreign powers made it the largest and most disastrous.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "The causes of these wars were mixed. Many scholars see them as fought to obtain security and freedom for differing religious confessions, however, scholars have largely interpreted these wars as struggles for political independence that coincided with the break up of medieval empires into the modern nation states.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "War had been fueled by the \"unquestioning assumption that a single religion should exist within each community\" say Matthews and Platt. However, debate on toleration now occupied the attention of every version of the Christian faith. Debate centered on defining the role of individual conscience, determining whether peace required allowing only one faith and the need to punish heretics, or if ancient opinions defending leniency, based on the parable of the tares, should be revived.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "This world changing debate was not confined to religion. It became necessary to rethink on a political level, all of the State's reasons for persecution. Many began arguing in favor of tolerance on a non-religious basis.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The Peace of Westphalia (1648) gave the Holy Roman Empire what Mout describes as \"a highly durable legal and constitutional foundation for a form of toleration\". Over the next two and a half centuries, many other treaties and political declarations of tolerance followed, until concepts of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of thought became established in most western countries.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "There has long been an established consensus that the Enlightenment was anti-Christian, anti-Church and anti-religious. However, twenty-first century scholars tend to see the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment as complex with many regional and national variations. According to Helena Rosenblatt, the Enlightenment was not just a war with Christianity, since many changes to the Church were advocated by Christian moderates.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "In Margaret Jacob's view, critique of Christianity began among the more extreme Protestant reformers who were enraged by fear, tyranny and persecution. Absolutism, supported by Catholicism, caused the virulent anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian sentiment that emerged in the 1680s.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Enlightenment shifted the paradigm, and various ground-breaking discoveries such as Galileo's, led to the Scientific revolution (1600-1750) and an upsurge in skepticism. Virtually everything in western culture was subjected to systematic doubt including religious beliefs. Biblical criticism emerged.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Spinoza, an Amsterdam Jew, who published against religion, along with Hobbes and others, supported a matter based (materialistic) mechanistic universe with no need of God. After 1750, secularization at every level of European society can be observed.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing observations made with his new telescope that planets moved. Since Aristotle's rediscovery in the 1100s, western scientists, along with the Catholic Church, had adopted Aristotle's physics and cosmology with the earth fixed in place. Jeffrey Foss writes that, by Galileo's time the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe was \"fully integrated with Catholic theology\".",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The majority of Galileo's fellow scientists had no telescope, and Galileo had no theory of physics to explain how planets could orbit the sun, since according to Aristotelian physics, that was impossible. (The physics would not be resolved for another hundred years.) Galileo's peers rejected his assertions and alerted the authorities. The Church forbade Galileo from teaching it. Instead, Galileo published his books. He was summoned before the Roman Inquisition twice. First warned, he was next sentenced to house arrest on a charge of \"grave suspicion of heresy\".",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "French historian Louis Châtellier [fr] writes that Galileo's condemnation - as a devoted Catholic - caused much consternation and private discussion about whether the judges were condemning Galileo, or the \"new science\" and anyone who attempted to displace Aristotle. Châtellier concludes, \"...the relationship between scientific thinkers and ecclesiastical authorities [became] marked by reciprocal mistrust\" which has waxed and waned into the modern day.",
"title": "Early modern (1500 – 1750)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "\"So turbulent was the period between 1760 and 1830 that today it is considered a historical watershed\" write Matthews and Platt. Monarchies fell, old societies were swept away, the class system realigned, and the changed social order altered the world.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "The old religion moved to the New World with vitality. Throughout the revolutionary period, English speaking Protestant Christianity was the majority religion and played the most visible role in supporting revolution. Martin Marty writes that, in addition to being a political and economic revolution, the War of Independence and its aftermath included the legal assurance of religious freedom marking a \"new order of ages\".",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "Change also took the form of a revival known as the First Great Awakening, which swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. Both religious and political in nature, it had roots in German Pietism and British Evangelicalism, and was a response to the extreme rationalism of biblical criticism, the anti-Christian tenets of the Enlightenment, and its threat of assimilation by the modern state.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Beginning among the Presbyterians, revival quickly spread to Congregationalists (Puritans) and Baptists, creating American Evangelicalism and Wesleyan Methodism. Battles over the movement and its dramatic style raged at both the congregational and denominational levels. This caused the division of American Protestantism into political 'Parties', for the first time, which eventually led to critical support for the American Revolution.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "In places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where one denomination received state funding, churches now began to lobby local legislatures to end that inequity by applying the Reformation principle separating church and state. Theological pluralism became the new norm.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s) extolled moral reform as the Christian alternative to armed revolution. They established societies, separate from any church, to begin social reform movements concerning abolition, women's rights, temperance and to \"teach the poor to read\". These were pioneers in developing nationally integrated forms of organization which produced the mergers and business consolidations that reshaped the American economy. Here lie the beginnings of the Latter Day Saint movement, the Restoration Movement and the Holiness movement.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 and was most notable for taking the movement throughout the world, especially in English speaking countries. The Fourth Great Awakening of the sixties - what political scientist Hugh Heclo describes as \"a plastic term reaching backward to the mid-1950s and forward to the mid-1970s\" - remains a debated concept.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Restorationists were prevalent in America, but they have not described themselves as a reform movement but have, instead, described themselves as restoring the Church to its original form as found in the book of Acts. It gave rise to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, Adventism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Matthews and Platt have written that, during this period of \"revolution and reaction, the West turned away from the past\" in the hope of creating a new order of social justice. For over 300 years, Christian Europe had participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historian Christopher Brown has written in the Cambridge History of Christianity that Christianity was, therefore, as complicit in the expansion of slavery as it was central to its demise.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Moral objections surfaced very soon after the establishment of the trade. In the earliest instances, denunciations came from Catholic priests. Next, emerging in the Religious Society of Friends, and followed by Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, abolitionists campaigned, wrote and spread pamphlets against the Atlantic slave trade. Quakers helped guide these tracts into print and organized the first anti-slavery societies. Moral reform of the Second Great Awakening also aided abolition.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "The first black abolitionists were Calvinist theologians who found no justification for slavery in the Bible. In the years after the American Revolution, black congregations sprang up around the English speaking world led by black preachers who brought revival, promoted communal and cultural autonomy, and provided the institutional base for keeping abolitionism alive.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Abolitionism did not flourish in the societies of absolutist states. It was the Protestant revivalists who followed the Quaker example, and the new American republic, that led to the \"gradual but comprehensive abolition of slavery\".",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "In its first hundred years, Protestantism did not develop foreign missions. The beginning of American Protestant missions abroad followed the sailing of William Carey from England to India in 1793 after the Great awakening. At the same time, a great effort was also being made to evangelize America. Missionaries played a crucial role in the acculturation of the American Indians.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "The history of boarding schools for the indigenous populations in Canada and the US is mixed. While the majority of native children did not attend boarding school at all, of those that did, recent studies indicate a few found happiness and refuge while many others found suffering, forced assimilation, and abuse. Over time, many missionaries came to respect the virtues of native culture. \"After 1828, most missionaries found it difficult to defend the policies of their government\" writes McLoughlin.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Revolution broke the power of the Old World aristocracy, offered hope to the disenfranchised, and enabled the middle class to reap the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Scholars have since identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation, work ethic, economic development, and the development of the state system. Weber says this contributed to economic growth and the development of banking across Northern Europe.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "In the early twentieth century, the study of two highly influential religious movements - the social gospel movement (1870s–1920s) and the global ecumenical movement (beginning in 1910) - provided the context for the development of American sociology as an academic discipline.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "Liberal Christianity, sometimes called liberal theology, is an umbrella term for religious movements within late 18th, 19th and 20th-century Christianity. According to theologian Theo Hobson, liberal Christianity has two traditions. Before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, liberalism was synonymous with Christian Idealism in that it imagined a liberal State with political and cultural liberty.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "The second tradition was from seventeenth century rationalism's efforts to wean Christianity from its \"irrational cultic\" roots. Lacking any grounding in Christian \"practice, ritual, sacramentalism, church and worship\", liberal Christianity lost touch with the fundamental necessity of faith and ritual in maintaining Christianity. This led to the birth of fundamentalism and liberalism's decline.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Fundamentalist Christianity is a movement that arose mainly within British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century in reaction to modernism. Before 1919, fundamentalism was loosely organized and undisciplined. Its most significant early movements were the holiness movement and the millenarian movement with its premillennial expectations of the second coming.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "In 1925, fundamentalists participated in the Scopes trial, and by 1930, the movement appeared to be dying. Then in the 1930s, Neo-orthodoxy began uniting moderates of both sides. In the 1940s, \"new-evangelicalism\" established itself as separate from fundamentalism. Today, fundamentalism is less about doctrine than political activism.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Pope Pius XI declared – Mit brennender Sorge – that Fascist governments had hidden \"pagan intentions\" and expressed the irreconcilability of the Catholic position with totalitarian fascist state worship which placed the nation above God, fundamental human rights, and dignity.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "Catholic priests were executed in concentration camps alongside Jews; 2,600 Catholic priests were imprisoned in Dachau, and 2,000 of them were executed (cf. Priesterblock). A further 2,700 Polish priests were executed (a quarter of all Polish priests), and 5,350 Polish nuns were either displaced, imprisoned, or executed. Many Catholic laymen and clergy played notable roles in sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, including Pope Pius XII. The head rabbi of Rome became a Catholic in 1945 and, in honour of the actions the pope undertook to save Jewish lives, he took the name Eugenio (the pope's first name).",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "Most leaders and members of the largest Protestant church in Germany, the German Evangelical Church, which had a long tradition of nationalism and support of the state, supported the Nazis when they came to power. A smaller contingent, about a third of German Protestants, formed the Confessing Church which opposed Nazism. In a study of sermon content, William Skiles says \"Confessing Church pastors opposed the Nazi regime on three fronts... first, they expressed harsh criticism of Nazi persecution of Christians and the German churches; second, they condemned National Socialism as a false ideology that worships false gods; and third, they challenged Nazi anti-Semitic ideology by supporting Jews as the chosen people of God and Judaism as a historic foundation of Christianity\".",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Nazis interfered in The Confessing Church's affairs, harassed its members, executed mass arrests and targeted well known pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, was arrested, found guilty in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "The Russian Orthodox Church held a privileged position in the Russian Empire, expressed in the motto of the late empire from 1833: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Populism. Nevertheless, the Church reform of Peter I in the early 18th century had placed the Orthodox authorities under the control of the tsar. An ober-procurator appointed by the tsar ran the committee which governed the Church between 1721 and 1918: the Most Holy Synod. The Church became involved in the various campaigns of russification and contributed to anti-semitism.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "The Bolsheviks and other Russian revolutionaries saw the Church, like the tsarist state, as an enemy of the people. Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden and sometimes led to imprisonment. Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals, as well as execution.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, one journalist reported 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. This included people like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna who was at this point a monastic. Recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables. More than 100,000 Russian clergymen were executed between 1937 and 1941.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "Under the state atheism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Christians of many denominations experienced persecution, with many churches and monasteries being destroyed, as well as clergy being executed.",
"title": "Late modern (1750 – 1945)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "Contemporary Christianity has been challenged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to affirm religion \"within the context of modern secularity\". Theologian William Meyer says this has become \"the critical fault line in the contemporary world\".",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "The traditional church, characterized by Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, functions within society, engaging it directly through preaching, teaching ministries and service programs like local food banks. Theologically, churches seek to embrace secular method and rationality while continuing to refuse the secular worldview. Sociologists Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers write that this type of Christianity has been declining in the West.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "Christian sects, such as the Amish and Mennonites, traditionally withdraw from, and minimize interaction with, society at large. According to the National Institute of Health, \"The Old Order Amish are the fastest growing religious subpopulation in the United States\".",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Theologian Allan Anderson has written that the 1960s saw the rise of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity. This mystical type of Christianity emphasizes the inward experience of personal piety and spirituality. In 2000, approximately one quarter of all Christians worldwide were part of Pentecostalism and its associated movements. By 2025, Pentecostals are expected to comprise one-third of the nearly three billion Christians worldwide. Deininger writes that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in global Christianity.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "New forms of religion which embrace the sacred as a deeper understanding of the self have begun. This \"spirituality\" is private and individualistic, and differs radically from Christian tradition, dogma and ritual. Theologian John Carman writes that Christianity has itself taken many new directions resulting from \"the appeal to inner experience, the renewed interest in human nature, and the influence of social conditions upon ethical reflection\".",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "In the twentieth century, liberal Christianity embraced the Social Gospel and liberation theology movements. These movements tend to be highly critical of traditional Christian ethics, and instead make the \"kingdom ideals\" of Jesus their goal. First focusing on the community's sins, rather than the individual's failings, they seek to foster social justice, expose institutionalized sin, and redeem the institutions of society. Ethicist Philip Wogaman says the social gospel and liberation theology redefined justice in the process.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "Originating in America in 1966, Black theology developed a combined social gospel and liberation theology that mixes Christianity with questions of civil rights, aspects of the Black Power movement, and responses to black Islamists claiming Christianity was a \"white man's\" religion. Spreading to the United Kingdom, then parts of Africa, confronting apartheid in South Africa, Black theology explains Christianity as liberation for this life not just the next.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Racial violence over the last several decades demonstrates how troubled issues of race remain in the twenty-first century. Paul Harvey says that, in 1960s America, \"The religious power of the civil rights movement transformed the American conception of race.\" Then the social power of the religious right responded in the 1970s by recapturing and recasting many evangelical concepts in political terms that included support of racial separation. The Prosperity Gospel has since developed and become a dominant force in American religious life. It has a multi-cultural demographic, and its \"modern idiom\", (positive thinking, evangelical tradition and New Thought), is based on self-empowerment and positive confession, and promotes racial reconciliation.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Feminist theology began in 1960. In the last years of the twentieth century, the re-examination of old religious texts through diversity, otherness, and difference developed womanist theology of African-American women, the \"mujerista\" theology of Hispanic women, and insights from Asian feminist theology.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "After World War II, Christian missionaries played a transformative role for many colonial societies moving them toward independence through the development of decolonization. In the mid to late 1990s, postcolonial theology emerged globally from multiple sources. Biblical scholars Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore write that it analyzes structures of power and ideology in order to recover what colonialism erased or suppressed in indigenous cultures.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "On 11 October 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. The council was \"pastoral\" in nature, interpreting dogma in terms of its scriptural roots, revising liturgical practices, and providing guidance for articulating traditional Church teachings in contemporary times. The council is perhaps best known for its instructions that the Mass may be celebrated in the vernacular as well as in Latin.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "On 21 November 1964, the Second Vatican Council published the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Roman Catholic goals are to establish full communion amongst all the various Christian churches. Amongst Evangelicals, there is no agreed upon definition, strategy or goal. Different theologies on the nature of the church have produced some hostility toward the formalism of the WCC. In the twenty-first century, sentiment is widespread that ecumenism has stalled.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestant missionaries worked with indigenous people to translate the Bible into approximately 90% of those native languages in their locations. This also generated a written grammar, a lexicon of native traditions, and a dictionary of their language, which was taught in missionary schools.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "Local native cultures responded with \"movements of indigenization and cultural liberation\" says Sanneh. This led to the development of national literatures, the spread of literacy, mass printing and the development of voluntary organizations which were instrumental in generating a democratic legacy. According to Sanneh, that means western missionaries began the \"largest, most diverse and most vigorous movement of cultural renewal in [the] history\" of Africa.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "In 1900 under colonial rule there were just under 9 million Christians in Africa. By 1960, and the end of colonialism there were about 60 million. By 2005, African Christians had increased to 393 million, about half of the continent's total population at that time. Population in Africa has continued to grow with the percentage of Christians remaining at about half in 2022. According to Isichei, \"The expansion of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa has been so dramatic that it has been called 'the fourth great age of Christian expansion'.\"",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "Historian Philip Jenkins observes that Christianity is growing rapidly in China and some other Asian countries. Sociologist and specialist in Chinese religion Fenggang Yang from Purdue University writes that Christianity, specifically Pentecostalism, is \"spreading among the Chinese of South-East Asia\". Social Anthropologist Juliette Koning and sociologist Heidi Dahles of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam agree there has been a \"rapid expansion of charismatic Christianity from the 1980s onwards\" in South East Asia. Allan Anderson and Edmond Tang have reported in their book Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia that \"Asia has the second largest number of Pentecostals/charismatics of any continent in the world, and seems to be fast catching up with the largest, Latin America.\"",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "It has been reported in America Magazine that increasing numbers of young people in China are becoming Christians. The Council on Foreign Relations says the \"number of Chinese Protestants has grown by an average of 10 percent annually since 1979\".",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity has grown in India in recent years. While the exact number is not available, religion scholar William R. Burrow of Colorado State University has estimated that about 8% have converted to Christianity.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "In his 2013 book The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution, American journalist John L. Allen Jr. has written that anti-Christian persecution in the twenty-first century by Islamic terrorists, narco-terrorists, paramilitary bands, nationalistic forces and various police states are a common enough occurrence for it to be a category of human rights concern. In 2013, 17 Middle Eastern Muslim majority states reported 28 of the 29 types of religious discrimination against 45 of the 47 religious minorities, including Christianity.",
"title": "Christianity since 1945"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "Web",
"title": "Further reading"
}
]
| The history of Christianity follows the Christian religion from the first century to the twenty-first as it developed from its earliest beliefs and practices, spread geographically, and changed into its contemporary global forms. Christianity originated with the ministry of Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer who proclaimed the imminent Kingdom of God and was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem in the Roman province of Judea. The earliest followers of Jesus were apocalyptic Jewish Christians. Christianity remained a Jewish sect, for centuries in some locations, diverging gradually from Judaism over doctrinal, social and historical differences. In spite of occasional persecution in the Roman Empire, the religious movement spread as a grassroots movement that became established by the third century. The Roman Emperor Constantine I became the first Christian emperor and in 313, he issued the Edict of Milan expressing tolerance for all religions thereby legalizing Christian worship. Various Christological debates about the human and divine nature of Jesus occupied the Christian Church for three centuries, and seven ecumenical councils were called to resolve them. Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization in Europe after the Fall of Rome. In the Early Middle Ages, missionary activities spread Christianity towards the west and the north. During the High Middle Ages, Eastern and Western Christianity grew apart, leading to the East–West Schism of 1054. Growing criticism of the Roman Catholic church and its corruption in the Late Middle Ages led to the Protestant Reformation and its related reform movements, which concluded with the European wars of religion, the development of tolerance as policy, and the Age of Enlightenment. In the twenty-first century, traditional Christianity has declined in the West, while new forms have developed and expanded throughout the world. Today, there are more than two billion Christians worldwide and Christianity has become the world's largest, and most widespread religion. Within the last century, the center of growth has shifted from West to East and from the North to the global South. | 2001-11-16T22:16:08Z | 2024-01-01T01:02:14Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity |
14,121 | Hertz | The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second. It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), terahertz (THz).
Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of periodic waveforms and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation E = hν, where E is the photon's energy, ν is its frequency, and h is the Planck constant.
The hertz is equivalent to one cycle per second. The International Committee for Weights and Measures defined the second as "the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" and then adds: "It follows that the hyperfine splitting in the ground state of the caesium 133 atom is exactly 9192631770 hertz, νhfs Cs = 9192631770 Hz." The dimension of the unit hertz is 1/time (T). Expressed in base SI units, the unit is the reciprocal second (1/s).
In English, "hertz" is also used as the plural form. As an SI unit, Hz can be prefixed; commonly used multiples are kHz (kilohertz, 10 Hz), MHz (megahertz, 10 Hz), GHz (gigahertz, 10 Hz) and THz (terahertz, 10 Hz). One hertz simply means "one event per second" (where the event being counted may be a complete cycle); 100 Hz means "one hundred events per second", and so on. The unit may be applied to any periodic event—for example, a clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz, or a human heart might be said to beat at 1.2 Hz.
The occurrence rate of aperiodic or stochastic events is expressed in reciprocal second or inverse second (1/s or s) in general or, in the specific case of radioactivity, in becquerels. Whereas 1 Hz is one cycle (or periodic event) per second, 1 Bq is one radionuclide event per second on average.
Even though frequency, angular velocity, angular frequency and radioactivity all have the dimension T, of these only frequency is expressed using the unit hertz. Thus a disc rotating at 60 revolutions per minute (rpm) is said to have an angular velocity of 2π rad/s and a frequency of rotation of 1 Hz. The correspondence between a frequency f with the unit hertz and an angular velocity ω with the unit radians per second is
The hertz is named after Heinrich Hertz. As with every SI unit named for a person, its symbol starts with an upper case letter (Hz), but when written in full, it follows the rules for capitalisation of a common noun; i.e., hertz becomes capitalised at the beginning of a sentence and in titles but is otherwise in lower case.
The hertz is named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), who made important scientific contributions to the study of electromagnetism. The name was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1935. It was adopted by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) (Conférence générale des poids et mesures) in 1960, replacing the previous name for the unit, "cycles per second" (cps), along with its related multiples, primarily "kilocycles per second" (kc/s) and "megacycles per second" (Mc/s), and occasionally "kilomegacycles per second" (kMc/s). The term "cycles per second" was largely replaced by "hertz" by the 1970s.
In some usage, the "per second" was omitted, so that "megacycles" (Mc) was used as an abbreviation of "megacycles per second" (that is, megahertz (MHz)).
Sound is a traveling longitudinal wave, which is an oscillation of pressure. Humans perceive the frequency of a sound as its pitch. Each musical note corresponds to a particular frequency. An infant's ear is able to perceive frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz; the average adult human can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 16000 Hz. The range of ultrasound, infrasound and other physical vibrations such as molecular and atomic vibrations extends from a few femtohertz into the terahertz range and beyond.
Electromagnetic radiation is often described by its frequency—the number of oscillations of the perpendicular electric and magnetic fields per second—expressed in hertz.
Radio frequency radiation is usually measured in kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), or gigahertz (GHz). Light is electromagnetic radiation that is even higher in frequency, and has frequencies in the range of tens (infrared) to thousands (ultraviolet) of terahertz. Electromagnetic radiation with frequencies in the low terahertz range (intermediate between those of the highest normally usable radio frequencies and long-wave infrared light) is often called terahertz radiation. Even higher frequencies exist, such as that of gamma rays, which can be measured in exahertz (EHz). (For historical reasons, the frequencies of light and higher frequency electromagnetic radiation are more commonly specified in terms of their wavelengths or photon energies: for a more detailed treatment of this and the above frequency ranges, see Electromagnetic spectrum.)
In computers, most central processing units (CPU) are labeled in terms of their clock rate expressed in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz). This specification refers to the frequency of the CPU's master clock signal. This signal is nominally a square wave, which is an electrical voltage that switches between low and high logic levels at regular intervals. As the hertz has become the primary unit of measurement accepted by the general populace to determine the performance of a CPU, many experts have criticized this approach, which they claim is an easily manipulable benchmark. Some processors use multiple clock cycles to perform a single operation, while others can perform multiple operations in a single cycle. For personal computers, CPU clock speeds have ranged from approximately 1 MHz in the late 1970s (Atari, Commodore, Apple computers) to up to 6 GHz in IBM Power microprocessors.
Various computer buses, such as the front-side bus connecting the CPU and northbridge, also operate at various frequencies in the megahertz range.
Higher frequencies than the International System of Units provides prefixes for are believed to occur naturally in the frequencies of the quantum-mechanical vibrations of massive particles, although these are not directly observable and must be inferred through other phenomena. By convention, these are typically not expressed in hertz, but in terms of the equivalent energy, which is proportional to the frequency by the factor of the Planck constant.
The CJK Compatibility block in Unicode contains characters for common SI units for frequency. These are intended for compatibility with East Asian character encodings, and not for use in new documents (which would be expected to use Latin letters, e.g. "MHz"). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second. It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), terahertz (THz).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of periodic waveforms and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation E = hν, where E is the photon's energy, ν is its frequency, and h is the Planck constant.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The hertz is equivalent to one cycle per second. The International Committee for Weights and Measures defined the second as \"the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom\" and then adds: \"It follows that the hyperfine splitting in the ground state of the caesium 133 atom is exactly 9192631770 hertz, νhfs Cs = 9192631770 Hz.\" The dimension of the unit hertz is 1/time (T). Expressed in base SI units, the unit is the reciprocal second (1/s).",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In English, \"hertz\" is also used as the plural form. As an SI unit, Hz can be prefixed; commonly used multiples are kHz (kilohertz, 10 Hz), MHz (megahertz, 10 Hz), GHz (gigahertz, 10 Hz) and THz (terahertz, 10 Hz). One hertz simply means \"one event per second\" (where the event being counted may be a complete cycle); 100 Hz means \"one hundred events per second\", and so on. The unit may be applied to any periodic event—for example, a clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz, or a human heart might be said to beat at 1.2 Hz.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The occurrence rate of aperiodic or stochastic events is expressed in reciprocal second or inverse second (1/s or s) in general or, in the specific case of radioactivity, in becquerels. Whereas 1 Hz is one cycle (or periodic event) per second, 1 Bq is one radionuclide event per second on average.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Even though frequency, angular velocity, angular frequency and radioactivity all have the dimension T, of these only frequency is expressed using the unit hertz. Thus a disc rotating at 60 revolutions per minute (rpm) is said to have an angular velocity of 2π rad/s and a frequency of rotation of 1 Hz. The correspondence between a frequency f with the unit hertz and an angular velocity ω with the unit radians per second is",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The hertz is named after Heinrich Hertz. As with every SI unit named for a person, its symbol starts with an upper case letter (Hz), but when written in full, it follows the rules for capitalisation of a common noun; i.e., hertz becomes capitalised at the beginning of a sentence and in titles but is otherwise in lower case.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The hertz is named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), who made important scientific contributions to the study of electromagnetism. The name was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1935. It was adopted by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) (Conférence générale des poids et mesures) in 1960, replacing the previous name for the unit, \"cycles per second\" (cps), along with its related multiples, primarily \"kilocycles per second\" (kc/s) and \"megacycles per second\" (Mc/s), and occasionally \"kilomegacycles per second\" (kMc/s). The term \"cycles per second\" was largely replaced by \"hertz\" by the 1970s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In some usage, the \"per second\" was omitted, so that \"megacycles\" (Mc) was used as an abbreviation of \"megacycles per second\" (that is, megahertz (MHz)).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Sound is a traveling longitudinal wave, which is an oscillation of pressure. Humans perceive the frequency of a sound as its pitch. Each musical note corresponds to a particular frequency. An infant's ear is able to perceive frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz; the average adult human can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 16000 Hz. The range of ultrasound, infrasound and other physical vibrations such as molecular and atomic vibrations extends from a few femtohertz into the terahertz range and beyond.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Electromagnetic radiation is often described by its frequency—the number of oscillations of the perpendicular electric and magnetic fields per second—expressed in hertz.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Radio frequency radiation is usually measured in kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), or gigahertz (GHz). Light is electromagnetic radiation that is even higher in frequency, and has frequencies in the range of tens (infrared) to thousands (ultraviolet) of terahertz. Electromagnetic radiation with frequencies in the low terahertz range (intermediate between those of the highest normally usable radio frequencies and long-wave infrared light) is often called terahertz radiation. Even higher frequencies exist, such as that of gamma rays, which can be measured in exahertz (EHz). (For historical reasons, the frequencies of light and higher frequency electromagnetic radiation are more commonly specified in terms of their wavelengths or photon energies: for a more detailed treatment of this and the above frequency ranges, see Electromagnetic spectrum.)",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In computers, most central processing units (CPU) are labeled in terms of their clock rate expressed in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz). This specification refers to the frequency of the CPU's master clock signal. This signal is nominally a square wave, which is an electrical voltage that switches between low and high logic levels at regular intervals. As the hertz has become the primary unit of measurement accepted by the general populace to determine the performance of a CPU, many experts have criticized this approach, which they claim is an easily manipulable benchmark. Some processors use multiple clock cycles to perform a single operation, while others can perform multiple operations in a single cycle. For personal computers, CPU clock speeds have ranged from approximately 1 MHz in the late 1970s (Atari, Commodore, Apple computers) to up to 6 GHz in IBM Power microprocessors.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Various computer buses, such as the front-side bus connecting the CPU and northbridge, also operate at various frequencies in the megahertz range.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Higher frequencies than the International System of Units provides prefixes for are believed to occur naturally in the frequencies of the quantum-mechanical vibrations of massive particles, although these are not directly observable and must be inferred through other phenomena. By convention, these are typically not expressed in hertz, but in terms of the equivalent energy, which is proportional to the frequency by the factor of the Planck constant.",
"title": "SI multiples"
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"text": "The CJK Compatibility block in Unicode contains characters for common SI units for frequency. These are intended for compatibility with East Asian character encodings, and not for use in new documents (which would be expected to use Latin letters, e.g. \"MHz\").",
"title": "Unicode"
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| The hertz is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second. It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), terahertz (THz). Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of periodic waveforms and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation E = hν, where E is the photon's energy, ν is its frequency, and h is the Planck constant. | 2001-11-11T20:18:56Z | 2023-12-21T17:17:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz |
14,123 | Heroic couplet | A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.
A frequently-cited example illustrating the use of heroic couplets is this passage from Cooper's Hill by John Denham, part of his description of the Thames:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.
The term "heroic couplet" is sometimes reserved for couplets that are largely closed and self-contained, as opposed to the enjambed couplets of poets like John Donne. The heroic couplet is often identified with the English Baroque works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, who used the form for their translations of the epics of Virgil and Homer, respectively. Major poems in the closed couplet, apart from the works of Dryden and Pope, are Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, and John Keats's Lamia. The form was immensely popular in the 18th century. The looser type of couplet, with occasional enjambment, was one of the standard verse forms in medieval narrative poetry, largely because of the influence of the Canterbury Tales.
English heroic couplets, especially in Dryden and his followers, are sometimes varied by the use of the occasional alexandrine, or hexameter line, and triplet. Often these two variations are used together to heighten a climax. The breaking of the regular pattern of rhyming pentameter pairs brings about a sense of poetic closure. Here are two examples from Book IV of Dryden's translation of the Aeneid.
Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around.
My Tyrians, at their injur’d queen’s command, Had toss’d their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish’d all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.
Twentieth-century authors have occasionally made use of the heroic couplet, often as an allusion to the works of poets of previous centuries. An example of this is Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, the second section of which is a 999-line, 4-canto poem largely written in loose heroic couplets with frequent enjambment. Here is an example from the first canto:
And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop. One hand Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
The use of heroic couplets in translations of Greco-Roman epics has also inspired translations of non-Western works into English. In 2021, Vietnamese translator Nguyen Binh published a translation of the Vietnamese epic poem Tale of Kiều, in which the lục bát couplets of the original were rendered into heroic couplets. Binh named John Dryden and Alexander Pope as major influences on their work, which also mimicked the spelling of Dryden and Pope's translations to evoke the medieval air of the Vietnamese original. An example of the heroic couplet translation can be found below:
One mounted, one released the other’s coat, The autumn maples dyed with roads remote. Red miles cast dust upon the faring steed; He disappear’d behind the berry mead. One stay’d as shadow through the hours of night, One left alone for great miles out of sight. Who had cut up the rounded moon in two, Half shining cushions, half on miles that grew? | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "A frequently-cited example illustrating the use of heroic couplets is this passage from Cooper's Hill by John Denham, part of his description of the Thames:",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The term \"heroic couplet\" is sometimes reserved for couplets that are largely closed and self-contained, as opposed to the enjambed couplets of poets like John Donne. The heroic couplet is often identified with the English Baroque works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, who used the form for their translations of the epics of Virgil and Homer, respectively. Major poems in the closed couplet, apart from the works of Dryden and Pope, are Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, and John Keats's Lamia. The form was immensely popular in the 18th century. The looser type of couplet, with occasional enjambment, was one of the standard verse forms in medieval narrative poetry, largely because of the influence of the Canterbury Tales.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "English heroic couplets, especially in Dryden and his followers, are sometimes varied by the use of the occasional alexandrine, or hexameter line, and triplet. Often these two variations are used together to heighten a climax. The breaking of the regular pattern of rhyming pentameter pairs brings about a sense of poetic closure. Here are two examples from Book IV of Dryden's translation of the Aeneid.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "My Tyrians, at their injur’d queen’s command, Had toss’d their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish’d all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Twentieth-century authors have occasionally made use of the heroic couplet, often as an allusion to the works of poets of previous centuries. An example of this is Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, the second section of which is a 999-line, 4-canto poem largely written in loose heroic couplets with frequent enjambment. Here is an example from the first canto:",
"title": "Modern use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop. One hand Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.",
"title": "Modern use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The use of heroic couplets in translations of Greco-Roman epics has also inspired translations of non-Western works into English. In 2021, Vietnamese translator Nguyen Binh published a translation of the Vietnamese epic poem Tale of Kiều, in which the lục bát couplets of the original were rendered into heroic couplets. Binh named John Dryden and Alexander Pope as major influences on their work, which also mimicked the spelling of Dryden and Pope's translations to evoke the medieval air of the Vietnamese original. An example of the heroic couplet translation can be found below:",
"title": "Modern use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "One mounted, one released the other’s coat, The autumn maples dyed with roads remote. Red miles cast dust upon the faring steed; He disappear’d behind the berry mead. One stay’d as shadow through the hours of night, One left alone for great miles out of sight. Who had cut up the rounded moon in two, Half shining cushions, half on miles that grew?",
"title": "Modern use"
}
]
| A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively. | 2001-11-12T17:58:22Z | 2023-11-06T00:24:05Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_couplet |
14,127 | Höðr | Höðr (Old Norse: Hǫðr [ˈhɔðz̠] ; often anglicized as Hod, Hoder, or Hodur) is a god in Norse mythology. The blind son of Odin and Frigg, he is tricked and guided by Loki into shooting a mistletoe arrow which was to slay the otherwise invulnerable Baldr.
According to the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, the goddess Frigg, Baldr's mother, made everything in existence swear never to harm Baldr, except for the mistletoe, which she found too unimportant to ask (alternatively, which she found too young to demand an oath from). The gods amused themselves by trying weapons on Baldr and seeing them fail to do any harm. Loki, the mischief-maker, upon finding out about Baldr's one weakness, made a spear from mistletoe, and helped Höðr shoot it at Baldr. In reaction to this, Odin and the giantess Rindr gave birth to Váli, who grew to adulthood within a day and slew Höðr.
The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recorded an alternative version of this myth in his Gesta Danorum. In this version, the mortal hero Høtherus and the demi-god Balderus compete for the hand of Nanna. Ultimately, Høtherus slays Balderus.
According to scholar Andy Orchard, the theonym Hǫðr can be translated as 'warrior'. Jan de Vries and Vladimir Orel write that is comparable with Old Norse hǫð ('war, slaughter'), and related to Old English heaðu-deór ('brave, stout in war'), from Proto-Germanic *haþuz ('battle'; cf. Old High German hadu-, Old Saxon hathu-, Old Frisian -had, Burgundian *haþus).
In the Gylfaginning part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda Höðr is introduced in an ominous way.
Höðr is not mentioned again until the prelude to Baldr's death is described. All things except the mistletoe (believed to be harmless) have sworn an oath not to harm Baldr, so the Æsir throw missiles at him for sport.
The Gylfaginning does not say what happens to Höðr after this. In fact it specifically states that Baldr cannot be avenged, at least not immediately.
It does seem, however, that Höðr ends up in Hel one way or another for the last mention of him in Gylfaginning is in the description of the post-Ragnarök world.
Snorri's source of this knowledge is clearly Völuspá as quoted below.
In the Skáldskaparmál section of the Prose Edda several kennings for Höðr are related.
None of those kennings, however, are actually found in surviving skaldic poetry. Neither are Snorri's kennings for Váli, which are also of interest in this context.
It is clear from this that Snorri was familiar with the role of Váli as Höðr's slayer, even though he does not relate that myth in the Gylfaginning prose. Some scholars have speculated that he found it distasteful, since Höðr is essentially innocent in his version of the story.
Höðr is referred to several times in the Poetic Edda, always in the context of Baldr's death. The following strophes are from Völuspá.
This account seems to fit well with the information in the Prose Edda, but here the role of Baldr's avenging brother is emphasized.
Baldr and Höðr are also mentioned in Völuspá's description of the world after Ragnarök.
The poem Vafþrúðnismál informs us that the gods who survive Ragnarök are Viðarr, Váli, Móði and Magni with no mention of Höðr and Baldr.
The myth of Baldr's death is also referred to in another Eddic poem, Baldrs draumar.
Höðr is not mentioned again by name in the Eddas. He is, however, referred to in Völuspá in skamma.
Höðr appears in both the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda. The name of Höðr occurs several times in skaldic poetry as a part of warrior-kennings. Thus Höðr brynju, "Höðr of byrnie", is a warrior and so is Höðr víga, "Höðr of battle". Some scholars have found the fact that the poets should want to compare warriors with Höðr to be incongruous with Snorri's description of him as a blind god, unable to harm anyone without assistance. It is possible that this indicates that some of the poets were familiar with other myths about Höðr than the one related in Gylfaginning – perhaps some where Höðr has a more active role. On the other hand, the names of many gods occur in kennings and the poets might not have been particular in using any god name as a part of a kenning.
In Gesta Danorum, Hotherus is a human hero of the Danish and Swedish royal lines. He is gifted in swimming, archery, fighting and music and Nanna, daughter of King Gevarus falls in love with him. But at the same time Balderus, son of Othinus, has caught sight of Nanna bathing and fallen violently in love with her. He resolves to slay Hotherus, his rival. Out hunting, Hotherus is led astray by a mist and meets wood-maidens who control the fortunes of war. They warn him that Balderus has designs on Nanna but also tell him that he shouldn't attack him in battle since he is a demigod. Hotherus goes to consult with King Gevarus and asks him for his daughter. The king replies that he would gladly favour him but that Balderus has already made a like request and he does not want to incur his wrath. Gevarus tells Hotherus that Balderus is invincible but that he knows of one weapon which can defeat him, a sword kept by Mimingus, the satyr of the woods. Mimingus also has another magical artifact, a bracelet that increases the wealth of its owner. Riding through a region of extraordinary cold in a carriage drawn by reindeer, Hotherus captures the satyr with a clever ruse and forces him to yield his artifacts.
Hearing about Hotherus's artifacts, Gelderus, king of Saxony, equips a fleet to attack him. Gevarus warns Hotherus of this and tells him where to meet Gelderus in battle. When the battle is joined, Hotherus and his men save their missiles while defending themselves against those of the enemy with a testudo formation. With his missiles exhausted, Gelderus is forced to sue for peace. He is treated mercifully by Hotherus and becomes his ally. Hotherus then gains another ally with his eloquent oratory by helping King Helgo of Hålogaland win a bride. Meanwhile, Balderus enters the country of King Gevarus armed and sues for Nanna. Gevarus tells him to learn Nanna's own mind. Balderus addresses her with cajoling words but is refused. Nanna tells him that because of the great difference in their nature and stature, since he is a demigod, they are not suitable for marriage.
As news of Balderus's efforts reaches Hotherus, he and his allies resolve to attack Balderus. A great naval battle ensues where the gods fight on the side of Balderus. Thoro in particular shatters all opposition with his mighty club. When the battle seems lost, Hotherus manages to hew Thoro's club off at the haft and the gods are forced to retreat. Gelderus perishes in the battle and Hotherus arranges a funeral pyre of vessels for him. After this battle Hotherus finally marries Nanna. Balderus is not completely defeated and shortly afterwards returns to defeat Hotherus in the field. But Balderus's victory is without fruit for he is still without Nanna. Lovesick, he is harassed by phantoms in Nanna's likeness and his health deteriorates so that he cannot walk but has himself drawn around in a cart.
After a while Hotherus and Balderus have their third battle and again Hotherus is forced to retreat. Weary of life because of his misfortunes, he plans to retire and wanders into the wilderness. In a cave he comes upon the same maidens he had met at the start of his career. Now they tell him that he can defeat Balderus if he gets a taste of some extraordinary food which had been devised to increase the strength of Balderus. Encouraged by this, Hotherus returns from exile and once again meets Balderus in the field. After a day of inconclusive fighting, he goes out during the night to spy on the enemy. He finds where Balderus's magical food is prepared and plays the lyre for the maidens preparing it. While they don't want to give him the food, they bestow on him a belt and a girdle which secure victory. Heading back to his camp, Hotherus meets Balderus and plunges his sword into his side. After three days, Balderus dies from his wound. Many years later, Bous, the son of Othinus and Rinda, avenges his brother by killing Hotherus in a duel.
There are also two lesser-known Danish–Latin chronicles, the Chronicon Lethrense and the Annales Lundenses, of which the latter is included in the former. These two sources provide a second euhemerized account of Höðr's slaying of Balder.
It relates that Hother was the king of the Saxons, son of Hothbrod, the daughter of Hadding. Hother first slew Othen's (i.e., Odin's) son Balder in battle and then chased Othen and Thor. Finally, Othen's son Both killed Hother. Hother, Balder, Othen, and Thor were incorrectly considered to be gods.
According to the Swedish mythologist and romantic poet Viktor Rydberg, the story of Baldr's death was taken from Húsdrápa, a poem composed by Ulfr Uggason around 990 AD at a feast thrown by the Icelandic Chief Óláfr Höskuldsson to celebrate the finished construction of his new home, Hjarðarholt, the walls of which were filled with symbolic representations of the Baldr myth among others. Rydberg suggested that Höðr was depicted with eyes closed and Loki guiding his aim to indicate that Loki was the true cause of Baldr's death and Höðr was only his "blind tool." Rydberg theorized that the author of the Gylfaginning then mistook the description of the symbolic artwork in the Húsdrápa as the actual tale of Baldr's death. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Höðr (Old Norse: Hǫðr [ˈhɔðz̠] ; often anglicized as Hod, Hoder, or Hodur) is a god in Norse mythology. The blind son of Odin and Frigg, he is tricked and guided by Loki into shooting a mistletoe arrow which was to slay the otherwise invulnerable Baldr.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "According to the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, the goddess Frigg, Baldr's mother, made everything in existence swear never to harm Baldr, except for the mistletoe, which she found too unimportant to ask (alternatively, which she found too young to demand an oath from). The gods amused themselves by trying weapons on Baldr and seeing them fail to do any harm. Loki, the mischief-maker, upon finding out about Baldr's one weakness, made a spear from mistletoe, and helped Höðr shoot it at Baldr. In reaction to this, Odin and the giantess Rindr gave birth to Váli, who grew to adulthood within a day and slew Höðr.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recorded an alternative version of this myth in his Gesta Danorum. In this version, the mortal hero Høtherus and the demi-god Balderus compete for the hand of Nanna. Ultimately, Høtherus slays Balderus.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to scholar Andy Orchard, the theonym Hǫðr can be translated as 'warrior'. Jan de Vries and Vladimir Orel write that is comparable with Old Norse hǫð ('war, slaughter'), and related to Old English heaðu-deór ('brave, stout in war'), from Proto-Germanic *haþuz ('battle'; cf. Old High German hadu-, Old Saxon hathu-, Old Frisian -had, Burgundian *haþus).",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the Gylfaginning part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda Höðr is introduced in an ominous way.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Höðr is not mentioned again until the prelude to Baldr's death is described. All things except the mistletoe (believed to be harmless) have sworn an oath not to harm Baldr, so the Æsir throw missiles at him for sport.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Gylfaginning does not say what happens to Höðr after this. In fact it specifically states that Baldr cannot be avenged, at least not immediately.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "It does seem, however, that Höðr ends up in Hel one way or another for the last mention of him in Gylfaginning is in the description of the post-Ragnarök world.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Snorri's source of this knowledge is clearly Völuspá as quoted below.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the Skáldskaparmál section of the Prose Edda several kennings for Höðr are related.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "None of those kennings, however, are actually found in surviving skaldic poetry. Neither are Snorri's kennings for Váli, which are also of interest in this context.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "It is clear from this that Snorri was familiar with the role of Váli as Höðr's slayer, even though he does not relate that myth in the Gylfaginning prose. Some scholars have speculated that he found it distasteful, since Höðr is essentially innocent in his version of the story.",
"title": "The Prose Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Höðr is referred to several times in the Poetic Edda, always in the context of Baldr's death. The following strophes are from Völuspá.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "This account seems to fit well with the information in the Prose Edda, but here the role of Baldr's avenging brother is emphasized.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Baldr and Höðr are also mentioned in Völuspá's description of the world after Ragnarök.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The poem Vafþrúðnismál informs us that the gods who survive Ragnarök are Viðarr, Váli, Móði and Magni with no mention of Höðr and Baldr.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The myth of Baldr's death is also referred to in another Eddic poem, Baldrs draumar.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Höðr is not mentioned again by name in the Eddas. He is, however, referred to in Völuspá in skamma.",
"title": "The Poetic Edda"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Höðr appears in both the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda. The name of Höðr occurs several times in skaldic poetry as a part of warrior-kennings. Thus Höðr brynju, \"Höðr of byrnie\", is a warrior and so is Höðr víga, \"Höðr of battle\". Some scholars have found the fact that the poets should want to compare warriors with Höðr to be incongruous with Snorri's description of him as a blind god, unable to harm anyone without assistance. It is possible that this indicates that some of the poets were familiar with other myths about Höðr than the one related in Gylfaginning – perhaps some where Höðr has a more active role. On the other hand, the names of many gods occur in kennings and the poets might not have been particular in using any god name as a part of a kenning.",
"title": "Skaldic poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Gesta Danorum, Hotherus is a human hero of the Danish and Swedish royal lines. He is gifted in swimming, archery, fighting and music and Nanna, daughter of King Gevarus falls in love with him. But at the same time Balderus, son of Othinus, has caught sight of Nanna bathing and fallen violently in love with her. He resolves to slay Hotherus, his rival. Out hunting, Hotherus is led astray by a mist and meets wood-maidens who control the fortunes of war. They warn him that Balderus has designs on Nanna but also tell him that he shouldn't attack him in battle since he is a demigod. Hotherus goes to consult with King Gevarus and asks him for his daughter. The king replies that he would gladly favour him but that Balderus has already made a like request and he does not want to incur his wrath. Gevarus tells Hotherus that Balderus is invincible but that he knows of one weapon which can defeat him, a sword kept by Mimingus, the satyr of the woods. Mimingus also has another magical artifact, a bracelet that increases the wealth of its owner. Riding through a region of extraordinary cold in a carriage drawn by reindeer, Hotherus captures the satyr with a clever ruse and forces him to yield his artifacts.",
"title": "Gesta Danorum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Hearing about Hotherus's artifacts, Gelderus, king of Saxony, equips a fleet to attack him. Gevarus warns Hotherus of this and tells him where to meet Gelderus in battle. When the battle is joined, Hotherus and his men save their missiles while defending themselves against those of the enemy with a testudo formation. With his missiles exhausted, Gelderus is forced to sue for peace. He is treated mercifully by Hotherus and becomes his ally. Hotherus then gains another ally with his eloquent oratory by helping King Helgo of Hålogaland win a bride. Meanwhile, Balderus enters the country of King Gevarus armed and sues for Nanna. Gevarus tells him to learn Nanna's own mind. Balderus addresses her with cajoling words but is refused. Nanna tells him that because of the great difference in their nature and stature, since he is a demigod, they are not suitable for marriage.",
"title": "Gesta Danorum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "As news of Balderus's efforts reaches Hotherus, he and his allies resolve to attack Balderus. A great naval battle ensues where the gods fight on the side of Balderus. Thoro in particular shatters all opposition with his mighty club. When the battle seems lost, Hotherus manages to hew Thoro's club off at the haft and the gods are forced to retreat. Gelderus perishes in the battle and Hotherus arranges a funeral pyre of vessels for him. After this battle Hotherus finally marries Nanna. Balderus is not completely defeated and shortly afterwards returns to defeat Hotherus in the field. But Balderus's victory is without fruit for he is still without Nanna. Lovesick, he is harassed by phantoms in Nanna's likeness and his health deteriorates so that he cannot walk but has himself drawn around in a cart.",
"title": "Gesta Danorum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "After a while Hotherus and Balderus have their third battle and again Hotherus is forced to retreat. Weary of life because of his misfortunes, he plans to retire and wanders into the wilderness. In a cave he comes upon the same maidens he had met at the start of his career. Now they tell him that he can defeat Balderus if he gets a taste of some extraordinary food which had been devised to increase the strength of Balderus. Encouraged by this, Hotherus returns from exile and once again meets Balderus in the field. After a day of inconclusive fighting, he goes out during the night to spy on the enemy. He finds where Balderus's magical food is prepared and plays the lyre for the maidens preparing it. While they don't want to give him the food, they bestow on him a belt and a girdle which secure victory. Heading back to his camp, Hotherus meets Balderus and plunges his sword into his side. After three days, Balderus dies from his wound. Many years later, Bous, the son of Othinus and Rinda, avenges his brother by killing Hotherus in a duel.",
"title": "Gesta Danorum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There are also two lesser-known Danish–Latin chronicles, the Chronicon Lethrense and the Annales Lundenses, of which the latter is included in the former. These two sources provide a second euhemerized account of Höðr's slaying of Balder.",
"title": "Chronicon Lethrense and Annales Lundenses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It relates that Hother was the king of the Saxons, son of Hothbrod, the daughter of Hadding. Hother first slew Othen's (i.e., Odin's) son Balder in battle and then chased Othen and Thor. Finally, Othen's son Both killed Hother. Hother, Balder, Othen, and Thor were incorrectly considered to be gods.",
"title": "Chronicon Lethrense and Annales Lundenses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "According to the Swedish mythologist and romantic poet Viktor Rydberg, the story of Baldr's death was taken from Húsdrápa, a poem composed by Ulfr Uggason around 990 AD at a feast thrown by the Icelandic Chief Óláfr Höskuldsson to celebrate the finished construction of his new home, Hjarðarholt, the walls of which were filled with symbolic representations of the Baldr myth among others. Rydberg suggested that Höðr was depicted with eyes closed and Loki guiding his aim to indicate that Loki was the true cause of Baldr's death and Höðr was only his \"blind tool.\" Rydberg theorized that the author of the Gylfaginning then mistook the description of the symbolic artwork in the Húsdrápa as the actual tale of Baldr's death.",
"title": "Rydberg's theories"
}
]
| Höðr is a god in Norse mythology. The blind son of Odin and Frigg, he is tricked and guided by Loki into shooting a mistletoe arrow which was to slay the otherwise invulnerable Baldr. According to the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, the goddess Frigg, Baldr's mother, made everything in existence swear never to harm Baldr, except for the mistletoe, which she found too unimportant to ask. The gods amused themselves by trying weapons on Baldr and seeing them fail to do any harm. Loki, the mischief-maker, upon finding out about Baldr's one weakness, made a spear from mistletoe, and helped Höðr shoot it at Baldr. In reaction to this, Odin and the giantess Rindr gave birth to Váli, who grew to adulthood within a day and slew Höðr. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recorded an alternative version of this myth in his Gesta Danorum. In this version, the mortal hero Høtherus and the demi-god Balderus compete for the hand of Nanna. Ultimately, Høtherus slays Balderus. | 2001-11-12T21:11:46Z | 2023-12-24T19:13:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6%C3%B0r |
14,128 | Herat | Herāt (/hɛˈrɑːt/; Pashto; Dari: هرات) is an oasis city and the third-largest city in Afghanistan. In 2020, it had an estimated population of 574,276, and serves as the capital of Herat Province, situated south of the Paropamisus Mountains (Selseleh-ye Safēd Kōh) in the fertile valley of the Hari River in the western part of the country. An ancient civilization on the Silk Road between West, Central and South Asia, it serves as a regional hub in the country's west.
Herat dates back to Avestan times and was traditionally known for its wine. The city has a number of historic sites, including the Herat Citadel and the Musalla Complex. During the Middle Ages, Herat became one of the important cities of Khorasan, as it was known as the Pearl of Khorasan. After its conquest by Tamerlane, the city became an important center of intellectual and artistic life in the Islamic world. Under the rule of Shah Rukh, the city served as the focal point of the Timurid Renaissance, whose glory is thought to have matched Florence of the Italian Renaissance as the center of a cultural rebirth. After the fall of the Timurid Empire, Herat has been governed by various Afghan rulers since the early 18th century. In 1716, the Abdali Afghans inhabiting the city revolted and formed their own Sultanate, the Sadozai Sultanate of Herat. They were conquered by the Afsharids in 1732.
After Nader Shah's death and Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise to power in 1747, Herat became part of Afghanistan. It became an independent city-state in the first half of the 19th century, facing several Iranian invasions until being incorporated into Afghanistan in 1863. The roads from Herat to Iran (through the border town of Islam Qala) and Turkmenistan (through the border town of Torghundi) are still strategically important. As the gateway to Iran, it collects high amount of customs revenue for Afghanistan. It also has an international airport. Following the 2001 war, the city had been relatively safe from Taliban insurgent attacks. In 2021, it was announced that Herat would be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On August 12, 2021, the city was seized by Taliban fighters as part of the Taliban's summer offensive.
Ancient
Herat is first recorded in ancient times, but its precise date of foundation is unknown. Under the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), the surrounding district was known by the Old Persian name of Haraiva (𐏃𐎼𐎡𐎺), and in classical sources, the region was correspondingly known as Areia (Aria). In the Zoroastrian collection of Avesta, the district is referred as Haroiva. The name of the district and its principal town is a derivative from that of the local river, the Herey River (from Old Iranian Harayu, meaning "with velocity"), which goes through the district and ends 5 km (3.1 mi) south of Herat. Herey is mentioned in Sanskrit as a yellow or golden color equivalent to Persian "Zard" meaning Gold (yellow). The naming of a region and its principal town after the main river is a common feature in this part of the world— compare the adjoining districts/rivers/towns of Arachosia and Bactria.
The district Aria of the Achaemenid Empire is mentioned in the provincial lists that are included in various royal inscriptions, for instance, in the Behistun inscription of Darius I (ca. 520 BC). Representatives from the district are depicted in reliefs, e.g., at the royal Achaemenid tombs of Naqsh-e Rustam and Persepolis. They are wearing Scythian-style dress (with a tunic and trousers tucked into high boots) and a twisted Bashlyk that covers their head, chin and neck.
Hamdallah Mustawfi, composer of the 14th-century geographical work Nuzhat al-Qulub writes that:
Herāt was the name of one of the chiefs among the followers of the hero Narīmān, and it was he who first founded the city. After it had fallen to ruin Alexander the Great rebuilt it, and the circuit of its walls was 9000 paces.
Herodotus described Herat as the bread-basket of Central Asia. At the time of Alexander the Great in 330 BC, Aria was obviously an important district. It was administered by a satrap called Satibarzanes, who was one of the three main Persian officials in the East of the Empire, together with the satrap Bessus of Bactria and Barsaentes of Arachosia. In late 330 BC, Alexander captured the Arian capital that was called Artacoana. The town was rebuilt and the citadel was constructed. Afghanistan became part of the Seleucid Empire.
However, most sources suggest that Herat was predominantly Zoroastrian. It became part of the Parthian Empire in 167 BC. In the Sasanian period (226-652), 𐭧𐭥𐭩𐭥 Harēv is listed in an inscription on the Ka'ba-i Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rustam; and Hariy is mentioned in the Pahlavi catalogue of the provincial capitals of the empire. In around 430, the town is also listed as having a Christian community, with a Nestorian bishop.
In the last two centuries of Sasanian rule, Aria (Herat) had great strategic importance in the endless wars between the Sasanians, the Chionites and the Hephthalites who had been settled in the northern section of Afghanistan since the late 4th century.
At the time of the Arab invasion in the middle of the 7th century, the Sasanian central power seemed already largely nominal in the province in contrast with the role of the Hephthalites tribal lords, who were settled in the Herat region and in the neighboring districts, mainly in pastoral Bādghis and in Qohestān. It must be underlined, however, that Herat remained one of the three Sasanian mint centers in the east, the other two beings Balkh and Marv. The Hephthalites from Herat and some unidentified Turks opposed the Arab forces in a battle of Qohestān in 651-52 AD, trying to block their advance on Nishāpur, but they were defeated
When the Arab armies appeared in Khorāsān in the 650s AD, Herāt was counted among the twelve capital towns of the Sasanian Empire. The Arab army under the general command of Ahnaf ibn Qais in its conquest of Khorāsān in 652 seems to have avoided Herāt, but it can be assumed that the city eventually submitted to the Arabs, since shortly afterward an Arab governor is mentioned there. A treaty was drawn in which the regions of Bādghis and Bushanj were included. As did many other places in Khorāsān, Herāt rebelled and had to be re-conquered several times.
Another power that was active in the area in the 650s was Tang dynasty China which had embarked on a campaign that culminated in the Conquest of the Western Turks. By 659–661, the Tang claimed a tenuous suzerainty over Herat, the westernmost point of Chinese power in its long history. This hold however would be ephemeral with local Turkish tribes rising in rebellion in 665 and driving out the Tang.
In 702 AD Yazid ibn al-Muhallab defeated certain Arab rebels, followers of Ibn al-Ash'ath, and forced them out of Herat. The city was the scene of conflicts between different groups of Muslims and Arab tribes in the disorders leading to the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate. Herat was also a center of the followers of Ustadh Sis.
In 870 AD, Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, a local ruler of the Saffarid dynasty conquered Herat and the rest of the nearby regions in the name of Islam.
...Arab armies carrying the banner of Islam came out of the west to defeat the Sasanians in 642 AD and then they marched with confidence to the east. On the western periphery of the Afghan area, the princes of Herat and Seistan gave way to rule by Arab governors but in the east, in the mountains, cities submitted only to rise in revolt, and the hastily converted returned to their old beliefs once the armies passed. The harshness and avariciousness of Arab rule produced such unrest, however, that once the waning power of the Caliphate became apparent, native rulers once again established themselves independent. Among these, the Saffarids of Seistan shone briefly in the Afghan area. The fanatic founder of this dynasty, the coppersmith's apprentice Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, came forth from his capital at Zaranj in 870 AD and marched through Bost, Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul, Bamiyan, Balkh and Herat, conquering in the name of Islam.
The region of Herāt was under the rule of King Nuh III, the seventh of the Samanid line—at the time of Sebük Tigin and his older son, Mahmud of Ghazni. The governor of Herāt was a noble by the name of Faik, who was appointed by Nuh III. It is said that Faik was a powerful, but insubordinate governor of Nuh III, and had been punished by Nuh III. Faik made overtures to Bogra Khan and Ughar Khan of Khorasan. Bogra Khan answered Faik's call, came to Herāt, and became its ruler. The Samanids fled, betrayed at the hands of Faik to whom the defense of Herāt had been entrusted by Nuh III. In 994, Nuh III invited Alptegin to come to his aid. Alptegin, along with Mahmud of Ghazni, defeated Faik and annexed Herāt, Nishapur and Tous.
Herat was a great trading center strategically located on trade routes from Mediterranean to India or to China. The city was noted for its textiles during the Abbasid Caliphate, according to many references by geographers. Herāt also had many learned sons such as Ansārī. The city is described by Estakhri and Ibn Hawqal in the 10th century as a prosperous town surrounded by strong walls with plenty of water sources, extensive suburbs, an inner citadel, a congregational mosque, and four gates, each gate opening to a thriving market place. The government building was outside the city at a distance of about a mile in a place called Khorāsānābād. A church was still visible in the countryside northeast of the town on the road to Balkh, and farther away on a hilltop stood a flourishing fire temple, called Sereshk, or Arshak according to Mustawfi.
Herat was a part of the Taherid dominion in Khorāsān until the rise of the Saffarids in Sistān under Ya'qub-i Laith in 861, who, in 862, started launching raids on Herat before besieging and capturing it on 16 August 867, and again in 872. The Saffarids succeeded in expelling the Taherids from Khorasan in 873.
The Sāmānid dynasty was established in Transoxiana by three brothers, Nuh, Yahyā, and Ahmad. Ahmad Sāmāni opened the way for the Samanid dynasty to the conquest of Khorāsān, including Herāt, which they were to rule for one century. The centralized Samanid administration served as a model for later dynasties. The Samanid power was destroyed in 999 by the Qarakhanids, who were advancing on Transoxiana from the northeast, and by the Ghaznavids, former Samanid retainers, attacking from the southeast.
Ghaznavid Era
Sultan Maḥmud of Ghazni officially took control of Khorāsān in 998. Herat was one of the six Ghaznavid mints in the region. In 1040, Herat was captured by the Seljuk Empire. During this change of power in Herat, there was supposedly a power vacuum which was filled by Abdullah Awn, who established a city-state and made an alliance with Mahmud of Ghazni. Yet, in 1175, it was captured by the Ghurids of Ghor and then came under the Khawarazm Empire in 1214. According to the account of Mustawfi, Herat flourished especially under the Ghurid dynasty in the 12th century. Mustawfi reported that there were "359 colleges in Herat, 12,000 shops all fully occupied, 6,000 bath-houses; besides caravanserais and mills, also a darwish convent and a fire temple". There were about 444,000 houses occupied by a settled population. The men were described as "warlike and carry arms", and they were Sunni Muslims. The great mosque of Herāt was built by Ghiyasuddin Ghori in 1201. In this period Herāt became an important center for the production of metal goods, especially in bronze, often decorated with elaborate inlays in precious metals.
Mongols
The Mongols laid siege to Herat twice. The first siege resulted in the surrender of the city, the slaughter of the local sultan's army of 12,000, and the appointment of two governors, one Mongol and one Muslim. The second, prompted by a rebellion against Mongol rule, lasted seven months and ended in June 1222 with, according to one account, the beheading of the entire population of 1,600,000 people by the victorious Mongols, such that "no head was left on a body, nor body with a head."
The city remained in ruins from 1222 to about 1236. In 1244, a local prince Shams al-Din Kart was named ruler of Herāt by the Mongol governor of Khorāsān and in 1255 he was confirmed in his rule by the founder of the Il-Khan dynasty Hulagu. Shamsuddin Kart founded a new dynasty and his successors, especially Fakhruddin Kart and Ghiyasuddin Kart, built many mosques and other buildings. The members of this dynasty were great patrons of literature and the arts. By this time Herāt became known as the pearl of Khorasan.
If anyone asks thee which is the pleasantest of cities, Thou mayest answer him aright that it is Herāt. For the world is like the sea, and the province of Khurāsān like a pearl-oyster therein, The city of Herāt being as the pearl in the middle of the oyster.
Timur took Herat in 1380 and he brought the Kartid dynasty to an end a few years later. The city reached its greatest glory under the Timurid princes, especially Sultan Husayn Bayqara who ruled Herat from 1469 until May 4, 1506. His chief minister, the poet and author in Persian and Turkish, Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i was a great builder and patron of the arts. Under the Timurids, Herat assumed the role of the main capital of an empire that extended in the West as far as central Persia. As the capital of the Timurid empire, it boasted many fine religious buildings and was famous for its sumptuous court life and musical performance and its tradition of miniature paintings. On the whole, the period was one of relative stability, prosperity, and development of economy and cultural activities. It began with the nomination of Shahrokh, the youngest son of Timur, as governor of Herat in 1397. The reign of Shahrokh in Herat was marked by intense royal patronage, building activities, and the promotion of manufacturing and trade, especially through the restoration and enlargement of the Herat's bāzār. The present Musallah Complex, and many buildings such as the madrasa of Gawhar Shad, Ali Shir mahāl, many gardens, and others, date from this time. The village of Gazar Gah, over two km northeast of Herat, contained a shrine that was enlarged and embellished under the Timurids. The tomb of the poet and mystic Khwājah Abdullāh Ansārī (d. 1088), was first rebuilt by Shahrokh about 1425, and other famous men were buried in the shrine area.
In the summer of 1458, the Qara Qoyunlu under Jahan Shah advanced as far as Herat, but had to turn back soon because of a revolt by his son Hasan Ali and also because Abu Said's march on Tabriz.
In 1507, Herat was occupied by the Uzbeks but after much fighting the city was taken by Shah Isma'il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, in 1510 and the Shamlu Qizilbash assumed the governorship of the area. Under the Safavids, Herat was again relegated to the position of a provincial capital, albeit one of particular importance. At the death of Shah Isma'il the Uzbeks again took Herat and held it until Shah Tahmasp retook it in 1528. The Persian king, Abbas was born in Herat, and in Safavid texts, Herat is referred to as a'zam-i bilād-i īrān, meaning "the greatest of the cities of Iran". In the 16th century, all future Safavid rulers, from Tahmasp I to Abbas I, were governors of Herat in their youth.
By the early 18th century Herat was governed by the Abdali Afghans. After Nader Shah's death in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani took possession of the city and became part of the Durrani Empire.
In 1793, Herat became independent for several years when Afghanistan underwent a civil war between different sons of Timur Shah. The Iranians had multiple wars with Herat between 1801 and 1837 (1804, 1807, 1811, 1814, 1817, 1818, 1821, 1822, 1825, 1833). The Iranians besieged the city in 1837, but the British helped the Heratis in repelling them. In 1856, they invaded again, and briefly managed to take the city on October 25; it led directly to the Anglo-Persian War. In 1857 hostilities between the Iranians and the British ended after the Treaty of Paris was signed, and the Persian troops withdrew from Herat in September 1857. Afghanistan conquered Herat on May 26, 1863, under Dost Muhammad Khan, two weeks before his death.
The famous Musalla of Gawhar Shah of Herat, a large Islamic religious complex consisting of five minarets, several mausoleums along with mosques and madrasas was dynamited during the Panjdeh incident to prevent their usage by the advancing Russian forces. Some emergency preservation work was carried out at the site in 2001 which included building protective walls around the Gawhar Shad Mausoleum and Sultan Husain Madrasa, repairing the remaining minaret of Gawhar Shad's Madrasa, and replanting the mausoleum garden.
In the aftermath of the Afghan Civil War (1928–1929), Herat was the last stronghold of Saqqawist resistance, holding out until 1931 when it was retaken by forces loyal to Mohammad Nadir Shah.
In the 1960s, engineers from the United States built Herat Airport, which was used by the Soviet forces during the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even before the Soviet invasion at the end of 1979, there was a substantial presence of Soviet advisors in the city with their families.
Between March 10 and March 20, 1979, the Afghan Army in Herāt under the control of commander Ismail Khan mutinied. Thousands of protesters took to the streets against the Khalq communist regime's oppression led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. The new rebels led by Khan managed to oust the communists and take control of the city for 3 days, with some protesters murdering any Soviet advisers. This shocked the government, who blamed the new administration of Iran following the Iranian Revolution for influencing the uprising. Reprisals by the government followed, and between 3,000 and 24,000 people (according to different sources) were killed, in what is called the 1979 Herat uprising, or in Persian as the Qiam-e Herat. The city itself was recaptured with tanks and airborne forces, but at the cost of thousands of civilians killed. This massacre was the first of its kind since the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, and was the bloodiest event preceding the Soviet–Afghan War.
Herat received damage during the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, especially its western side. The province as a whole was one of the worst-hit. In April 1983, a series of Soviet bombings damaged half of the city and killed around 3,000 civilians, described as "extremely heavy, brutal and prolonged". Ismail Khan was the leading mujahideen commander in Herāt fighting against the Soviet-backed government.
After the communist government's collapse in 1992, Khan joined the new government and he became governor of Herat Province. The city was relatively safe and it was recovering and rebuilding from the damage caused in the Soviet–Afghan War. However, on September 5, 1995, the city was captured by the Taliban without much resistance, forcing Khan to flee. Herat became the first Persian-speaking city to be captured by the Taliban. The Taliban's strict enforcement of laws confining women at home and closing girls' schools alienated Heratis who are traditionally more liberal and educated, like the Kabulis, than other urban populations in the country. Two days of anti-Taliban protests occurred in December 1996 which was violently dispersed and led to the imposition of a curfew. In May 1999, a rebellion in Herat was crushed by the Taliban, who blamed Iran for causing it.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, on November 12, 2001, it was captured from the Taliban by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance and Ismail Khan returned to power (see Battle of Herat). The state of the city was reportedly much better than that of Kabul. In 2004, Mirwais Sadiq, Aviation Minister of Afghanistan and the son of Ismail Khan, was ambushed and killed in Herāt by a local rival group. More than 200 people were arrested under suspicion of involvement.
In 2005, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) began establishing bases in and around the city. Its main mission was to train the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and help with the rebuilding process of the country. Regional Command West, led by Italy, assisted the Afghan National Army (ANA) 207th Corps. Herat was one of the first seven areas that transitioned security responsibility from NATO to Afghanistan. In July 2011, the Afghan security forces assumed security responsibility from NATO.
Due to their close relations, Iran began investing in the development of Herat's power, economy and education sectors. In the meantime, the United States built a consulate in Herat to help further strengthen its relations with Afghanistan. In addition to the usual services, the consulate works with the local officials on development projects and with security issues in the region.
On 12 August 2021, the city was captured by the Taliban during the 2021 Taliban offensive.
Herat has a cold semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification BSk). Precipitation is very low, and mostly falls in winter. Although Herāt is approximately 240 m (790 ft) lower than Kandahar, the summer climate is more temperate, and the climate throughout the year is far from disagreeable, although winter temperatures are comparably lower. From May to September, the wind blows from the northwest with great force. The winter is tolerably mild; snow melts rather quickly, and even on the mountains does not lie long. The eastern reaches of the Hari River, including the rapids, are frozen hard in the winter, and people travel on it as on a road.
India, Iran and Pakistan operate their consulate here for trade, military and political links.
Of the more than dozen minarets that once stood in Herāt, many have been toppled from war and neglect over the past century. Recently, however, everyday traffic threatens many of the remaining unique towers by shaking the very foundations they stand on. Cars and trucks that drive on a road encircling the ancient city rumble the ground every time they pass these historic structures. UNESCO personnel and Afghan authorities have been working to stabilize the Fifth Minaret.
The population of Herat numbered approximately 592,902 in 2021. The city houses a multi-ethnic society and speakers of the Persian language are in the majority. There is no current data on the precise ethnic composition of the city's population, but according to a 2003 map found in the National Geographic Magazine, Persian-speaking Tajik and Farsiwan peoples form the majority of the city, comprising around 85% of the population. The remaining population comprises Pashtuns (10%), Hazaras (2%), Uzbeks (2%) and Turkmens (1%).
Persian is the native language of Herat and the local dialect – known by natives as Herātī – belongs to the Khorāsānī cluster within Persian. It is akin to the Persian dialects of eastern Iran, notably those of Mashhad and Khorasan Province, which borders Herat. This Persian dialect serves as the lingua franca of the city. The second language that is understood by many is Pashto, which is the native language of the Pashtuns. The local Pashto dialect spoken in Herat is a variant of western Pashto, which is also spoken in Kandahar and southern and western Afghanistan. Religiously, Sunni Islam is practiced by the majority, while Shias make up the minority.
The city has high residential density clustered around the core of the city. However, vacant plots account for a higher percentage of the city (21%) than residential land use (18%) and agricultural is the largest percentage of total land use (36%).
The city once had a Jewish community. About 280 families lived in Herat as of 1948, but most of them moved to Israel that year, and the community disappeared by 1992. There are four former synagogues in the city's old quarter, which were neglected for decades and fell into disrepair. In the late 2000s, the buildings of the synagogues were renovated by the Aga Khan Trust for culture, and at this time, three of them were turned into schools and nurseries, the Jewish community having vanished. The Jewish cemetery is being taken care of by Jalil Ahmed Abdelaziz.
Herat International Airport was built by engineers from the United States in the 1960s and was used by the Soviet Armed Forces during the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s. It was bombed in late 2001 during Operation Enduring Freedom but had been rebuilt within the next decade. The runway of the airport has been extended and upgraded and as of August 2014 there were regularly scheduled direct flights to Delhi, Dubai, Mashad, and various airports in Afghanistan. At least five airlines operated regularly scheduled direct flights to Kabul.
Rail connections to and from Herat were proposed many times, during The Great Game of the 19th century and again in the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came to life. In February 2002, Iran and the Asian Development Bank announced funding for a railway connecting Torbat-e Heydarieh in Iran to Herat. This was later changed to begin in Khaf in Iran, a 191 km (119 mi) railway for both cargo and passengers, with work on the Iranian side of the border starting in 2006. Construction is underway in the Afghan side and it was estimated to be completed by March 2018. There is also the prospect of an extension across Afghanistan to Sher Khan Bandar.
The AH76 highway connects Herat to Maymana and the north. The AH77 connects it east towards Chaghcharan and north towards Mary in Turkmenistan. Highway 1 (part of Asian highway AH1) links it to Mashhad in Iran to the northwest, and south via the Kandahar–Herat Highway to Delaram.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Herat". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 330–332. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Herāt (/hɛˈrɑːt/; Pashto; Dari: هرات) is an oasis city and the third-largest city in Afghanistan. In 2020, it had an estimated population of 574,276, and serves as the capital of Herat Province, situated south of the Paropamisus Mountains (Selseleh-ye Safēd Kōh) in the fertile valley of the Hari River in the western part of the country. An ancient civilization on the Silk Road between West, Central and South Asia, it serves as a regional hub in the country's west.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Herat dates back to Avestan times and was traditionally known for its wine. The city has a number of historic sites, including the Herat Citadel and the Musalla Complex. During the Middle Ages, Herat became one of the important cities of Khorasan, as it was known as the Pearl of Khorasan. After its conquest by Tamerlane, the city became an important center of intellectual and artistic life in the Islamic world. Under the rule of Shah Rukh, the city served as the focal point of the Timurid Renaissance, whose glory is thought to have matched Florence of the Italian Renaissance as the center of a cultural rebirth. After the fall of the Timurid Empire, Herat has been governed by various Afghan rulers since the early 18th century. In 1716, the Abdali Afghans inhabiting the city revolted and formed their own Sultanate, the Sadozai Sultanate of Herat. They were conquered by the Afsharids in 1732.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After Nader Shah's death and Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise to power in 1747, Herat became part of Afghanistan. It became an independent city-state in the first half of the 19th century, facing several Iranian invasions until being incorporated into Afghanistan in 1863. The roads from Herat to Iran (through the border town of Islam Qala) and Turkmenistan (through the border town of Torghundi) are still strategically important. As the gateway to Iran, it collects high amount of customs revenue for Afghanistan. It also has an international airport. Following the 2001 war, the city had been relatively safe from Taliban insurgent attacks. In 2021, it was announced that Herat would be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On August 12, 2021, the city was seized by Taliban fighters as part of the Taliban's summer offensive.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ancient",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Herat is first recorded in ancient times, but its precise date of foundation is unknown. Under the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), the surrounding district was known by the Old Persian name of Haraiva (𐏃𐎼𐎡𐎺), and in classical sources, the region was correspondingly known as Areia (Aria). In the Zoroastrian collection of Avesta, the district is referred as Haroiva. The name of the district and its principal town is a derivative from that of the local river, the Herey River (from Old Iranian Harayu, meaning \"with velocity\"), which goes through the district and ends 5 km (3.1 mi) south of Herat. Herey is mentioned in Sanskrit as a yellow or golden color equivalent to Persian \"Zard\" meaning Gold (yellow). The naming of a region and its principal town after the main river is a common feature in this part of the world— compare the adjoining districts/rivers/towns of Arachosia and Bactria.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The district Aria of the Achaemenid Empire is mentioned in the provincial lists that are included in various royal inscriptions, for instance, in the Behistun inscription of Darius I (ca. 520 BC). Representatives from the district are depicted in reliefs, e.g., at the royal Achaemenid tombs of Naqsh-e Rustam and Persepolis. They are wearing Scythian-style dress (with a tunic and trousers tucked into high boots) and a twisted Bashlyk that covers their head, chin and neck.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hamdallah Mustawfi, composer of the 14th-century geographical work Nuzhat al-Qulub writes that:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Herāt was the name of one of the chiefs among the followers of the hero Narīmān, and it was he who first founded the city. After it had fallen to ruin Alexander the Great rebuilt it, and the circuit of its walls was 9000 paces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Herodotus described Herat as the bread-basket of Central Asia. At the time of Alexander the Great in 330 BC, Aria was obviously an important district. It was administered by a satrap called Satibarzanes, who was one of the three main Persian officials in the East of the Empire, together with the satrap Bessus of Bactria and Barsaentes of Arachosia. In late 330 BC, Alexander captured the Arian capital that was called Artacoana. The town was rebuilt and the citadel was constructed. Afghanistan became part of the Seleucid Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "However, most sources suggest that Herat was predominantly Zoroastrian. It became part of the Parthian Empire in 167 BC. In the Sasanian period (226-652), 𐭧𐭥𐭩𐭥 Harēv is listed in an inscription on the Ka'ba-i Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rustam; and Hariy is mentioned in the Pahlavi catalogue of the provincial capitals of the empire. In around 430, the town is also listed as having a Christian community, with a Nestorian bishop.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the last two centuries of Sasanian rule, Aria (Herat) had great strategic importance in the endless wars between the Sasanians, the Chionites and the Hephthalites who had been settled in the northern section of Afghanistan since the late 4th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "At the time of the Arab invasion in the middle of the 7th century, the Sasanian central power seemed already largely nominal in the province in contrast with the role of the Hephthalites tribal lords, who were settled in the Herat region and in the neighboring districts, mainly in pastoral Bādghis and in Qohestān. It must be underlined, however, that Herat remained one of the three Sasanian mint centers in the east, the other two beings Balkh and Marv. The Hephthalites from Herat and some unidentified Turks opposed the Arab forces in a battle of Qohestān in 651-52 AD, trying to block their advance on Nishāpur, but they were defeated",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "When the Arab armies appeared in Khorāsān in the 650s AD, Herāt was counted among the twelve capital towns of the Sasanian Empire. The Arab army under the general command of Ahnaf ibn Qais in its conquest of Khorāsān in 652 seems to have avoided Herāt, but it can be assumed that the city eventually submitted to the Arabs, since shortly afterward an Arab governor is mentioned there. A treaty was drawn in which the regions of Bādghis and Bushanj were included. As did many other places in Khorāsān, Herāt rebelled and had to be re-conquered several times.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Another power that was active in the area in the 650s was Tang dynasty China which had embarked on a campaign that culminated in the Conquest of the Western Turks. By 659–661, the Tang claimed a tenuous suzerainty over Herat, the westernmost point of Chinese power in its long history. This hold however would be ephemeral with local Turkish tribes rising in rebellion in 665 and driving out the Tang.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 702 AD Yazid ibn al-Muhallab defeated certain Arab rebels, followers of Ibn al-Ash'ath, and forced them out of Herat. The city was the scene of conflicts between different groups of Muslims and Arab tribes in the disorders leading to the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate. Herat was also a center of the followers of Ustadh Sis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 870 AD, Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, a local ruler of the Saffarid dynasty conquered Herat and the rest of the nearby regions in the name of Islam.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "...Arab armies carrying the banner of Islam came out of the west to defeat the Sasanians in 642 AD and then they marched with confidence to the east. On the western periphery of the Afghan area, the princes of Herat and Seistan gave way to rule by Arab governors but in the east, in the mountains, cities submitted only to rise in revolt, and the hastily converted returned to their old beliefs once the armies passed. The harshness and avariciousness of Arab rule produced such unrest, however, that once the waning power of the Caliphate became apparent, native rulers once again established themselves independent. Among these, the Saffarids of Seistan shone briefly in the Afghan area. The fanatic founder of this dynasty, the coppersmith's apprentice Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, came forth from his capital at Zaranj in 870 AD and marched through Bost, Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul, Bamiyan, Balkh and Herat, conquering in the name of Islam.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The region of Herāt was under the rule of King Nuh III, the seventh of the Samanid line—at the time of Sebük Tigin and his older son, Mahmud of Ghazni. The governor of Herāt was a noble by the name of Faik, who was appointed by Nuh III. It is said that Faik was a powerful, but insubordinate governor of Nuh III, and had been punished by Nuh III. Faik made overtures to Bogra Khan and Ughar Khan of Khorasan. Bogra Khan answered Faik's call, came to Herāt, and became its ruler. The Samanids fled, betrayed at the hands of Faik to whom the defense of Herāt had been entrusted by Nuh III. In 994, Nuh III invited Alptegin to come to his aid. Alptegin, along with Mahmud of Ghazni, defeated Faik and annexed Herāt, Nishapur and Tous.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Herat was a great trading center strategically located on trade routes from Mediterranean to India or to China. The city was noted for its textiles during the Abbasid Caliphate, according to many references by geographers. Herāt also had many learned sons such as Ansārī. The city is described by Estakhri and Ibn Hawqal in the 10th century as a prosperous town surrounded by strong walls with plenty of water sources, extensive suburbs, an inner citadel, a congregational mosque, and four gates, each gate opening to a thriving market place. The government building was outside the city at a distance of about a mile in a place called Khorāsānābād. A church was still visible in the countryside northeast of the town on the road to Balkh, and farther away on a hilltop stood a flourishing fire temple, called Sereshk, or Arshak according to Mustawfi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Herat was a part of the Taherid dominion in Khorāsān until the rise of the Saffarids in Sistān under Ya'qub-i Laith in 861, who, in 862, started launching raids on Herat before besieging and capturing it on 16 August 867, and again in 872. The Saffarids succeeded in expelling the Taherids from Khorasan in 873.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Sāmānid dynasty was established in Transoxiana by three brothers, Nuh, Yahyā, and Ahmad. Ahmad Sāmāni opened the way for the Samanid dynasty to the conquest of Khorāsān, including Herāt, which they were to rule for one century. The centralized Samanid administration served as a model for later dynasties. The Samanid power was destroyed in 999 by the Qarakhanids, who were advancing on Transoxiana from the northeast, and by the Ghaznavids, former Samanid retainers, attacking from the southeast.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ghaznavid Era",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Sultan Maḥmud of Ghazni officially took control of Khorāsān in 998. Herat was one of the six Ghaznavid mints in the region. In 1040, Herat was captured by the Seljuk Empire. During this change of power in Herat, there was supposedly a power vacuum which was filled by Abdullah Awn, who established a city-state and made an alliance with Mahmud of Ghazni. Yet, in 1175, it was captured by the Ghurids of Ghor and then came under the Khawarazm Empire in 1214. According to the account of Mustawfi, Herat flourished especially under the Ghurid dynasty in the 12th century. Mustawfi reported that there were \"359 colleges in Herat, 12,000 shops all fully occupied, 6,000 bath-houses; besides caravanserais and mills, also a darwish convent and a fire temple\". There were about 444,000 houses occupied by a settled population. The men were described as \"warlike and carry arms\", and they were Sunni Muslims. The great mosque of Herāt was built by Ghiyasuddin Ghori in 1201. In this period Herāt became an important center for the production of metal goods, especially in bronze, often decorated with elaborate inlays in precious metals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Mongols",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Mongols laid siege to Herat twice. The first siege resulted in the surrender of the city, the slaughter of the local sultan's army of 12,000, and the appointment of two governors, one Mongol and one Muslim. The second, prompted by a rebellion against Mongol rule, lasted seven months and ended in June 1222 with, according to one account, the beheading of the entire population of 1,600,000 people by the victorious Mongols, such that \"no head was left on a body, nor body with a head.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The city remained in ruins from 1222 to about 1236. In 1244, a local prince Shams al-Din Kart was named ruler of Herāt by the Mongol governor of Khorāsān and in 1255 he was confirmed in his rule by the founder of the Il-Khan dynasty Hulagu. Shamsuddin Kart founded a new dynasty and his successors, especially Fakhruddin Kart and Ghiyasuddin Kart, built many mosques and other buildings. The members of this dynasty were great patrons of literature and the arts. By this time Herāt became known as the pearl of Khorasan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "If anyone asks thee which is the pleasantest of cities, Thou mayest answer him aright that it is Herāt. For the world is like the sea, and the province of Khurāsān like a pearl-oyster therein, The city of Herāt being as the pearl in the middle of the oyster.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Timur took Herat in 1380 and he brought the Kartid dynasty to an end a few years later. The city reached its greatest glory under the Timurid princes, especially Sultan Husayn Bayqara who ruled Herat from 1469 until May 4, 1506. His chief minister, the poet and author in Persian and Turkish, Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i was a great builder and patron of the arts. Under the Timurids, Herat assumed the role of the main capital of an empire that extended in the West as far as central Persia. As the capital of the Timurid empire, it boasted many fine religious buildings and was famous for its sumptuous court life and musical performance and its tradition of miniature paintings. On the whole, the period was one of relative stability, prosperity, and development of economy and cultural activities. It began with the nomination of Shahrokh, the youngest son of Timur, as governor of Herat in 1397. The reign of Shahrokh in Herat was marked by intense royal patronage, building activities, and the promotion of manufacturing and trade, especially through the restoration and enlargement of the Herat's bāzār. The present Musallah Complex, and many buildings such as the madrasa of Gawhar Shad, Ali Shir mahāl, many gardens, and others, date from this time. The village of Gazar Gah, over two km northeast of Herat, contained a shrine that was enlarged and embellished under the Timurids. The tomb of the poet and mystic Khwājah Abdullāh Ansārī (d. 1088), was first rebuilt by Shahrokh about 1425, and other famous men were buried in the shrine area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the summer of 1458, the Qara Qoyunlu under Jahan Shah advanced as far as Herat, but had to turn back soon because of a revolt by his son Hasan Ali and also because Abu Said's march on Tabriz.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1507, Herat was occupied by the Uzbeks but after much fighting the city was taken by Shah Isma'il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, in 1510 and the Shamlu Qizilbash assumed the governorship of the area. Under the Safavids, Herat was again relegated to the position of a provincial capital, albeit one of particular importance. At the death of Shah Isma'il the Uzbeks again took Herat and held it until Shah Tahmasp retook it in 1528. The Persian king, Abbas was born in Herat, and in Safavid texts, Herat is referred to as a'zam-i bilād-i īrān, meaning \"the greatest of the cities of Iran\". In the 16th century, all future Safavid rulers, from Tahmasp I to Abbas I, were governors of Herat in their youth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "By the early 18th century Herat was governed by the Abdali Afghans. After Nader Shah's death in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani took possession of the city and became part of the Durrani Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1793, Herat became independent for several years when Afghanistan underwent a civil war between different sons of Timur Shah. The Iranians had multiple wars with Herat between 1801 and 1837 (1804, 1807, 1811, 1814, 1817, 1818, 1821, 1822, 1825, 1833). The Iranians besieged the city in 1837, but the British helped the Heratis in repelling them. In 1856, they invaded again, and briefly managed to take the city on October 25; it led directly to the Anglo-Persian War. In 1857 hostilities between the Iranians and the British ended after the Treaty of Paris was signed, and the Persian troops withdrew from Herat in September 1857. Afghanistan conquered Herat on May 26, 1863, under Dost Muhammad Khan, two weeks before his death.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The famous Musalla of Gawhar Shah of Herat, a large Islamic religious complex consisting of five minarets, several mausoleums along with mosques and madrasas was dynamited during the Panjdeh incident to prevent their usage by the advancing Russian forces. Some emergency preservation work was carried out at the site in 2001 which included building protective walls around the Gawhar Shad Mausoleum and Sultan Husain Madrasa, repairing the remaining minaret of Gawhar Shad's Madrasa, and replanting the mausoleum garden.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In the aftermath of the Afghan Civil War (1928–1929), Herat was the last stronghold of Saqqawist resistance, holding out until 1931 when it was retaken by forces loyal to Mohammad Nadir Shah.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the 1960s, engineers from the United States built Herat Airport, which was used by the Soviet forces during the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even before the Soviet invasion at the end of 1979, there was a substantial presence of Soviet advisors in the city with their families.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Between March 10 and March 20, 1979, the Afghan Army in Herāt under the control of commander Ismail Khan mutinied. Thousands of protesters took to the streets against the Khalq communist regime's oppression led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. The new rebels led by Khan managed to oust the communists and take control of the city for 3 days, with some protesters murdering any Soviet advisers. This shocked the government, who blamed the new administration of Iran following the Iranian Revolution for influencing the uprising. Reprisals by the government followed, and between 3,000 and 24,000 people (according to different sources) were killed, in what is called the 1979 Herat uprising, or in Persian as the Qiam-e Herat. The city itself was recaptured with tanks and airborne forces, but at the cost of thousands of civilians killed. This massacre was the first of its kind since the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, and was the bloodiest event preceding the Soviet–Afghan War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Herat received damage during the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, especially its western side. The province as a whole was one of the worst-hit. In April 1983, a series of Soviet bombings damaged half of the city and killed around 3,000 civilians, described as \"extremely heavy, brutal and prolonged\". Ismail Khan was the leading mujahideen commander in Herāt fighting against the Soviet-backed government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "After the communist government's collapse in 1992, Khan joined the new government and he became governor of Herat Province. The city was relatively safe and it was recovering and rebuilding from the damage caused in the Soviet–Afghan War. However, on September 5, 1995, the city was captured by the Taliban without much resistance, forcing Khan to flee. Herat became the first Persian-speaking city to be captured by the Taliban. The Taliban's strict enforcement of laws confining women at home and closing girls' schools alienated Heratis who are traditionally more liberal and educated, like the Kabulis, than other urban populations in the country. Two days of anti-Taliban protests occurred in December 1996 which was violently dispersed and led to the imposition of a curfew. In May 1999, a rebellion in Herat was crushed by the Taliban, who blamed Iran for causing it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, on November 12, 2001, it was captured from the Taliban by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance and Ismail Khan returned to power (see Battle of Herat). The state of the city was reportedly much better than that of Kabul. In 2004, Mirwais Sadiq, Aviation Minister of Afghanistan and the son of Ismail Khan, was ambushed and killed in Herāt by a local rival group. More than 200 people were arrested under suspicion of involvement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 2005, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) began establishing bases in and around the city. Its main mission was to train the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and help with the rebuilding process of the country. Regional Command West, led by Italy, assisted the Afghan National Army (ANA) 207th Corps. Herat was one of the first seven areas that transitioned security responsibility from NATO to Afghanistan. In July 2011, the Afghan security forces assumed security responsibility from NATO.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Due to their close relations, Iran began investing in the development of Herat's power, economy and education sectors. In the meantime, the United States built a consulate in Herat to help further strengthen its relations with Afghanistan. In addition to the usual services, the consulate works with the local officials on development projects and with security issues in the region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On 12 August 2021, the city was captured by the Taliban during the 2021 Taliban offensive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Herat has a cold semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification BSk). Precipitation is very low, and mostly falls in winter. Although Herāt is approximately 240 m (790 ft) lower than Kandahar, the summer climate is more temperate, and the climate throughout the year is far from disagreeable, although winter temperatures are comparably lower. From May to September, the wind blows from the northwest with great force. The winter is tolerably mild; snow melts rather quickly, and even on the mountains does not lie long. The eastern reaches of the Hari River, including the rapids, are frozen hard in the winter, and people travel on it as on a road.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "India, Iran and Pakistan operate their consulate here for trade, military and political links.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Of the more than dozen minarets that once stood in Herāt, many have been toppled from war and neglect over the past century. Recently, however, everyday traffic threatens many of the remaining unique towers by shaking the very foundations they stand on. Cars and trucks that drive on a road encircling the ancient city rumble the ground every time they pass these historic structures. UNESCO personnel and Afghan authorities have been working to stabilize the Fifth Minaret.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The population of Herat numbered approximately 592,902 in 2021. The city houses a multi-ethnic society and speakers of the Persian language are in the majority. There is no current data on the precise ethnic composition of the city's population, but according to a 2003 map found in the National Geographic Magazine, Persian-speaking Tajik and Farsiwan peoples form the majority of the city, comprising around 85% of the population. The remaining population comprises Pashtuns (10%), Hazaras (2%), Uzbeks (2%) and Turkmens (1%).",
"title": "Demography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Persian is the native language of Herat and the local dialect – known by natives as Herātī – belongs to the Khorāsānī cluster within Persian. It is akin to the Persian dialects of eastern Iran, notably those of Mashhad and Khorasan Province, which borders Herat. This Persian dialect serves as the lingua franca of the city. The second language that is understood by many is Pashto, which is the native language of the Pashtuns. The local Pashto dialect spoken in Herat is a variant of western Pashto, which is also spoken in Kandahar and southern and western Afghanistan. Religiously, Sunni Islam is practiced by the majority, while Shias make up the minority.",
"title": "Demography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The city has high residential density clustered around the core of the city. However, vacant plots account for a higher percentage of the city (21%) than residential land use (18%) and agricultural is the largest percentage of total land use (36%).",
"title": "Demography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The city once had a Jewish community. About 280 families lived in Herat as of 1948, but most of them moved to Israel that year, and the community disappeared by 1992. There are four former synagogues in the city's old quarter, which were neglected for decades and fell into disrepair. In the late 2000s, the buildings of the synagogues were renovated by the Aga Khan Trust for culture, and at this time, three of them were turned into schools and nurseries, the Jewish community having vanished. The Jewish cemetery is being taken care of by Jalil Ahmed Abdelaziz.",
"title": "Demography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Herat International Airport was built by engineers from the United States in the 1960s and was used by the Soviet Armed Forces during the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s. It was bombed in late 2001 during Operation Enduring Freedom but had been rebuilt within the next decade. The runway of the airport has been extended and upgraded and as of August 2014 there were regularly scheduled direct flights to Delhi, Dubai, Mashad, and various airports in Afghanistan. At least five airlines operated regularly scheduled direct flights to Kabul.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Rail connections to and from Herat were proposed many times, during The Great Game of the 19th century and again in the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came to life. In February 2002, Iran and the Asian Development Bank announced funding for a railway connecting Torbat-e Heydarieh in Iran to Herat. This was later changed to begin in Khaf in Iran, a 191 km (119 mi) railway for both cargo and passengers, with work on the Iranian side of the border starting in 2006. Construction is underway in the Afghan side and it was estimated to be completed by March 2018. There is also the prospect of an extension across Afghanistan to Sher Khan Bandar.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The AH76 highway connects Herat to Maymana and the north. The AH77 connects it east towards Chaghcharan and north towards Mary in Turkmenistan. Highway 1 (part of Asian highway AH1) links it to Mashhad in Iran to the northwest, and south via the Kandahar–Herat Highway to Delaram.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). \"Herat\". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 330–332.",
"title": "Attribution"
}
]
| Herāt is an oasis city and the third-largest city in Afghanistan. In 2020, it had an estimated population of 574,276, and serves as the capital of Herat Province, situated south of the Paropamisus Mountains in the fertile valley of the Hari River in the western part of the country. An ancient civilization on the Silk Road between West, Central and South Asia, it serves as a regional hub in the country's west. Herat dates back to Avestan times and was traditionally known for its wine. The city has a number of historic sites, including the Herat Citadel and the Musalla Complex. During the Middle Ages, Herat became one of the important cities of Khorasan, as it was known as the Pearl of Khorasan. After its conquest by Tamerlane, the city became an important center of intellectual and artistic life in the Islamic world. Under the rule of Shah Rukh, the city served as the focal point of the Timurid Renaissance, whose glory is thought to have matched Florence of the Italian Renaissance as the center of a cultural rebirth. After the fall of the Timurid Empire, Herat has been governed by various Afghan rulers since the early 18th century. In 1716, the Abdali Afghans inhabiting the city revolted and formed their own Sultanate, the Sadozai Sultanate of Herat. They were conquered by the Afsharids in 1732. After Nader Shah's death and Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise to power in 1747, Herat became part of Afghanistan. It became an independent city-state in the first half of the 19th century, facing several Iranian invasions until being incorporated into Afghanistan in 1863. The roads from Herat to Iran and Turkmenistan are still strategically important. As the gateway to Iran, it collects high amount of customs revenue for Afghanistan. It also has an international airport. Following the 2001 war, the city had been relatively safe from Taliban insurgent attacks. In 2021, it was announced that Herat would be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On August 12, 2021, the city was seized by Taliban fighters as part of the Taliban's summer offensive. | 2001-11-14T19:09:48Z | 2023-12-29T12:21:24Z | [
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14,130 | Hedeby | Hedeby (Danish pronunciation: [ˈhe̝ːðəˌpyˀ], Old Norse Heiðabýr, German Haithabu) was an important Danish Viking Age (8th to the 11th centuries) trading settlement near the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula, now in the Schleswig-Flensburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Around 965, chronicler Abraham ben Jacob visited Hedeby and described it as, "a very large city at the very end of the world's ocean."
The settlement developed as a trading centre at the head of a narrow, navigable inlet known as the Schlei, which connects to the Baltic Sea. The location was favorable because there is a short portage of less than 15 km to the Treene River, which flows into the Eider with its North Sea estuary, making it a convenient place where goods and ships could be pulled on a corduroy road overland for an almost uninterrupted seaway between the Baltic and the North Sea and avoid a dangerous and time-consuming circumnavigation of Jutland, providing Hedeby with a role similar to later Lübeck. Hedeby was the second largest Nordic town during the Viking Age, after Uppåkra in present-day southern Sweden. The city of Schleswig was later founded on the other side of the Schlei. Hedeby was abandoned after its destruction in 1066.
Hedeby was rediscovered in the late 19th century and excavations began in 1900. The Hedeby Museum was opened next to the site in 1985. Because of its historical importance during the Viking Age and exceptional preservation, Hedeby and the nearby defensive earthworks of the Danevirke were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018.
Hedeby is mentioned in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Marsh King's Daughter.
The Old Norse name Heiða-býr simply translates to "heath-settlement" (heiðr "heath" and býr = "yard; settlement, village, town"). The name is recorded in numerous spelling variants.
Sources from the 9th and 10th century AD also attest to the names Sliesthorp and Sliaswich (cf. -thorp vs. -wich), and the town of Schleswig still exists 3 km north of Hedeby. However, Æthelweard claimed in his Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the Saxons used Slesuuic and the Danes Haithaby to refer to the same town.
Hedeby is first mentioned in the Frankish chronicles of Einhard (804) who was in the service of Charlemagne, but was probably founded around 770. In 808 the Danish king Godfred (Lat. Godofredus) destroyed a competing Slav trade centre named Reric, and it is recorded in the Frankish chronicles that he moved the merchants from there to Hedeby. This may have provided the initial impetus for the town to develop. The same sources record that Godfred strengthened the Danevirke, an earthen wall that stretched across the south of the Jutland peninsula. The Danevirke joined the defensive walls of Hedeby to form an east–west barrier across the peninsula, from the marshes in the west to the Schlei inlet leading into the Baltic in the east.
The town itself was surrounded on its three landward sides (north, west, and south) by earthworks. At the end of the 9th century the northern and southern parts of the town were abandoned for the central section. Later a 9-metre (29-ft) high semi-circular wall was erected to guard the western approaches to the town. On the eastern side, the town was bordered by the innermost part of the Schlei inlet and the bay of Haddebyer Noor.
Hedeby became a principal marketplace because of its geographical location on the major trade routes between the Frankish Empire and Scandinavia (north-south), and between the Baltic and the North Sea (east-west). Between 800 and 1000 the growing economic power of the Vikings led to its dramatic expansion as a major trading centre. Along with Birka and Schleswig, Hedeby's prominence as a major international trading hub served as a foundation of the Hanseatic League that would emerge by the 12th century.
The following indicates the importance achieved by the town:
A Swedish dynasty founded by Olof the Brash is said to have ruled Hedeby during the last decades of the 9th century and the first part of the 10th century. This was told to Adam of Bremen by the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson, and it is supported by three runestones found in Denmark. Two of them were raised by the mother of Olof's grandson Sigtrygg Gnupasson. The third runestone, discovered in 1796, is from Hedeby, the Stone of Eric (Swedish: Erikstenen). It is inscribed with Norwegian-Swedish runes. It is, however, possible that Danes also occasionally wrote with this version of the younger futhark.
Life was short and crowded in Hedeby. The small houses were clustered tightly together in a grid, with the east–west streets leading down to jetties in the harbour. People rarely lived beyond 30 or 40, and archaeological research shows that their later years were often painful due to crippling diseases such as tuberculosis.
Al-Tartushi, a late 10th-century traveller from al-Andalus, provides one of the most colourful and often quoted descriptions of life in Hedeby. Al-Tartushi was from Cordoba in Spain, which had a significantly more wealthy and comfortable lifestyle than Hedeby. While Hedeby may have been significant by Scandinavian standards, Al-Tartushi was unimpressed:
The town was sacked in 1050 by King Harald Hardrada of Norway during a conflict with King Sweyn II of Denmark. He set the town on fire by sending several burning ships into the harbour, the charred remains of which were found at the bottom of the Schlei during recent excavations. A Norwegian skald, quoted by Snorri Sturluson, describes the sack as follows:
In 1066 the town was sacked and burned by West Slavs. Following the destruction, Hedeby was slowly abandoned. People moved across the Schlei inlet, which separates the two peninsulas of Angeln and Schwansen, and founded the town of Schleswig.
After the settlement was abandoned, rising waters contributed to the complete disappearance of all visible structures on the site. It was even forgotten where the settlement had been. This proved to be fortunate for later archaeological work at the site.
Archaeological work began at the site in 1900 after the rediscovery of the settlement. Excavations were conducted for the next 15 years. Further excavations were carried out between 1930 and 1939. Archaeological work on the site was productive for two main reasons: that the site had never been built on since its destruction some 840 years earlier, and that the permanently waterlogged ground had preserved wood and other perishable materials. After the Second World War, in 1959, archaeological work was started again and has continued intermittently ever since. The embankments surrounding the settlement were excavated, and the harbour was partially dredged, during which the wreck of a Viking ship was discovered. Despite all this work, only 5% of the settlement (and only 1% of the harbour) has as yet been investigated.
The most important finds resulting from the excavations are now on display in the adjoining Haithabu Museum.
In 2005 an ambitious archaeological reconstruction program was initiated on the original site. Based on the results of archaeological analyses, exact copies of some of the original Viking houses have been rebuilt. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hedeby (Danish pronunciation: [ˈhe̝ːðəˌpyˀ], Old Norse Heiðabýr, German Haithabu) was an important Danish Viking Age (8th to the 11th centuries) trading settlement near the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula, now in the Schleswig-Flensburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Around 965, chronicler Abraham ben Jacob visited Hedeby and described it as, \"a very large city at the very end of the world's ocean.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The settlement developed as a trading centre at the head of a narrow, navigable inlet known as the Schlei, which connects to the Baltic Sea. The location was favorable because there is a short portage of less than 15 km to the Treene River, which flows into the Eider with its North Sea estuary, making it a convenient place where goods and ships could be pulled on a corduroy road overland for an almost uninterrupted seaway between the Baltic and the North Sea and avoid a dangerous and time-consuming circumnavigation of Jutland, providing Hedeby with a role similar to later Lübeck. Hedeby was the second largest Nordic town during the Viking Age, after Uppåkra in present-day southern Sweden. The city of Schleswig was later founded on the other side of the Schlei. Hedeby was abandoned after its destruction in 1066.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hedeby was rediscovered in the late 19th century and excavations began in 1900. The Hedeby Museum was opened next to the site in 1985. Because of its historical importance during the Viking Age and exceptional preservation, Hedeby and the nearby defensive earthworks of the Danevirke were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hedeby is mentioned in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Marsh King's Daughter.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Old Norse name Heiða-býr simply translates to \"heath-settlement\" (heiðr \"heath\" and býr = \"yard; settlement, village, town\"). The name is recorded in numerous spelling variants.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Sources from the 9th and 10th century AD also attest to the names Sliesthorp and Sliaswich (cf. -thorp vs. -wich), and the town of Schleswig still exists 3 km north of Hedeby. However, Æthelweard claimed in his Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the Saxons used Slesuuic and the Danes Haithaby to refer to the same town.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hedeby is first mentioned in the Frankish chronicles of Einhard (804) who was in the service of Charlemagne, but was probably founded around 770. In 808 the Danish king Godfred (Lat. Godofredus) destroyed a competing Slav trade centre named Reric, and it is recorded in the Frankish chronicles that he moved the merchants from there to Hedeby. This may have provided the initial impetus for the town to develop. The same sources record that Godfred strengthened the Danevirke, an earthen wall that stretched across the south of the Jutland peninsula. The Danevirke joined the defensive walls of Hedeby to form an east–west barrier across the peninsula, from the marshes in the west to the Schlei inlet leading into the Baltic in the east.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The town itself was surrounded on its three landward sides (north, west, and south) by earthworks. At the end of the 9th century the northern and southern parts of the town were abandoned for the central section. Later a 9-metre (29-ft) high semi-circular wall was erected to guard the western approaches to the town. On the eastern side, the town was bordered by the innermost part of the Schlei inlet and the bay of Haddebyer Noor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hedeby became a principal marketplace because of its geographical location on the major trade routes between the Frankish Empire and Scandinavia (north-south), and between the Baltic and the North Sea (east-west). Between 800 and 1000 the growing economic power of the Vikings led to its dramatic expansion as a major trading centre. Along with Birka and Schleswig, Hedeby's prominence as a major international trading hub served as a foundation of the Hanseatic League that would emerge by the 12th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The following indicates the importance achieved by the town:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A Swedish dynasty founded by Olof the Brash is said to have ruled Hedeby during the last decades of the 9th century and the first part of the 10th century. This was told to Adam of Bremen by the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson, and it is supported by three runestones found in Denmark. Two of them were raised by the mother of Olof's grandson Sigtrygg Gnupasson. The third runestone, discovered in 1796, is from Hedeby, the Stone of Eric (Swedish: Erikstenen). It is inscribed with Norwegian-Swedish runes. It is, however, possible that Danes also occasionally wrote with this version of the younger futhark.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Life was short and crowded in Hedeby. The small houses were clustered tightly together in a grid, with the east–west streets leading down to jetties in the harbour. People rarely lived beyond 30 or 40, and archaeological research shows that their later years were often painful due to crippling diseases such as tuberculosis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Al-Tartushi, a late 10th-century traveller from al-Andalus, provides one of the most colourful and often quoted descriptions of life in Hedeby. Al-Tartushi was from Cordoba in Spain, which had a significantly more wealthy and comfortable lifestyle than Hedeby. While Hedeby may have been significant by Scandinavian standards, Al-Tartushi was unimpressed:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The town was sacked in 1050 by King Harald Hardrada of Norway during a conflict with King Sweyn II of Denmark. He set the town on fire by sending several burning ships into the harbour, the charred remains of which were found at the bottom of the Schlei during recent excavations. A Norwegian skald, quoted by Snorri Sturluson, describes the sack as follows:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1066 the town was sacked and burned by West Slavs. Following the destruction, Hedeby was slowly abandoned. People moved across the Schlei inlet, which separates the two peninsulas of Angeln and Schwansen, and founded the town of Schleswig.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After the settlement was abandoned, rising waters contributed to the complete disappearance of all visible structures on the site. It was even forgotten where the settlement had been. This proved to be fortunate for later archaeological work at the site.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Archaeological work began at the site in 1900 after the rediscovery of the settlement. Excavations were conducted for the next 15 years. Further excavations were carried out between 1930 and 1939. Archaeological work on the site was productive for two main reasons: that the site had never been built on since its destruction some 840 years earlier, and that the permanently waterlogged ground had preserved wood and other perishable materials. After the Second World War, in 1959, archaeological work was started again and has continued intermittently ever since. The embankments surrounding the settlement were excavated, and the harbour was partially dredged, during which the wreck of a Viking ship was discovered. Despite all this work, only 5% of the settlement (and only 1% of the harbour) has as yet been investigated.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The most important finds resulting from the excavations are now on display in the adjoining Haithabu Museum.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2005 an ambitious archaeological reconstruction program was initiated on the original site. Based on the results of archaeological analyses, exact copies of some of the original Viking houses have been rebuilt.",
"title": "Archaeology"
}
]
| Hedeby was an important Danish Viking Age trading settlement near the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula, now in the Schleswig-Flensburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Around 965, chronicler Abraham ben Jacob visited Hedeby and described it as, "a very large city at the very end of the world's ocean." The settlement developed as a trading centre at the head of a narrow, navigable inlet known as the Schlei, which connects to the Baltic Sea. The location was favorable because there is a short portage of less than 15 km to the Treene River, which flows into the Eider with its North Sea estuary, making it a convenient place where goods and ships could be pulled on a corduroy road overland for an almost uninterrupted seaway between the Baltic and the North Sea and avoid a dangerous and time-consuming circumnavigation of Jutland, providing Hedeby with a role similar to later Lübeck. Hedeby was the second largest Nordic town during the Viking Age, after Uppåkra in present-day southern Sweden. The city of Schleswig was later founded on the other side of the Schlei. Hedeby was abandoned after its destruction in 1066. Hedeby was rediscovered in the late 19th century and excavations began in 1900. The Hedeby Museum was opened next to the site in 1985. Because of its historical importance during the Viking Age and exceptional preservation, Hedeby and the nearby defensive earthworks of the Danevirke were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018. Hedeby is mentioned in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Marsh King's Daughter. | 2001-11-13T07:17:49Z | 2023-12-11T22:29:55Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedeby |
14,131 | Hazaras | The Hazaras (Persian: هزاره, romanized: Həzārə; Hazaragi: آزره, romanized: Āzrə) are an ethnic group and a principal component of the population of Afghanistan, native to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. They are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan and primarily residing in the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan, as well as a significant minority groups mainly in Quetta, Pakistan and Mashhad, Iran. They speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of Persian. Dari, also known as Dari Persian, is the official language of Afghanistan.
Hazaras are considered to be one of the most persecuted groups in Afghanistan. More than half of the Hazara population was massacred by the Emirate of Afghanistan between 1888 and 1893, and their persecution has occurred various times across previous decades.
The etymology of the word "Hazara" remains disputed, but some have differing opinions on the term.
Despite being one of the principal population elements of Afghanistan, the origins of the Hazara people have not been fully reconstructed. However, due to genetic and linguistic analysis, Hazaras are described as an ethnically mixed ethnic group with Hazaras sharing varying degrees of ancestry with contemporary Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranic populations. Additionally, overall Hazaras share a common racial structure and physical appearance with the Turkic people of Central Asia.
Over the course of centuries, invading Mongol (Turco-Mongol) and Turkic invaders, notably, the Qara'unas, the Chagatai Turco-Mongols, the Ilkhanate, and the Timurids, merged with the local indigenous Turkic and Iranic populations. While academics agree that Hazaras are ultimately the result of a combination of several Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranic tribes, there is a dispute by some on what groups played the largest roles in this combination.
According to historian Lutfi Temirkhanov, the Mongolian detachments left in Afghanistan by Genghis Khan or his successors became the starting layer, the basis of the Hazara ethnogenesis. The participation of the Mongols in the ethnogenesis of the Hazaras is evidenced by linguistic data, historical sources, data on toponymy, as well as works on population genetics. Such scholars as Vasily Bartold, Ármin Vámbéry, Vadim Masson, Vadim Romodin, Ilya Petrushevsky, Allah Rakha, Fatima, Min-Sheng Peng, Atif Adan, Rui Bi, Memona Yasmin, Yong-Gang Yao wrote about the historical use of the Mongolian language by the Hazaras.
Genetically, the Hazara combine varying amounts of West Eurasian and East Eurasian derived components. Genetic data shows that the Hazaras of Afghanistan cluster closely with the Uzbek population of the country, while both groups are at a notable distance from Afghanistan's Tajik and Pashtun populations. There is evidence for both paternal and maternal relations to Iranian peoples, Turkic peoples and Mongolic peoples.
The frequency of ancestry components among the Hazaras vary according to tribal affiliation. They display high genetic affinity to present-day Turkic populations of Central Asia and East Asia. One analysis argues that the Hazaras are a Central Asian people, closely related to the Turkic populations of Central Asia, rather than Mongolians and East Asians or Indo-Iranians. In terms of their overall genetic makeup, around 49% of the Hazaras average gene pool is derived from East Asian sources, around 48% is derived from European-like sources, and around 0,17%, 0,47% and 2,30% is derived from African, Oceanian and Amerindian-like sources respectively. The Hazara can also be modeled as having 57,8% Mongolian-related ancestry, with the remainder (42,2%) being derived from local Iranian sources. The Hazaras genetic makeup is most similar to Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz populations.
The most common paternal DNA haplogroups of Hazaras from Afghanistan are the West Eurasian R1a and East Eurasian C-M217 clades, followed by West Eurasian J2-M172 and L-M20. Some Hazaras were also found to belong to the haplogroup R1a1a-M17, E1b1b1-M35, L-M20 and H-M69, which are shared with Tajiks, Pashtuns as well as Indian populations. One individual with haplogroup B-M60, normally found in Eastern Africa, was found as well.
Pakistani Hazara harbored high frequency of haplogroup C-M217 at c. 40% (10/25) and Haplogroup R1b at c. 32% (8/25). A relatively high frequency of R1b was also found in Eastern Russian Tatars and Bashkirs. All three groups are thought to be associated with the Golden Horde. Haplogroup C-M217, also known as C2, is the most frequent haplogroup in Kazakh and Mongol populations.
The Hazara share c. 35% maternal haplogroups with contemporary East Asian populations, while c. 65% is shared with West Eurasian populations. The Hazaras as a whole have mostly West Eurasian mtDNA.
The first mention of Hazaras is made by Babur in the early 16th century and later by the court historians of Shah Abbas of the Safavid dynasty. It is reported that they embraced Shia Islam between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, during the Safavid periods. Hazara men, along with those of other ethnic groups, were recruited to the army of Ahmad Shah Durrani in the 18th century.
During the second reign of Dost Mohammad Khan in the 19th century, Hazaras from Hazarajat began to be taxed for the first time. However, for the most part, they still managed to keep their regional autonomy until the 1892 Battle of Uruzgan and subsequent subjugation of Abdur Rahman Khan began in the late 19th century.
When the Treaty of Gandomak was signed and the Second Anglo-Afghan War ended in 1880, Abdur Rahman Khan set out a goal to bring Hazaristan, Turkistan and Kafiristan under his control. He launched several campaigns in Hazarajat due to resistance from the Hazaras in which his forces committed atrocities. The southern part of Hazarajat was spared as they accepted his rule, while the other parts of Hazarajat rejected Abdur Rahman and instead supported his uncle, Sher Ali Khan. In response to this Abdur Rahman waged a war against tribal leaders who rejected his policies and rule. This is known as the Hazara Uprisings.
These campaigns had a catastrophic impact on the demographics of Hazaras causing over sixty percent of the total Hazara population to be massacred with some being displaced and exiled from their own lands. The Hazara lands was distributed among loyalist villagers of nearby non-Hazaras. The repression after the uprising has been called genocide or ethnic cleansing in the history of modern Afghanistan.
After these massacres, Abdul Rahman Khan forced many Hazara families from the Hazara areas of Uruzgan and other parts of Hazarajat to leave their hometowns and ancestral lands. causing some many Hazaras fled to neighboring countries such as Central Asia, Iran, British India, Iraq and Syria. Those Hazaras living in the northern Hindu Kush went to Tsarist Russia, mostly in the southern cities of Russia, and some of them went to Iran. Many Hazaras living in the Tsarist Russian regions lost their language, accent and ethnic identity over time due to the similarities between the racial building and the physical appearance of the people of those regions, and they settled and gravitated among them. These fleeing Hazaras settled in previous Tsarist Russia regions, including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Dagestan. But the Hazaras in northwestern Afghanistan migrated to Iran and settled in neighborhoods in and around Mashhad. These Hazaras later became known as Khawari or Barbari. Another part of Hazaras from the southeast of the Hazara regions of Afghanistan has moved to British India, which resides in Quetta, present-day Pakistan. One of the most famous political and military figures of these Hazaras is Muhammad Musa Khan, who held the general's military rank in Pakistani system. Another group has settled in Syria, Iraq and British India. These Hazara people who migrated to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Iraq were unable to settle with the people of these areas because of the differences in physical appearance, so they have not lost their language, culture and ethnic identity.
In 1901, Habibullah Khan, Abdur Rahman's eldest son and successor granted amnesty to Hazaras and asked them to return who were exiled by his predecessor. But few of them returned and settled in Afghan Turkestan and Balkh province because they had lost their previous lands. Hazara continued to face social, economic and political discrimination through most of the 20th century. In 1933 Mohammed Nadir Shah the King of Afghanistan was assassinated by Abdul Khaliq Hazara, a school student. The Afghan government captured and executed him later, along with several of his family members.
Mistrust of the central government by the Hazaras and local uprisings continued. In particular, from 1945 to 1946, during Zahir Shah's rule, a revolt took place by the leadership of Ibrahim Khan most known as "Ibrahim Gawsawar" against new taxes that were exclusively imposed on Hazaras. The Kuchis meanwhile not only were exempted from taxes but also received allowances from the Afghan government. The angry rebels began capturing and killing government officials. In response, the central government sent a force to subdue the region and later removed the taxes.
The repressive policies of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) after the Saur Revolution in 1978 caused uprisings throughout the country. Fearing Iranian influence, the Hazaras were particularly persecuted. President Hafizullah Amin published in October 1979 a list of 12,000 victims of the Taraki government. Among them were 7,000 Hazaras who were shot in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison.
During the Soviet-Afghan War, the Hazarajat region did not see as much heavy fighting as other regions of Afghanistan. Most of the Hazara mujahideen fought the Soviets in the regions which were on the periphery of the Hazarajat region. There was a division between the Tanzeem Nasle Nau Hazara, a party based in Quetta, of Hazara nationalists and secular intellectuals, and the Islamist parties in Hazarajat. By 1979, the Hazara-Islamist groups had already liberated Hazarajat from the central Soviet-backed Afghan government and later took entire control of Hazarajat away from the secularists. By 1984, the Islamist dominance of Hazarajat was complete. As the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the Islamist groups felt the need to broaden their political appeal and turned their focus to Hazara nationalism. This led to the establishment of the Hizbe-Wahdat, an alliance of all the Hazara resistance groups (except the Harakat-e Islami). In 1992 with the fall of Kabul, the Harakat-e Islami took sides with Burhanuddin Rabbani's government while the Hizbe-Wahdat took sides with the opposition. The Hizbe-Wahdat was eventually forced out of Kabul in 1995 when the Taliban movement captured and killed their leader Abdul Ali Mazari. With the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996, all the Hazara groups united with the new Northern Alliance against the common new enemy. However, despite fierce resistance Hazarajat fell to the Taliban in 1998. The Taliban had Hazarajat isolated from the rest of the world going as far as not allowing the United Nations to deliver food to the provinces of Bamyan, Ghor, Maidan Wardak and Daykundi.
In 1997, a revolt broke out among Hazaras in Mazar-e Sharif when they refused to be disarmed by the Taliban; 600 Taliban were killed in subsequent fighting. In retaliation, the genocidal policies of Abdur Rahman Khan's era was adopted by the Taliban. In 1998, six thousand Hazaras were killed in the north; the intention was ethnic cleansing of Hazaras. In March 2001, the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, were also destroyed even though there was a lot of condemnation.
Hazaras have also played a significant role in the creation of Pakistan. One such Hazara was Qazi Muhammad Isa of the Sheikh Ali tribe, who had been close friends with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, having met each other for the first time while they were studying in London. He had been the first from his native province of Balochistan to obtain a Bar-at-Law degree and had helped set up the All-India Muslim League in Balochistan.
Though Hazaras played a role in the anti-Soviet movement, other Hazaras participated in the new communist government, which actively courted Afghan minorities. Sultan Ali Kishtmand, a Hazara, served as prime minister of Afghanistan from 1981 to 1990 (with one brief interruption in 1988). The Ismaili Hazara of Baghlan Province likewise supported the communists, and their pir (religious leader) Jaffar Naderi led a pro-Communist militia in the region.
During the years that followed, Hazara suffered severe oppression, and many ethnic massacres, genocides, and pogroms were carried out by the predominantly ethnic Pashtun Taliban and are documented by such groups as the Human Rights Watch.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, American and Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban many Hazaras became important figures in Afghanistan. Hazara have also pursued higher education, enrolled in the army, and many have top government positions. For example, Some Vice Presidents, ministers and governors were Hazara, including Karim Khalili, Sarwar Danish, Sima Samar, Muhammad Mohaqiq, Habiba Sarābi, Abdul Haq Shafaq, Sayed Anwar Rahmati, Qurban Ali Urozgani, Muhammad Arif Shah Jahan, Mahmoud Baligh, Mohammad Eqbal Munib and Mohammad Asim Asim. The mayor of Nili, Daykundi was Azra Jafari, who became the first female mayor in Afghanistan. Some other notable Hazaras include Sultan Ali Keshtmand, Abdul Wahed Sarābi, Akram Yari, Ghulam Ali Wahdat, Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, Ghulam Husain Naseri, Abbas Noyan, Daoud Naji, Abbas Ibrahim Zada, Ramazan Bashardost, Ahmad Shah Ramazan, Ahmad Behzad, Nasrullah Sadiqi Zada Nili, Fahim Hashimy, Maryam Monsef and others.
Although Afghanistan has been historically one of the poorest countries in the world, the Hazarajat region has been kept less developed by past governments. Since the ousting of the Taliban in late 2001, billions of dollars poured into Afghanistan for reconstruction and several large-scale reconstruction projects took place in Afghanistan from August 2012. For example, there have been more than 5000 kilometers of road pavement completed across Afghanistan, of which little was done in central Afghanistan (Hazarajat). On the other hand, the Band-e Amir in Bamyan Province became the first national park in Afghanistan. A road from Kabul to Bamyan was also built, along with new police stations, government institutions, hospitals and schools in the provinces of Bamyan, Daykundi and others mostly Hazara-populated provinces. The first ski resort in Afghanistan was also established in Bamyan Province.
Discrimination indicates that Kuchis (Pashtun nomads who have historically been migrating from region to region depending on the season) are allowed to use Hazarajat pastures during the summer season. It is believed that allowing the Kuchis to use some of the grazing lands in Hazarajat began during the rule of Abdur Rahman Khan. Living in mountainous Hazarajat, where little farmland exists, Hazara people rely on these pasture lands for their livelihood during the long and harsh winters. In 2007 some Kuchi nomads entered into parts of Hazarajat to graze their livestock, and when the local Hazara resisted, a clash took place and several people on both sides died using assault rifles. Such events continue to occur, even after the central government was forced to intervene, including President Hamid Karzai. In late July 2012, a Hazara police commander in Uruzgan province reportedly rounded up and killed 9 Pashtun civilians in revenge for the death of two local Hazara. The matter is being investigated by the Afghan government.
The drive by President Hamid Karzai after the Peace Jirga to strike a deal with Taliban leaders caused deep unease in Afghanistan's minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule. The leaders of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, vowed to resist any return of the Taliban to power, referring to the large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians during the Taliban period.
Following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, which ended the war in Afghanistan, concerns were raised as to whether the Taliban would reimpose the persecution of Hazaras as in the 1990s. An academic at Melbourne's La Trobe University said that "The Hazaras are very fearful that the Taliban will likely be reinstating the policies of the 1990s" despite Taliban reassurances that they will not revert to the bad old ways of the 1990s.
Some sources claim that Hazaras comprise about 20 to 30 percent of the total population of Afghanistan. They were by far the largest ethnic group in the past, in 1888–1893 Uprisings of Hazaras over sixty percent of them were massacred with some being displaced and meanwhile, they also lost a large part of their territory to non-Hazaras that could double their land size today.
The Hazaras are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, primarily residing in the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan and generally scattered throughout Afghanistan.
Until the 1880s, the Hazaras were completely autonomous and controlled the entire Hazaristan region. Nowadays, the vast majority of Hazaras reside in Hazaristan and many others reside in the cities of the country.
After the massacre and genocide of the Hazaras by Abdur Rahman in 1888–1893, many Hazaras migrated to Central Asia regions under the occupation of Tsarist Russia, such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, and some of them settled mostly in Samarkand and Bukhara. Over time, a large number of Hazaras living in the regions of Tsarist Russia lost their accent, language and ethnic identity due to the similarities of their racial structure and appearance with the people of those regions and were assimilated among them.
During the period of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century, Hazaras worked during the winter months in coal mines, road construction, and other working-class jobs in some cities of what is now Pakistan. The earliest record of Hazara in the areas of Pakistan is found in Broadfoot's Sappers company from 1835 in Quetta. This company had also participated in the First Anglo-Afghan War. Some Hazara also worked on the agriculture farms in Sindh and the construction of the Sukkur barrage. In 1962, the government of Pakistan recognized the Hazaras as one of the ethnic groups of Pakistan.
Most Pakistani Hazaras today live in the city of Quetta, in Balochistan, Pakistan. Localities in the city of Quetta with prominent Hazara populations include Hazara Town and Mehr Abad and Hazara tribes such as the Sardar are exclusively Pakistani. The literacy level among the Hazara community in Pakistan is relatively high compared to the Hazaras of Afghanistan, and they have integrated well into the social dynamics of the local society. Saira Batool, a Hazara woman, was one of the first female pilots in the Pakistan Air Force. Other notable Hazaras include Qazi Muhammad Isa, General Muhammad Musa Khan, who served as the 4th Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army from 1958 to 1968, Air Marshal Sharbat Ali Changezi, whose years of service in the Pakistan Air Force were from 1949 to 1987, Hussain Ali Yousafi, the slain chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, Sayed Nasir Ali Shah, MNA from Quetta and his father Haji Sayed Hussain Hazara who was a senator and member of Pakistan Parliament during the Zia-ul-Haq era.
Despite all of this, Hazaras are often targeted by militant groups such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and others. "Activists say at least 800-1,000 Hazaras have been killed since 1999 and the pace is quickening. More than one hundred have been murdered in and around Quetta since January, according to Human Rights Watch." The political representation of the community is served by Hazara Democratic Party, a secular liberal democratic party, headed by Abdul Khaliq Hazara.
The Hazara people in Iran are also referred to as Barbari (Persian: بربری), or Khāwari (خاوری). Over many years as a result of political unrest in Afghanistan, some Hazaras have migrated to Iran. The local Hazara population has been estimated at 500,000 people including Afghan immigrants. At least one-third have spent more than half their life in Iran. Before the separation of Afghanistan from Iran according to the Treaty of Paris in 1857 during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah, Greater Khorasan covered a part of the west of this land and various tribes or ethnic groups lived in it. One of these tribes was the Hazaras. This tribe, who settled on both sides of the border after drawing the border line between Iran and Afghanistan, has played many roles in the contemporary history of Khorasan province and especially Mashhad. The leadership of this tribe at the end of the Qajar period and also the Pahlavi period was with Muhammad Yusuf Khan Hazara known as "Sulat al-Sultanah Hazara", a Sunni Hazara who was a politician and the first Sunni representative member in the Iranian Parliament and the only Sunni Iranian who has represented Mashhad in the history of Iran's legislatures.
The Attarwala claim to be Hazara who mainly inhabitant in the state of Gujarat, India, descended from a group of Mughal soldiers who were initially settled in Agra, during the rule of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. According to their recorded documents, they then migrated to Ahmedabad via Gwalior, Ratlam and Godhra. This migration followed their participation in the community in the 1857 Indian War Independence. Once settled in Gujarat, India, the community took up the occupation of manufacturing perfumes known as ittars. The word attarwala means the manufacturer of perfumes. A second migration took place in 1947 from Agra, after the partition of India, with some members immigrating to Pakistan, while others joining their co-ethnics in Ahmedabad.
Alessandro Monsutti argues, in his recent anthropological book, that migration is the traditional way of life of the Hazara people, referring to the seasonal and historical migrations which have never ceased and do not seem to be dictated only by emergencies such as war. Due to the decades of war in Afghanistan and the sectarian violence in Pakistan, many Hazaras left their communities and have settled in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and particularly the Northern European countries such as Sweden and Denmark. Some go to these countries as exchange students while others through human smuggling, which sometimes costs them their lives. Since 2001, about 1,000 people have died in the ocean while trying to reach Australia by boats from Indonesia. Many of these were Hazaras. The notable case was the Tampa affair in which a shipload of refugees, mostly Hazaras, was rescued by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa and subsequently sent to Nauru.
Hazara culture is a combination of customs, traditions, behaviors, beliefs and norms that have been formed in interaction and confrontation with the surrounding phenomena for many years and now it is displayed as a cultural identity. The Hazara culture is rich in heritage, with many unique cultures, and has common influences with various cultures of Central Asia and South Asia. The Hazaras, outside of Hazarajat, have adopted the cultures of the cities where they dwell, resembling the cultures and traditions of the Afghan Tajiks and Pashtuns. Traditionally the Hazara are highland farmers. In Hazarajat, they have retained many of their own cultures and traditions and many of their cultures and traditions are more closely related to those of Central Asians than to those of the Afghan Tajiks. Historically and traditionally, Hazaras live in houses, but some of them such as Aimaq Hazara and a few other are semi-nomadic and live mostly in felt yurts, rather than houses.
Hazara clothing have an important and special role in supporting the cultural, traditional and social identity of the Hazara ethnicity. Hazara clothes are produced manually and by machine; In Afghanistan these types of clothes are sewn in most parts of the country, especially in central provinces of Afghanistan.
Hazara men traditionally wear barak, also called barag, and hat. Barak is one of the important components of Hazara people's clothing. Barak is a kind of soft, sticky and thick piece made from the first wool of lambs of special sheep that are raised in Hazarajat, provided. In addition to being a very acceptable, stylish, and regal clothe, the Hazara barak is also a warm winter that is resistant to moisture and does not get wet easily in snow and rain. Also, barak has a special property and softness, it reduces muscle pains and is also healing for joint pains. Nowadays, the most common clothes among Hazara men is the perahan o tunban and sometimes with a hat or a turban.
The traditional clothing of Hazara women includes a pleated skirt with a tunban or undergarment. The lower tunbans are made of fabrics such as flowered chits and the upper skirts are made of better fabrics such as velvet or zari and net and have a border or decoration at the bottom. The women's shirt is calf-length, close-collared, and long-sleeved, and has slits on both sides that are placed on the skirts, which are admired for their completeness in the Islamic set. Hazara women's clothing has certain characteristics according to their social, economic, and age conditions. The clothes of young Hazara women are made of different fabrics in different colors and happy designs with beautiful and colorful chador, but older women prefer dark-colored fabrics with simple black and white designs. Hazara women's chador or head cover is often decorated with ornaments that is often silver or gold, and sometimes with a hat. The ornaments on the clothe is silver or gold necklace with colorful beads, buttons, bangles and silver or gold bracelets.
Hazaras traditionally wear headgear or hats, which are of different types for men and women. There are different types of Hazara hats and caps, some of which are made from animal skin and some from barak. Also some Hazara men wear the turban of Khorasan.
The Hazara cuisine is strongly influenced by Central Asian, South Asian and Persian cuisines. However, there are special foods, cooking methods and different cooking styles that are specific to them. They have a hospitable dining etiquette. In their culture, it is customary to prepare special food for guests.
The Hazaras speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of the Persian language.
The Hazara people in Hazaristan region speak the Hazaragi dialect of Persian, which is infused with many Turkic and a few Mongolic words. According to Atif Adnan, the Hazara population speaks Persian with some Mongolian words. The primary differences between Persian and Hazaragi are the accent. Despite these differences, Hazaragi is mutually intelligible with Dari, the official language of Afghanistan.
According to Doctor of Sciences Lutfi Temirkhanov, the ancestors of the Hazaras were Mongol-speaking and only after the resettlement, they mixed with the Persian-speaking and Turkic-speaking population: "hordes of Mongol princes and feudal lords found themselves in a Persian-speaking encirclement; they mixed with them, were influenced by the Persian-Tajik culture and gradually adopted the Persian language". According to a number of sources, in the 16th century the Mongolian language was widespread among the Hazaras. According to some, Turkic and Mongolic words make up about 20% of the vocabulary of Hazaragi dialect.
Hazaras predominantly practice Islam, mostly the Shi'a, with a significant and almost a large Sunni, some Isma'ili and Non-denominational Islam. The majority of Afghanistan's population practices Sunni Islam; this may have contributed to the discrimination against them.
There is no single theory about the acceptance of the Shi'a Islam by the majority of Hazaras. Probably most of them accepted Shi'a Islam during the first part of the 16th century, in the early days of the Safavid dynasty.
A significant and almost a large population of Hazara people are Sunni Muslims. Sunni Hazaras have been Sunni since long ago and before the occupation of Hazara lands by Abdul Rahman, but some of them were converted from Shia to Sunni Islam after the occupation of Hazara lands by Abdul Rahman and 1888–1893 Hazara uprisings. In Afghanistan, they inhabit in different provinces such as Kabul, Baghlan, Badghis, Ghor, Kunduz, Panjshir, Bamyan, Badakhshan, Parwan, and in some other regions of Afghanistan.
A Sunni Hazara, Sher Muhammad Khan Hazara, the chieftain of the Hazaras of Qala e Naw, Badghis province and a warlord who participant in the Sunni coalition that defended Herat in 1837. Also, one of the defeaters of British forces around Qandahar and Maiwand desert during the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838–1842.
Isma'ili Hazaras mainly live in provinces of Kabul, Parwan, Baghlan and Bamyan. And their smaller groups live in Maidan Wardak, Samangan, Zabul, and... The Isma'ili Hazaras have always been kept separate from the rest of the Hazaras on account of religious beliefs and political purposes.
The Hazara people have been organized by various tribes. Some overarching Hazara tribes are Sheikh Ali, Jaghori, Jaghatu, Qara Baghi, Ghaznichi, Muhammad Khwaja, Behsudi, Daimirdadi, Turkmani, Uruzgani, Daikundi, Daizangi, Daichopan, Daizinyat, Naiman, Qarlugh, Aimaq Hazara, and others. The different tribes come from Hazaristan (Hazara regions), such as Parwan, Bamyan, Ghazni, Ghor, Uruzgan, Daikundi, Maidan Wardak, and... have spread outwards from Hazaristan (main region) in other parts of Afghanistan, and also in other Hazara-populated areas.
Some well-known Hazara writers and poets include Faiz Muhammad Kateb, Amir Khosrow Dehlavi, Ismael Balkhi, Hassan Poladi, Kazim Yazdani, Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, Kamran Mir Hazar, Basir Ahang, Sayed Askar Mousavi, Ali Baba Taj, Sayed Abutalib Mozaffari, Rahnaward Zaryab, Aziz Royesh and so on.
Many Hazara musicians are widely hailed as being skilled in playing the dambura, a native, regional lute instrument similarly found in other Central Asian nations, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Some of the famous Hazara musician and dambura players are, such as Sarwar Sarkhosh, Dawood Sarkhosh, Safdar Tawakoli, Sayed Anwar Azad and others. In Hazara dambura sometimes revolutionary hymns are very common. The first singer who started singing revolutionary hymns on dambura was Sarwar Sarkhosh, and his main message was the uprising of the young generation and the fight against oppression. Also Ghaychak a field instruments in music that is usually played like a fiddle. The resonance bowl is made of walnuts or berries and its wires are metal which is one of the stringed instruments in Hazara music.
Hazara cinema artists have no older background, but nowadays some of their famous actors and actresses include Hussain Sadiqi, Abid Ali Nazish, Shamila Shirzad, Nikbakht Noruz and others.
Many Hazaras engaged in varieties of sports, including football, volleyball, wrestling, martial arts, boxing, karate, taekwondo, judo, wushu, Jujitsu, Cricket, Tennis, and more. Pahlawan Ebrahim Khedri, a 62 kg wrestler, was the national champion for two decades in Afghanistan. Another famous Hazara wrestler, Wakil Hussain Allahdad, was killed in the 22 April 2018 Kabul suicide bombing in Dashte Barchi, Kabul.
Rohullah Nikpai, won a bronze medal in Taekwondo at the Beijing Olympics 2008, beating world champion Juan Antonio Ramos of Spain 4–1 in a play-off final. It was Afghanistan's first-ever Olympic medal. He then won a second Olympic medal for Afghanistan in the London 2012 games.
Another notable Hazara athlete Sayed Abdul Jalil Waiz was the first ever badminton player representing Afghanistan in the Asian Junior Championships in 2005, where he produced the first win for his country against Iraq, with 15–13, 15–1. He participated in several international championships since 2005 and achieved victories against Australia, the Philippines and Mongolia. Hamid Rahimi, a Hazara boxer from Afghanistan who lives in Germany. Hussain Sadiqi, a Hazara Australian martial artist who won an award for the best fight scene for an Australian made action movie.
Hazara football players are Zohib Islam Amiri, who is currently playing for the Afghanistan national football team, Moshtaq Yaqoubi an Afghan-Finnish footballer who plays for HIFK, Mustafa Amini, a Hazara Australian footballer who plays as a midfielder for Danish Superliga club AGF and the Australian national team, Rahmat Akbari an Australian footballer who plays as a midfielder for Brisbane Roar, and others like Rohullah Iqbalzada, Omran Haydary, Zelfy Nazary, Moshtaq Ahmadi, and Zahra Mahmoodi.
Some Hazara from Pakistan have also excelled in sports and have received numerous awards, particularly in boxing, football and field hockey.
Pakistani Hazara Abrar Hussain, a former Olympic boxer served as deputy director-general of the Pakistan Sports Board. He represented Pakistan three times at the Olympics and won a gold medal at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing. Another Hazara boxer from Pakistan is Haider Ali a Commonwealth Games gold medalist and Olympian who is currently retired.
Former captain of the Pakistan national football team Qayyum Changezi was the second Pakistani footballer to score a hat trick in an international game. New Hazara youngsters are seen to appear in football in Pakistan mostly from Quetta, such as Muhammad Ali and Rajab Ali Hazara.
Another is Kulsoom Hazara, a Pakistani female karate champion who has won several gold, silver and bronze medals on national and international stages, including Pride of Pakistan Award. Other karateka Hazaras include Nargis Hameedullah who became the first Pakistani woman to win an individual medal (a bronze) at the Asian Games karate championship, and Shahida Abbasi.
Cultural sports of Hazara people are those sports that have been inherited from their ancestors for generations.
Buzkashi is a Central Asian sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. It is the national sport in Afghanistan and is one of the cultural sports of the Hazara people and they still practice this sport in Afghanistan.
Tirandāzi is a kind of archery and an old cultural sport of Hazaras.
Pahlawani or Kushti is a kind of cultural wrestling sport that is performed by Hazaras. Pahlawani has a long history in Afghanistan and among the Hazaras. In Afghanistan, on holidays, Pahlawani fields are set up. Pahlawani is held in different age groups. This cultural sport has its special techniques. Because this sport is very ancient and familiar, it has been continued from generation to generation among the Hazaras. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Hazaras (Persian: هزاره, romanized: Həzārə; Hazaragi: آزره, romanized: Āzrə) are an ethnic group and a principal component of the population of Afghanistan, native to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. They are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan and primarily residing in the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan, as well as a significant minority groups mainly in Quetta, Pakistan and Mashhad, Iran. They speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of Persian. Dari, also known as Dari Persian, is the official language of Afghanistan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hazaras are considered to be one of the most persecuted groups in Afghanistan. More than half of the Hazara population was massacred by the Emirate of Afghanistan between 1888 and 1893, and their persecution has occurred various times across previous decades.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The etymology of the word \"Hazara\" remains disputed, but some have differing opinions on the term.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Despite being one of the principal population elements of Afghanistan, the origins of the Hazara people have not been fully reconstructed. However, due to genetic and linguistic analysis, Hazaras are described as an ethnically mixed ethnic group with Hazaras sharing varying degrees of ancestry with contemporary Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranic populations. Additionally, overall Hazaras share a common racial structure and physical appearance with the Turkic people of Central Asia.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Over the course of centuries, invading Mongol (Turco-Mongol) and Turkic invaders, notably, the Qara'unas, the Chagatai Turco-Mongols, the Ilkhanate, and the Timurids, merged with the local indigenous Turkic and Iranic populations. While academics agree that Hazaras are ultimately the result of a combination of several Turkic, Mongolic, and Iranic tribes, there is a dispute by some on what groups played the largest roles in this combination.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to historian Lutfi Temirkhanov, the Mongolian detachments left in Afghanistan by Genghis Khan or his successors became the starting layer, the basis of the Hazara ethnogenesis. The participation of the Mongols in the ethnogenesis of the Hazaras is evidenced by linguistic data, historical sources, data on toponymy, as well as works on population genetics. Such scholars as Vasily Bartold, Ármin Vámbéry, Vadim Masson, Vadim Romodin, Ilya Petrushevsky, Allah Rakha, Fatima, Min-Sheng Peng, Atif Adan, Rui Bi, Memona Yasmin, Yong-Gang Yao wrote about the historical use of the Mongolian language by the Hazaras.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Genetically, the Hazara combine varying amounts of West Eurasian and East Eurasian derived components. Genetic data shows that the Hazaras of Afghanistan cluster closely with the Uzbek population of the country, while both groups are at a notable distance from Afghanistan's Tajik and Pashtun populations. There is evidence for both paternal and maternal relations to Iranian peoples, Turkic peoples and Mongolic peoples.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The frequency of ancestry components among the Hazaras vary according to tribal affiliation. They display high genetic affinity to present-day Turkic populations of Central Asia and East Asia. One analysis argues that the Hazaras are a Central Asian people, closely related to the Turkic populations of Central Asia, rather than Mongolians and East Asians or Indo-Iranians. In terms of their overall genetic makeup, around 49% of the Hazaras average gene pool is derived from East Asian sources, around 48% is derived from European-like sources, and around 0,17%, 0,47% and 2,30% is derived from African, Oceanian and Amerindian-like sources respectively. The Hazara can also be modeled as having 57,8% Mongolian-related ancestry, with the remainder (42,2%) being derived from local Iranian sources. The Hazaras genetic makeup is most similar to Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz populations.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The most common paternal DNA haplogroups of Hazaras from Afghanistan are the West Eurasian R1a and East Eurasian C-M217 clades, followed by West Eurasian J2-M172 and L-M20. Some Hazaras were also found to belong to the haplogroup R1a1a-M17, E1b1b1-M35, L-M20 and H-M69, which are shared with Tajiks, Pashtuns as well as Indian populations. One individual with haplogroup B-M60, normally found in Eastern Africa, was found as well.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Pakistani Hazara harbored high frequency of haplogroup C-M217 at c. 40% (10/25) and Haplogroup R1b at c. 32% (8/25). A relatively high frequency of R1b was also found in Eastern Russian Tatars and Bashkirs. All three groups are thought to be associated with the Golden Horde. Haplogroup C-M217, also known as C2, is the most frequent haplogroup in Kazakh and Mongol populations.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Hazara share c. 35% maternal haplogroups with contemporary East Asian populations, while c. 65% is shared with West Eurasian populations. The Hazaras as a whole have mostly West Eurasian mtDNA.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The first mention of Hazaras is made by Babur in the early 16th century and later by the court historians of Shah Abbas of the Safavid dynasty. It is reported that they embraced Shia Islam between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, during the Safavid periods. Hazara men, along with those of other ethnic groups, were recruited to the army of Ahmad Shah Durrani in the 18th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "During the second reign of Dost Mohammad Khan in the 19th century, Hazaras from Hazarajat began to be taxed for the first time. However, for the most part, they still managed to keep their regional autonomy until the 1892 Battle of Uruzgan and subsequent subjugation of Abdur Rahman Khan began in the late 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When the Treaty of Gandomak was signed and the Second Anglo-Afghan War ended in 1880, Abdur Rahman Khan set out a goal to bring Hazaristan, Turkistan and Kafiristan under his control. He launched several campaigns in Hazarajat due to resistance from the Hazaras in which his forces committed atrocities. The southern part of Hazarajat was spared as they accepted his rule, while the other parts of Hazarajat rejected Abdur Rahman and instead supported his uncle, Sher Ali Khan. In response to this Abdur Rahman waged a war against tribal leaders who rejected his policies and rule. This is known as the Hazara Uprisings.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "These campaigns had a catastrophic impact on the demographics of Hazaras causing over sixty percent of the total Hazara population to be massacred with some being displaced and exiled from their own lands. The Hazara lands was distributed among loyalist villagers of nearby non-Hazaras. The repression after the uprising has been called genocide or ethnic cleansing in the history of modern Afghanistan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After these massacres, Abdul Rahman Khan forced many Hazara families from the Hazara areas of Uruzgan and other parts of Hazarajat to leave their hometowns and ancestral lands. causing some many Hazaras fled to neighboring countries such as Central Asia, Iran, British India, Iraq and Syria. Those Hazaras living in the northern Hindu Kush went to Tsarist Russia, mostly in the southern cities of Russia, and some of them went to Iran. Many Hazaras living in the Tsarist Russian regions lost their language, accent and ethnic identity over time due to the similarities between the racial building and the physical appearance of the people of those regions, and they settled and gravitated among them. These fleeing Hazaras settled in previous Tsarist Russia regions, including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Dagestan. But the Hazaras in northwestern Afghanistan migrated to Iran and settled in neighborhoods in and around Mashhad. These Hazaras later became known as Khawari or Barbari. Another part of Hazaras from the southeast of the Hazara regions of Afghanistan has moved to British India, which resides in Quetta, present-day Pakistan. One of the most famous political and military figures of these Hazaras is Muhammad Musa Khan, who held the general's military rank in Pakistani system. Another group has settled in Syria, Iraq and British India. These Hazara people who migrated to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Iraq were unable to settle with the people of these areas because of the differences in physical appearance, so they have not lost their language, culture and ethnic identity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1901, Habibullah Khan, Abdur Rahman's eldest son and successor granted amnesty to Hazaras and asked them to return who were exiled by his predecessor. But few of them returned and settled in Afghan Turkestan and Balkh province because they had lost their previous lands. Hazara continued to face social, economic and political discrimination through most of the 20th century. In 1933 Mohammed Nadir Shah the King of Afghanistan was assassinated by Abdul Khaliq Hazara, a school student. The Afghan government captured and executed him later, along with several of his family members.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Mistrust of the central government by the Hazaras and local uprisings continued. In particular, from 1945 to 1946, during Zahir Shah's rule, a revolt took place by the leadership of Ibrahim Khan most known as \"Ibrahim Gawsawar\" against new taxes that were exclusively imposed on Hazaras. The Kuchis meanwhile not only were exempted from taxes but also received allowances from the Afghan government. The angry rebels began capturing and killing government officials. In response, the central government sent a force to subdue the region and later removed the taxes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The repressive policies of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) after the Saur Revolution in 1978 caused uprisings throughout the country. Fearing Iranian influence, the Hazaras were particularly persecuted. President Hafizullah Amin published in October 1979 a list of 12,000 victims of the Taraki government. Among them were 7,000 Hazaras who were shot in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During the Soviet-Afghan War, the Hazarajat region did not see as much heavy fighting as other regions of Afghanistan. Most of the Hazara mujahideen fought the Soviets in the regions which were on the periphery of the Hazarajat region. There was a division between the Tanzeem Nasle Nau Hazara, a party based in Quetta, of Hazara nationalists and secular intellectuals, and the Islamist parties in Hazarajat. By 1979, the Hazara-Islamist groups had already liberated Hazarajat from the central Soviet-backed Afghan government and later took entire control of Hazarajat away from the secularists. By 1984, the Islamist dominance of Hazarajat was complete. As the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the Islamist groups felt the need to broaden their political appeal and turned their focus to Hazara nationalism. This led to the establishment of the Hizbe-Wahdat, an alliance of all the Hazara resistance groups (except the Harakat-e Islami). In 1992 with the fall of Kabul, the Harakat-e Islami took sides with Burhanuddin Rabbani's government while the Hizbe-Wahdat took sides with the opposition. The Hizbe-Wahdat was eventually forced out of Kabul in 1995 when the Taliban movement captured and killed their leader Abdul Ali Mazari. With the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996, all the Hazara groups united with the new Northern Alliance against the common new enemy. However, despite fierce resistance Hazarajat fell to the Taliban in 1998. The Taliban had Hazarajat isolated from the rest of the world going as far as not allowing the United Nations to deliver food to the provinces of Bamyan, Ghor, Maidan Wardak and Daykundi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1997, a revolt broke out among Hazaras in Mazar-e Sharif when they refused to be disarmed by the Taliban; 600 Taliban were killed in subsequent fighting. In retaliation, the genocidal policies of Abdur Rahman Khan's era was adopted by the Taliban. In 1998, six thousand Hazaras were killed in the north; the intention was ethnic cleansing of Hazaras. In March 2001, the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, were also destroyed even though there was a lot of condemnation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hazaras have also played a significant role in the creation of Pakistan. One such Hazara was Qazi Muhammad Isa of the Sheikh Ali tribe, who had been close friends with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, having met each other for the first time while they were studying in London. He had been the first from his native province of Balochistan to obtain a Bar-at-Law degree and had helped set up the All-India Muslim League in Balochistan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Though Hazaras played a role in the anti-Soviet movement, other Hazaras participated in the new communist government, which actively courted Afghan minorities. Sultan Ali Kishtmand, a Hazara, served as prime minister of Afghanistan from 1981 to 1990 (with one brief interruption in 1988). The Ismaili Hazara of Baghlan Province likewise supported the communists, and their pir (religious leader) Jaffar Naderi led a pro-Communist militia in the region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "During the years that followed, Hazara suffered severe oppression, and many ethnic massacres, genocides, and pogroms were carried out by the predominantly ethnic Pashtun Taliban and are documented by such groups as the Human Rights Watch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, American and Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban many Hazaras became important figures in Afghanistan. Hazara have also pursued higher education, enrolled in the army, and many have top government positions. For example, Some Vice Presidents, ministers and governors were Hazara, including Karim Khalili, Sarwar Danish, Sima Samar, Muhammad Mohaqiq, Habiba Sarābi, Abdul Haq Shafaq, Sayed Anwar Rahmati, Qurban Ali Urozgani, Muhammad Arif Shah Jahan, Mahmoud Baligh, Mohammad Eqbal Munib and Mohammad Asim Asim. The mayor of Nili, Daykundi was Azra Jafari, who became the first female mayor in Afghanistan. Some other notable Hazaras include Sultan Ali Keshtmand, Abdul Wahed Sarābi, Akram Yari, Ghulam Ali Wahdat, Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, Ghulam Husain Naseri, Abbas Noyan, Daoud Naji, Abbas Ibrahim Zada, Ramazan Bashardost, Ahmad Shah Ramazan, Ahmad Behzad, Nasrullah Sadiqi Zada Nili, Fahim Hashimy, Maryam Monsef and others.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although Afghanistan has been historically one of the poorest countries in the world, the Hazarajat region has been kept less developed by past governments. Since the ousting of the Taliban in late 2001, billions of dollars poured into Afghanistan for reconstruction and several large-scale reconstruction projects took place in Afghanistan from August 2012. For example, there have been more than 5000 kilometers of road pavement completed across Afghanistan, of which little was done in central Afghanistan (Hazarajat). On the other hand, the Band-e Amir in Bamyan Province became the first national park in Afghanistan. A road from Kabul to Bamyan was also built, along with new police stations, government institutions, hospitals and schools in the provinces of Bamyan, Daykundi and others mostly Hazara-populated provinces. The first ski resort in Afghanistan was also established in Bamyan Province.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Discrimination indicates that Kuchis (Pashtun nomads who have historically been migrating from region to region depending on the season) are allowed to use Hazarajat pastures during the summer season. It is believed that allowing the Kuchis to use some of the grazing lands in Hazarajat began during the rule of Abdur Rahman Khan. Living in mountainous Hazarajat, where little farmland exists, Hazara people rely on these pasture lands for their livelihood during the long and harsh winters. In 2007 some Kuchi nomads entered into parts of Hazarajat to graze their livestock, and when the local Hazara resisted, a clash took place and several people on both sides died using assault rifles. Such events continue to occur, even after the central government was forced to intervene, including President Hamid Karzai. In late July 2012, a Hazara police commander in Uruzgan province reportedly rounded up and killed 9 Pashtun civilians in revenge for the death of two local Hazara. The matter is being investigated by the Afghan government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The drive by President Hamid Karzai after the Peace Jirga to strike a deal with Taliban leaders caused deep unease in Afghanistan's minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule. The leaders of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, vowed to resist any return of the Taliban to power, referring to the large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians during the Taliban period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, which ended the war in Afghanistan, concerns were raised as to whether the Taliban would reimpose the persecution of Hazaras as in the 1990s. An academic at Melbourne's La Trobe University said that \"The Hazaras are very fearful that the Taliban will likely be reinstating the policies of the 1990s\" despite Taliban reassurances that they will not revert to the bad old ways of the 1990s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Some sources claim that Hazaras comprise about 20 to 30 percent of the total population of Afghanistan. They were by far the largest ethnic group in the past, in 1888–1893 Uprisings of Hazaras over sixty percent of them were massacred with some being displaced and meanwhile, they also lost a large part of their territory to non-Hazaras that could double their land size today.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Hazaras are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, primarily residing in the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan and generally scattered throughout Afghanistan.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Until the 1880s, the Hazaras were completely autonomous and controlled the entire Hazaristan region. Nowadays, the vast majority of Hazaras reside in Hazaristan and many others reside in the cities of the country.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "After the massacre and genocide of the Hazaras by Abdur Rahman in 1888–1893, many Hazaras migrated to Central Asia regions under the occupation of Tsarist Russia, such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, and some of them settled mostly in Samarkand and Bukhara. Over time, a large number of Hazaras living in the regions of Tsarist Russia lost their accent, language and ethnic identity due to the similarities of their racial structure and appearance with the people of those regions and were assimilated among them.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During the period of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century, Hazaras worked during the winter months in coal mines, road construction, and other working-class jobs in some cities of what is now Pakistan. The earliest record of Hazara in the areas of Pakistan is found in Broadfoot's Sappers company from 1835 in Quetta. This company had also participated in the First Anglo-Afghan War. Some Hazara also worked on the agriculture farms in Sindh and the construction of the Sukkur barrage. In 1962, the government of Pakistan recognized the Hazaras as one of the ethnic groups of Pakistan.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Most Pakistani Hazaras today live in the city of Quetta, in Balochistan, Pakistan. Localities in the city of Quetta with prominent Hazara populations include Hazara Town and Mehr Abad and Hazara tribes such as the Sardar are exclusively Pakistani. The literacy level among the Hazara community in Pakistan is relatively high compared to the Hazaras of Afghanistan, and they have integrated well into the social dynamics of the local society. Saira Batool, a Hazara woman, was one of the first female pilots in the Pakistan Air Force. Other notable Hazaras include Qazi Muhammad Isa, General Muhammad Musa Khan, who served as the 4th Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army from 1958 to 1968, Air Marshal Sharbat Ali Changezi, whose years of service in the Pakistan Air Force were from 1949 to 1987, Hussain Ali Yousafi, the slain chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, Sayed Nasir Ali Shah, MNA from Quetta and his father Haji Sayed Hussain Hazara who was a senator and member of Pakistan Parliament during the Zia-ul-Haq era.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Despite all of this, Hazaras are often targeted by militant groups such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and others. \"Activists say at least 800-1,000 Hazaras have been killed since 1999 and the pace is quickening. More than one hundred have been murdered in and around Quetta since January, according to Human Rights Watch.\" The political representation of the community is served by Hazara Democratic Party, a secular liberal democratic party, headed by Abdul Khaliq Hazara.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Hazara people in Iran are also referred to as Barbari (Persian: بربری), or Khāwari (خاوری). Over many years as a result of political unrest in Afghanistan, some Hazaras have migrated to Iran. The local Hazara population has been estimated at 500,000 people including Afghan immigrants. At least one-third have spent more than half their life in Iran. Before the separation of Afghanistan from Iran according to the Treaty of Paris in 1857 during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah, Greater Khorasan covered a part of the west of this land and various tribes or ethnic groups lived in it. One of these tribes was the Hazaras. This tribe, who settled on both sides of the border after drawing the border line between Iran and Afghanistan, has played many roles in the contemporary history of Khorasan province and especially Mashhad. The leadership of this tribe at the end of the Qajar period and also the Pahlavi period was with Muhammad Yusuf Khan Hazara known as \"Sulat al-Sultanah Hazara\", a Sunni Hazara who was a politician and the first Sunni representative member in the Iranian Parliament and the only Sunni Iranian who has represented Mashhad in the history of Iran's legislatures.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Attarwala claim to be Hazara who mainly inhabitant in the state of Gujarat, India, descended from a group of Mughal soldiers who were initially settled in Agra, during the rule of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. According to their recorded documents, they then migrated to Ahmedabad via Gwalior, Ratlam and Godhra. This migration followed their participation in the community in the 1857 Indian War Independence. Once settled in Gujarat, India, the community took up the occupation of manufacturing perfumes known as ittars. The word attarwala means the manufacturer of perfumes. A second migration took place in 1947 from Agra, after the partition of India, with some members immigrating to Pakistan, while others joining their co-ethnics in Ahmedabad.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Alessandro Monsutti argues, in his recent anthropological book, that migration is the traditional way of life of the Hazara people, referring to the seasonal and historical migrations which have never ceased and do not seem to be dictated only by emergencies such as war. Due to the decades of war in Afghanistan and the sectarian violence in Pakistan, many Hazaras left their communities and have settled in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and particularly the Northern European countries such as Sweden and Denmark. Some go to these countries as exchange students while others through human smuggling, which sometimes costs them their lives. Since 2001, about 1,000 people have died in the ocean while trying to reach Australia by boats from Indonesia. Many of these were Hazaras. The notable case was the Tampa affair in which a shipload of refugees, mostly Hazaras, was rescued by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa and subsequently sent to Nauru.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Hazara culture is a combination of customs, traditions, behaviors, beliefs and norms that have been formed in interaction and confrontation with the surrounding phenomena for many years and now it is displayed as a cultural identity. The Hazara culture is rich in heritage, with many unique cultures, and has common influences with various cultures of Central Asia and South Asia. The Hazaras, outside of Hazarajat, have adopted the cultures of the cities where they dwell, resembling the cultures and traditions of the Afghan Tajiks and Pashtuns. Traditionally the Hazara are highland farmers. In Hazarajat, they have retained many of their own cultures and traditions and many of their cultures and traditions are more closely related to those of Central Asians than to those of the Afghan Tajiks. Historically and traditionally, Hazaras live in houses, but some of them such as Aimaq Hazara and a few other are semi-nomadic and live mostly in felt yurts, rather than houses.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Hazara clothing have an important and special role in supporting the cultural, traditional and social identity of the Hazara ethnicity. Hazara clothes are produced manually and by machine; In Afghanistan these types of clothes are sewn in most parts of the country, especially in central provinces of Afghanistan.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Hazara men traditionally wear barak, also called barag, and hat. Barak is one of the important components of Hazara people's clothing. Barak is a kind of soft, sticky and thick piece made from the first wool of lambs of special sheep that are raised in Hazarajat, provided. In addition to being a very acceptable, stylish, and regal clothe, the Hazara barak is also a warm winter that is resistant to moisture and does not get wet easily in snow and rain. Also, barak has a special property and softness, it reduces muscle pains and is also healing for joint pains. Nowadays, the most common clothes among Hazara men is the perahan o tunban and sometimes with a hat or a turban.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The traditional clothing of Hazara women includes a pleated skirt with a tunban or undergarment. The lower tunbans are made of fabrics such as flowered chits and the upper skirts are made of better fabrics such as velvet or zari and net and have a border or decoration at the bottom. The women's shirt is calf-length, close-collared, and long-sleeved, and has slits on both sides that are placed on the skirts, which are admired for their completeness in the Islamic set. Hazara women's clothing has certain characteristics according to their social, economic, and age conditions. The clothes of young Hazara women are made of different fabrics in different colors and happy designs with beautiful and colorful chador, but older women prefer dark-colored fabrics with simple black and white designs. Hazara women's chador or head cover is often decorated with ornaments that is often silver or gold, and sometimes with a hat. The ornaments on the clothe is silver or gold necklace with colorful beads, buttons, bangles and silver or gold bracelets.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Hazaras traditionally wear headgear or hats, which are of different types for men and women. There are different types of Hazara hats and caps, some of which are made from animal skin and some from barak. Also some Hazara men wear the turban of Khorasan.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Hazara cuisine is strongly influenced by Central Asian, South Asian and Persian cuisines. However, there are special foods, cooking methods and different cooking styles that are specific to them. They have a hospitable dining etiquette. In their culture, it is customary to prepare special food for guests.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Hazaras speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of the Persian language.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Hazara people in Hazaristan region speak the Hazaragi dialect of Persian, which is infused with many Turkic and a few Mongolic words. According to Atif Adnan, the Hazara population speaks Persian with some Mongolian words. The primary differences between Persian and Hazaragi are the accent. Despite these differences, Hazaragi is mutually intelligible with Dari, the official language of Afghanistan.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "According to Doctor of Sciences Lutfi Temirkhanov, the ancestors of the Hazaras were Mongol-speaking and only after the resettlement, they mixed with the Persian-speaking and Turkic-speaking population: \"hordes of Mongol princes and feudal lords found themselves in a Persian-speaking encirclement; they mixed with them, were influenced by the Persian-Tajik culture and gradually adopted the Persian language\". According to a number of sources, in the 16th century the Mongolian language was widespread among the Hazaras. According to some, Turkic and Mongolic words make up about 20% of the vocabulary of Hazaragi dialect.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Hazaras predominantly practice Islam, mostly the Shi'a, with a significant and almost a large Sunni, some Isma'ili and Non-denominational Islam. The majority of Afghanistan's population practices Sunni Islam; this may have contributed to the discrimination against them.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There is no single theory about the acceptance of the Shi'a Islam by the majority of Hazaras. Probably most of them accepted Shi'a Islam during the first part of the 16th century, in the early days of the Safavid dynasty.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "A significant and almost a large population of Hazara people are Sunni Muslims. Sunni Hazaras have been Sunni since long ago and before the occupation of Hazara lands by Abdul Rahman, but some of them were converted from Shia to Sunni Islam after the occupation of Hazara lands by Abdul Rahman and 1888–1893 Hazara uprisings. In Afghanistan, they inhabit in different provinces such as Kabul, Baghlan, Badghis, Ghor, Kunduz, Panjshir, Bamyan, Badakhshan, Parwan, and in some other regions of Afghanistan.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "A Sunni Hazara, Sher Muhammad Khan Hazara, the chieftain of the Hazaras of Qala e Naw, Badghis province and a warlord who participant in the Sunni coalition that defended Herat in 1837. Also, one of the defeaters of British forces around Qandahar and Maiwand desert during the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838–1842.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Isma'ili Hazaras mainly live in provinces of Kabul, Parwan, Baghlan and Bamyan. And their smaller groups live in Maidan Wardak, Samangan, Zabul, and... The Isma'ili Hazaras have always been kept separate from the rest of the Hazaras on account of religious beliefs and political purposes.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Hazara people have been organized by various tribes. Some overarching Hazara tribes are Sheikh Ali, Jaghori, Jaghatu, Qara Baghi, Ghaznichi, Muhammad Khwaja, Behsudi, Daimirdadi, Turkmani, Uruzgani, Daikundi, Daizangi, Daichopan, Daizinyat, Naiman, Qarlugh, Aimaq Hazara, and others. The different tribes come from Hazaristan (Hazara regions), such as Parwan, Bamyan, Ghazni, Ghor, Uruzgan, Daikundi, Maidan Wardak, and... have spread outwards from Hazaristan (main region) in other parts of Afghanistan, and also in other Hazara-populated areas.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Some well-known Hazara writers and poets include Faiz Muhammad Kateb, Amir Khosrow Dehlavi, Ismael Balkhi, Hassan Poladi, Kazim Yazdani, Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, Kamran Mir Hazar, Basir Ahang, Sayed Askar Mousavi, Ali Baba Taj, Sayed Abutalib Mozaffari, Rahnaward Zaryab, Aziz Royesh and so on.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Many Hazara musicians are widely hailed as being skilled in playing the dambura, a native, regional lute instrument similarly found in other Central Asian nations, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Some of the famous Hazara musician and dambura players are, such as Sarwar Sarkhosh, Dawood Sarkhosh, Safdar Tawakoli, Sayed Anwar Azad and others. In Hazara dambura sometimes revolutionary hymns are very common. The first singer who started singing revolutionary hymns on dambura was Sarwar Sarkhosh, and his main message was the uprising of the young generation and the fight against oppression. Also Ghaychak a field instruments in music that is usually played like a fiddle. The resonance bowl is made of walnuts or berries and its wires are metal which is one of the stringed instruments in Hazara music.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Hazara cinema artists have no older background, but nowadays some of their famous actors and actresses include Hussain Sadiqi, Abid Ali Nazish, Shamila Shirzad, Nikbakht Noruz and others.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Many Hazaras engaged in varieties of sports, including football, volleyball, wrestling, martial arts, boxing, karate, taekwondo, judo, wushu, Jujitsu, Cricket, Tennis, and more. Pahlawan Ebrahim Khedri, a 62 kg wrestler, was the national champion for two decades in Afghanistan. Another famous Hazara wrestler, Wakil Hussain Allahdad, was killed in the 22 April 2018 Kabul suicide bombing in Dashte Barchi, Kabul.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Rohullah Nikpai, won a bronze medal in Taekwondo at the Beijing Olympics 2008, beating world champion Juan Antonio Ramos of Spain 4–1 in a play-off final. It was Afghanistan's first-ever Olympic medal. He then won a second Olympic medal for Afghanistan in the London 2012 games.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Another notable Hazara athlete Sayed Abdul Jalil Waiz was the first ever badminton player representing Afghanistan in the Asian Junior Championships in 2005, where he produced the first win for his country against Iraq, with 15–13, 15–1. He participated in several international championships since 2005 and achieved victories against Australia, the Philippines and Mongolia. Hamid Rahimi, a Hazara boxer from Afghanistan who lives in Germany. Hussain Sadiqi, a Hazara Australian martial artist who won an award for the best fight scene for an Australian made action movie.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Hazara football players are Zohib Islam Amiri, who is currently playing for the Afghanistan national football team, Moshtaq Yaqoubi an Afghan-Finnish footballer who plays for HIFK, Mustafa Amini, a Hazara Australian footballer who plays as a midfielder for Danish Superliga club AGF and the Australian national team, Rahmat Akbari an Australian footballer who plays as a midfielder for Brisbane Roar, and others like Rohullah Iqbalzada, Omran Haydary, Zelfy Nazary, Moshtaq Ahmadi, and Zahra Mahmoodi.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Some Hazara from Pakistan have also excelled in sports and have received numerous awards, particularly in boxing, football and field hockey.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Pakistani Hazara Abrar Hussain, a former Olympic boxer served as deputy director-general of the Pakistan Sports Board. He represented Pakistan three times at the Olympics and won a gold medal at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing. Another Hazara boxer from Pakistan is Haider Ali a Commonwealth Games gold medalist and Olympian who is currently retired.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Former captain of the Pakistan national football team Qayyum Changezi was the second Pakistani footballer to score a hat trick in an international game. New Hazara youngsters are seen to appear in football in Pakistan mostly from Quetta, such as Muhammad Ali and Rajab Ali Hazara.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Another is Kulsoom Hazara, a Pakistani female karate champion who has won several gold, silver and bronze medals on national and international stages, including Pride of Pakistan Award. Other karateka Hazaras include Nargis Hameedullah who became the first Pakistani woman to win an individual medal (a bronze) at the Asian Games karate championship, and Shahida Abbasi.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Cultural sports of Hazara people are those sports that have been inherited from their ancestors for generations.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Buzkashi is a Central Asian sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. It is the national sport in Afghanistan and is one of the cultural sports of the Hazara people and they still practice this sport in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Tirandāzi is a kind of archery and an old cultural sport of Hazaras.",
"title": "Culture and society"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Pahlawani or Kushti is a kind of cultural wrestling sport that is performed by Hazaras. Pahlawani has a long history in Afghanistan and among the Hazaras. In Afghanistan, on holidays, Pahlawani fields are set up. Pahlawani is held in different age groups. This cultural sport has its special techniques. Because this sport is very ancient and familiar, it has been continued from generation to generation among the Hazaras.",
"title": "Culture and society"
}
]
| The Hazaras are an ethnic group and a principal component of the population of Afghanistan, native to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. They are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan and primarily residing in the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan, as well as a significant minority groups mainly in Quetta, Pakistan and Mashhad, Iran. They speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of Persian. Dari, also known as Dari Persian, is the official language of Afghanistan. Hazaras are considered to be one of the most persecuted groups in Afghanistan. More than half of the Hazara population was massacred by the Emirate of Afghanistan between 1888 and 1893, and their persecution has occurred various times across previous decades. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-26T22:59:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazaras |
14,132 | Hawala | Hawala or hewala (Arabic: حِوالة ḥawāla, meaning transfer or sometimes trust), originating in India as havala (Hindi: हवाला), also known as havaleh in Persian, and xawala or xawilaad in Somali, is a popular and informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers (known as hawaladars). They operate outside of, or parallel to, traditional banking, financial channels and remittance systems. The system requires a minimum of two hawaladars that take care of the "transaction" without the movement of cash or telegraphic transfer. While hawaladars are spread throughout the world, they are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Hawala follows Islamic traditions but its use is not limited to Muslims.
The hawala system originated in India. In 2003 Hawala as a legal concept was documented, finding evidence of Hawala reaching back to 1327, in a publication by Matthias Schramm and Markus Taube, with the title "Evolution and institutional foundation of the hawala financial system".
"Hawala" itself influenced the development of the agency in common law and in civil laws, such as the aval in French law and pt:aval Portuguese law, and the avallo in Italian law. The words aval and avallo were themselves derived from hawala. The transfer of debt, which was "not permissible under Roman law but became widely practiced in medieval Europe, especially in commercial transactions", was due to the large extent of the "trade conducted by the Italian cities with the Muslim world in the Middle Ages". The agency was also "an institution unknown to Roman law" as no "individual could conclude a binding contract on behalf of another as his agent". In Roman law, the "contractor himself was considered the party to the contract and it took a second contract between the person who acted on behalf of a principal and the latter in order to transfer the rights and the obligations deriving from the contract to him". On the other hand, Islamic law and the later common law "had no difficulty in accepting agency as one of its institutions in the field of contracts and of obligations in general".
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 those international organizations that are responsible for counterterrorism and enforcing laws against money laundering have directed their efforts on identifying problems within the hawala, as well as other remittance systems. The First International Conference on Hawala in May 2002 published the Regulatory Frameworks for Hawala and Other Remittance Systems. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) contributed a chapter, in which informal value transfer systems were considered. According to the IMF, countries with limited financial services experience macroeconomic consequences because residents rely heavily on informal fund transfer systems. Informal value transfer systems share common characteristics, including anonymity, lack of regulation or official scrutiny. Therefore informal value transfer systems may be susceptible to use by criminal organizations for money laundering and terrorist financing.
In the most basic variant of the hawala system, money is transferred via a network of hawala brokers, or hawaladars. It is the transfer of money without actually moving it. In fact, a successful definition of the hawala system that is used is "money transfer without money movement". According to the author Sam Vaknin, there are large hawaladar operators with networks of middlemen in cities across many countries, but most hawaladars are small businesses who work at hawala as a sideline or moonlighting operation.
The figure shows how hawala works: (1) a customer (A, left-hand side) approaches a hawala broker (X) in one city and gives a sum of money (red arrow) that is to be transferred to a recipient (B, right-hand side) in another, usually foreign, city. Along with the money, he usually specifies something like a password that will lead to the money being paid out (blue arrows). (2b) The hawala broker X calls another hawala broker M in the recipient's city, and informs M about the agreed password, or gives other disposition of the funds. Then, the intended recipient (B), who also has been informed by A about the password (2a), now approaches M and tells him the agreed password (3a). If the password is correct, then M releases the transferred sum to B (3b), usually minus a small commission. X now owes M the money that M had paid out to B; thus M has to trust X's promise to settle the debt at a later date.
The unique feature of the system is that no promissory instruments are exchanged between the hawala brokers; the transaction takes place entirely on the honour system. As the system does not depend on the legal enforceability of claims, it can operate even in the absence of a legal and juridical environment. Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and the loss of honour, which lead to severe economic hardship.
Informal records are produced of individual transactions, and a running tally of the amount owed by one broker to another is kept. Settlements of debts between hawala brokers can take a variety of forms (such as goods, services, properties, transfers of employees, etc.), and need not take the form of direct cash transactions.
In addition to commissions, hawala brokers often earn their profits through bypassing official exchange rates. Generally, the funds enter the system in the source country's currency and leave the system in the recipient country's currency. As settlements often take place without any foreign exchange transactions, they can be made at other than official exchange rates.
Hawala is attractive to customers because it provides a fast and convenient transfer of funds, usually with a far lower commission than that charged by banks. Its advantages are most pronounced when the receiving country applies unprofitable exchange rate regulations or when the banking system in the receiving country is less complex (e.g., due to differences in legal environment in places such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia). Moreover, in some parts of the world, it is the only option for legitimate fund transfers. It has been used even by aid organizations in areas in which it is the best-functioning institution.
Dubai has been prominent for decades as a welcoming hub for hawala transactions worldwide.
The hundi is a financial instrument that developed on the Indian sub-continent for use in trade and credit transactions. Hundis are used as a form of remittance instrument to transfer money from place to place, as a form of credit instrument or IOU to borrow money and as a bill of exchange in trade transactions. The Reserve Bank of India describes the Hundi as "an unconditional order in writing made by a person directing another to pay a certain sum of money to a person named in the order."
According to the CIA, with the dissolution of Somalia's formal banking system, many informal money transfer operators arose to fill the void. It estimates that such hawaladars, xawilaad or xawala brokers are now responsible for the transfer of up to $1.6 billion per year in remittances to the country, most coming from working Somalis outside Somalia. Such funds have in turn had a stimulating effect on local business activity.
The 2012 Tuareg rebellion left Northern Mali without an official money transfer service for months. The coping mechanisms that appeared were patterned on the hawala system. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hawala or hewala (Arabic: حِوالة ḥawāla, meaning transfer or sometimes trust), originating in India as havala (Hindi: हवाला), also known as havaleh in Persian, and xawala or xawilaad in Somali, is a popular and informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers (known as hawaladars). They operate outside of, or parallel to, traditional banking, financial channels and remittance systems. The system requires a minimum of two hawaladars that take care of the \"transaction\" without the movement of cash or telegraphic transfer. While hawaladars are spread throughout the world, they are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Hawala follows Islamic traditions but its use is not limited to Muslims.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The hawala system originated in India. In 2003 Hawala as a legal concept was documented, finding evidence of Hawala reaching back to 1327, in a publication by Matthias Schramm and Markus Taube, with the title \"Evolution and institutional foundation of the hawala financial system\".",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "\"Hawala\" itself influenced the development of the agency in common law and in civil laws, such as the aval in French law and pt:aval Portuguese law, and the avallo in Italian law. The words aval and avallo were themselves derived from hawala. The transfer of debt, which was \"not permissible under Roman law but became widely practiced in medieval Europe, especially in commercial transactions\", was due to the large extent of the \"trade conducted by the Italian cities with the Muslim world in the Middle Ages\". The agency was also \"an institution unknown to Roman law\" as no \"individual could conclude a binding contract on behalf of another as his agent\". In Roman law, the \"contractor himself was considered the party to the contract and it took a second contract between the person who acted on behalf of a principal and the latter in order to transfer the rights and the obligations deriving from the contract to him\". On the other hand, Islamic law and the later common law \"had no difficulty in accepting agency as one of its institutions in the field of contracts and of obligations in general\".",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 those international organizations that are responsible for counterterrorism and enforcing laws against money laundering have directed their efforts on identifying problems within the hawala, as well as other remittance systems. The First International Conference on Hawala in May 2002 published the Regulatory Frameworks for Hawala and Other Remittance Systems. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) contributed a chapter, in which informal value transfer systems were considered. According to the IMF, countries with limited financial services experience macroeconomic consequences because residents rely heavily on informal fund transfer systems. Informal value transfer systems share common characteristics, including anonymity, lack of regulation or official scrutiny. Therefore informal value transfer systems may be susceptible to use by criminal organizations for money laundering and terrorist financing.",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the most basic variant of the hawala system, money is transferred via a network of hawala brokers, or hawaladars. It is the transfer of money without actually moving it. In fact, a successful definition of the hawala system that is used is \"money transfer without money movement\". According to the author Sam Vaknin, there are large hawaladar operators with networks of middlemen in cities across many countries, but most hawaladars are small businesses who work at hawala as a sideline or moonlighting operation.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The figure shows how hawala works: (1) a customer (A, left-hand side) approaches a hawala broker (X) in one city and gives a sum of money (red arrow) that is to be transferred to a recipient (B, right-hand side) in another, usually foreign, city. Along with the money, he usually specifies something like a password that will lead to the money being paid out (blue arrows). (2b) The hawala broker X calls another hawala broker M in the recipient's city, and informs M about the agreed password, or gives other disposition of the funds. Then, the intended recipient (B), who also has been informed by A about the password (2a), now approaches M and tells him the agreed password (3a). If the password is correct, then M releases the transferred sum to B (3b), usually minus a small commission. X now owes M the money that M had paid out to B; thus M has to trust X's promise to settle the debt at a later date.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The unique feature of the system is that no promissory instruments are exchanged between the hawala brokers; the transaction takes place entirely on the honour system. As the system does not depend on the legal enforceability of claims, it can operate even in the absence of a legal and juridical environment. Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and the loss of honour, which lead to severe economic hardship.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Informal records are produced of individual transactions, and a running tally of the amount owed by one broker to another is kept. Settlements of debts between hawala brokers can take a variety of forms (such as goods, services, properties, transfers of employees, etc.), and need not take the form of direct cash transactions.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In addition to commissions, hawala brokers often earn their profits through bypassing official exchange rates. Generally, the funds enter the system in the source country's currency and leave the system in the recipient country's currency. As settlements often take place without any foreign exchange transactions, they can be made at other than official exchange rates.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Hawala is attractive to customers because it provides a fast and convenient transfer of funds, usually with a far lower commission than that charged by banks. Its advantages are most pronounced when the receiving country applies unprofitable exchange rate regulations or when the banking system in the receiving country is less complex (e.g., due to differences in legal environment in places such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia). Moreover, in some parts of the world, it is the only option for legitimate fund transfers. It has been used even by aid organizations in areas in which it is the best-functioning institution.",
"title": "How it works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Dubai has been prominent for decades as a welcoming hub for hawala transactions worldwide.",
"title": "Regional variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The hundi is a financial instrument that developed on the Indian sub-continent for use in trade and credit transactions. Hundis are used as a form of remittance instrument to transfer money from place to place, as a form of credit instrument or IOU to borrow money and as a bill of exchange in trade transactions. The Reserve Bank of India describes the Hundi as \"an unconditional order in writing made by a person directing another to pay a certain sum of money to a person named in the order.\"",
"title": "Regional variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "According to the CIA, with the dissolution of Somalia's formal banking system, many informal money transfer operators arose to fill the void. It estimates that such hawaladars, xawilaad or xawala brokers are now responsible for the transfer of up to $1.6 billion per year in remittances to the country, most coming from working Somalis outside Somalia. Such funds have in turn had a stimulating effect on local business activity.",
"title": "Regional variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The 2012 Tuareg rebellion left Northern Mali without an official money transfer service for months. The coping mechanisms that appeared were patterned on the hawala system.",
"title": "Regional variants"
}
]
| Hawala or hewala, originating in India as havala, also known as havaleh in Persian, and xawala or xawilaad in Somali, is a popular and informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers. They operate outside of, or parallel to, traditional banking, financial channels and remittance systems. The system requires a minimum of two hawaladars that take care of the "transaction" without the movement of cash or telegraphic transfer. While hawaladars are spread throughout the world, they are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Hawala follows Islamic traditions but its use is not limited to Muslims. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-13T00:10:01Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala |
14,133 | Hydroponics | Hydroponics is a type of horticulture and a subset of hydroculture which involves growing plants, usually crops or medicinal plants, without soil, by using water-based mineral nutrient solutions. Terrestrial or aquatic plants may grow with their roots exposed to the nutritious liquid or the roots may be mechanically supported by an inert medium such as perlite, gravel, or other substrates.
Despite inert media, roots can cause changes of the rhizosphere pH and root exudates can affect rhizosphere biology and physiological balance of the nutrient solution when secondary metabolites are produced in plants. Transgenic plants grown hydroponically allow the release of pharmaceutical proteins as part of the root exudate into the hydroponic medium.
The nutrients used in hydroponic systems can come from many different organic or inorganic sources, including fish excrement, duck manure, purchased chemical fertilizers, or artificial standard or hybrid nutrient solutions.
In contrast to field cultivation, plants are commonly grown hydroponically in a greenhouse or contained environment on inert media, adapted to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) process. Plants commonly grown hydroponically include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, lettuces, and cannabis, usually for commercial use, as well as Arabidopsis thaliana, which serves as a model organism in plant science and genetics.
Hydroponics offers many advantages, notably a decrease in water usage in agriculture. To grow 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of tomatoes using intensive farming methods requires 214 liters (47 imp gal; 57 U.S. gal) of water; using hydroponics, 70 liters (15 imp gal; 18 U.S. gal); and only 20 liters (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 U.S. gal) using aeroponics.
Hydroponic cultures lead to highest biomass and protein production compared to other growth substrates, of plants cultivated in the same environmental conditions and supplied with equal amounts of nutrients.
Since hydroponic growing takes much less water and nutrients to grow produce, and climate change threatens agricultural yields, it could be possible in the future for people in harsh environments with little accessible water to hydroponically grow their own plant-based food.
Hydroponics is not only used on earth, but has also proven itself in plant production experiments in space.
The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum or 'A Natural History' by Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. As a result of his work, water culture became a popular research technique. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and the discoveries of German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop, in the years 1859–1875, resulted in a development of the technique of soilless cultivation. To quote von Sachs directly: "In the year 1860, I published the results of experiments which demonstrated that land plants are capable of absorbing their nutritive matters out of watery solutions, without the aid of soil, and that it is possible in this way not only to maintain plants alive and growing for a long time, as had long been known, but also to bring about a vigorous increase of their organic substance, and even the production of seed capable of germination." Growth of terrestrial plants without soil in mineral nutrient solutions was later called "solution culture" in reference to "soil culture". It quickly became a standard research and teaching technique in the 19th and 20th centuries and is still widely used in plant nutrition science.
Around the 1930s plant nutritionists investigated diseases of certain plants, and thereby, observed symptoms related to existing soil conditions such as salinity. In this context, water culture experiments were undertaken with the hope of delivering similar symptoms under controlled laboratory conditions. This approach forced by Dennis Robert Hoagland led to innovative model systems (e.g., green algae Nitella) and standardized nutrient recipes playing an increasingly important role in modern plant physiology. In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that the principles of solution culture be used for agricultural crop production. He first termed this cultivation method "aquiculture" created in analogy to "agriculture" but later found that the cognate term aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Gericke created a sensation by growing tomato vines twenty-five feet (7.6 metres) high in his back yard in mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil. He then introduced the term Hydroponics, water culture, in 1937, proposed to him by W. A. Setchell, a phycologist with an extensive education in the classics. Hydroponics is derived from neologism υδρωπονικά (derived from Greek ύδωρ=water and πονέω=cultivate), constructed in analogy to γεωπονικά (derived from Greek γαία=earth and πονέω=cultivate), geoponica, that which concerns agriculture, replacing, γεω-, earth, with ὑδρο-, water.
Despite initial successes, however, Gericke realized that the time was not yet ripe for the general technical application and commercial use of hydroponics for producing crops. He also wanted to make sure all aspects of hydroponic cultivation were researched and tested before making any of the specifics available to the public. Reports of Gericke's work and his claims that hydroponics would revolutionize plant agriculture prompted a huge number of requests for further information. Gericke had been denied use of the university's greenhouses for his experiments due to the administration's skepticism, and when the university tried to compel him to release his preliminary nutrient recipes developed at home, he requested greenhouse space and time to improve them using appropriate research facilities. While he was eventually provided greenhouse space, the university assigned Hoagland and Arnon to re-evaluate Gericke's claims and show his formula held no benefit over soil grown plant yields, a view held by Hoagland. Because of these irreconcilable conflicts, Gericke left his academic position in 1937 in a climate that was politically unfavorable and continued his research independently in his greenhouse. In 1940, Gericke, whose work is considered to be the basis for all forms of hydroponic growing, published the book, Complete Guide to Soilless Gardening. Therein, for the first time, he published his basic formula involving the macro- and micronutrient salts for hydroponically-grown plants.
As a result of research of Gericke's claims by order of the Director of the California Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California, Claude Hutchison, Dennis Hoagland and Daniel Arnon wrote a classic 1938 agricultural bulletin, The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants Without Soil, one of the most important works on solution culture ever, which made the claim that hydroponic crop yields were no better than crop yields obtained with good-quality soils. Ultimately, crop yields would be limited by factors other than mineral nutrients, especially light and aeration of the culture medium. However, in the introduction to his landmark book on soilless cultivation, published two years later, Gericke pointed out that the results published by Hoagland and Arnon in comparing the yields of experimental plants in sand, soil and solution cultures, were based on several systemic errors ("...these experimenters have made the mistake of limiting the productive capacity of hydroponics to that of soil. Comparison can be only by growing as great a number of plants in each case as the fertility of the culture medium can support").
For example, the Hoagland and Arnon study did not adequately appreciate that hydroponics has other key benefits compared to soil culture including the fact that the roots of the plant have constant access to oxygen and that the plants have access to as much or as little water and nutrients as they need. This is important as one of the most common errors when cultivating plants is over- and underwatering; hydroponics prevents this from occurring as large amounts of water, which may drown root systems in soil, can be made available to the plant in hydroponics, and any water not used, is drained away, recirculated, or actively aerated, eliminating anoxic conditions in the root area. In soil, a grower needs to be very experienced to know exactly with how much water to feed the plant. Too much and the plant will be unable to access oxygen because air in the soil pores is displaced, which can lead to root rot; too little and the plant will undergo water stress or lose the ability to absorb nutrients, which are typically moved into the roots while dissolved, leading to nutrient deficiency symptoms such as chlorosis or fertilizer burn. Eventually, Gericke's advanced ideas led to the implementation of hydroponics into commercial agriculture while Hoagland's views and helpful support by the University prompted Hoagland and his associates to develop several new formulas (recipes) for mineral nutrient solutions, universally known as Hoagland solution.
One of the earliest successes of hydroponics occurred on Wake Island, a rocky atoll in the Pacific Ocean used as a refueling stop for Pan American Airlines. Hydroponics was used there in the 1930s to grow vegetables for the passengers. Hydroponics was a necessity on Wake Island because there was no soil, and it was prohibitively expensive to airlift in fresh vegetables.
From 1943 to 1946, Daniel I. Arnon served as a major in the United States Army and used his prior expertise with plant nutrition to feed troops stationed on barren Ponape Island in the western Pacific by growing crops in gravel and nutrient-rich water because there was no arable land available.
In the 1960s, Allen Cooper of England developed the nutrient film technique. The Land Pavilion at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center opened in 1982 and prominently features a variety of hydroponic techniques.
In recent decades, NASA has done extensive hydroponic research for its Controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS). Hydroponics research mimicking a Martian environment uses LED lighting to grow in a different color spectrum with much less heat. Ray Wheeler, a plant physiologist at Kennedy Space Center's Space Life Science Lab, believes that hydroponics will create advances within space travel, as a bioregenerative life support system.
As of 2017, Canada had hundreds of acres of large-scale commercial hydroponic greenhouses, producing tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
Due to technological advancements within the industry and numerous economic factors, the global hydroponics market is forecast to grow from US$226.45 million in 2016 to US$724.87 million by 2023.
There are two main variations for each medium: sub-irrigation and top irrigation. For all techniques, most hydroponic reservoirs are now built of plastic, but other materials have been used, including concrete, glass, metal, vegetable solids, and wood. The containers should exclude light to prevent algae and fungal growth in the hydroponic medium.
In static solution culture, plants are grown in containers of nutrient solution, such as glass Mason jars (typically, in-home applications), pots, buckets, tubs, or tanks. The solution is usually gently aerated but may be un-aerated. If un-aerated, the solution level is kept low enough that enough roots are above the solution so they get adequate oxygen. A hole is cut (or drilled) in the top of the reservoir for each plant; if it is a jar or tub, it may be its lid, but otherwise, cardboard, foil, paper, wood or metal may be put on top. A single reservoir can be dedicated to a single plant, or to various plants. Reservoir size can be increased as plant size increases. A home-made system can be constructed from food containers or glass canning jars with aeration provided by an aquarium pump, aquarium airline tubing, aquarium valves or even a biofilm of green algae on the glass, through photosynthesis. Clear containers can also be covered with aluminium foil, butcher paper, black plastic, or other material to eliminate the effects of negative phototropism. The nutrient solution is changed either on a schedule, such as once per week, or when the concentration drops below a certain level as determined with an electrical conductivity meter. Whenever the solution is depleted below a certain level, either water or fresh nutrient solution is added. A Mariotte's bottle, or a float valve, can be used to automatically maintain the solution level. In raft solution culture, plants are placed in a sheet of buoyant plastic that is floated on the surface of the nutrient solution. That way, the solution level never drops below the roots.
In continuous-flow solution culture, the nutrient solution constantly flows past the roots. It is much easier to automate than the static solution culture because sampling and adjustments to the temperature, pH, and nutrient concentrations can be made in a large storage tank that has potential to serve thousands of plants. A popular variation is the nutrient film technique or NFT, whereby a very shallow stream of water containing all the dissolved nutrients required for plant growth is recirculated in a thin layer past a bare root mat of plants in a watertight channel, with an upper surface exposed to air. As a consequence, an abundant supply of oxygen is provided to the roots of the plants. A properly designed NFT system is based on using the right channel slope, the right flow rate, and the right channel length. The main advantage of the NFT system over other forms of hydroponics is that the plant roots are exposed to adequate supplies of water, oxygen, and nutrients. In all other forms of production, there is a conflict between the supply of these requirements, since excessive or deficient amounts of one results in an imbalance of one or both of the others. NFT, because of its design, provides a system where all three requirements for healthy plant growth can be met at the same time, provided that the simple concept of NFT is always remembered and practised. The result of these advantages is that higher yields of high-quality produce are obtained over an extended period of cropping. A downside of NFT is that it has very little buffering against interruptions in the flow (e.g., power outages). But, overall, it is probably one of the more productive techniques.
The same design characteristics apply to all conventional NFT systems. While slopes along channels of 1:100 have been recommended, in practice it is difficult to build a base for channels that is sufficiently true to enable nutrient films to flow without ponding in locally depressed areas. As a consequence, it is recommended that slopes of 1:30 to 1:40 are used. This allows for minor irregularities in the surface, but, even with these slopes, ponding and water logging may occur. The slope may be provided by the floor, benches or racks may hold the channels and provide the required slope. Both methods are used and depend on local requirements, often determined by the site and crop requirements.
As a general guide, flow rates for each gully should be one liter per minute. At planting, rates may be half this and the upper limit of 2 L/min appears about the maximum. Flow rates beyond these extremes are often associated with nutritional problems. Depressed growth rates of many crops have been observed when channels exceed 12 meters in length. On rapidly growing crops, tests have indicated that, while oxygen levels remain adequate, nitrogen may be depleted over the length of the gully. As a consequence, channel length should not exceed 10–15 meters. In situations where this is not possible, the reductions in growth can be eliminated by placing another nutrient feed halfway along the gully and halving the flow rates through each outlet.
Aeroponics is a system wherein roots are continuously or discontinuously kept in an environment saturated with fine drops (a mist or aerosol) of nutrient solution. The method requires no substrate and entails growing plants with their roots suspended in a deep air or growth chamber with the roots periodically wetted with a fine mist of atomized nutrients. Excellent aeration is the main advantage of aeroponics.
Aeroponic techniques have proven to be commercially successful for propagation, seed germination, seed potato production, tomato production, leaf crops, and micro-greens. Since inventor Richard Stoner commercialized aeroponic technology in 1983, aeroponics has been implemented as an alternative to water intensive hydroponic systems worldwide. A major limitation of hydroponics is the fact that 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of water can only hold 8 milligrams (0.12 gr) of air, no matter whether aerators are utilized or not.
Another distinct advantage of aeroponics over hydroponics is that any species of plants can be grown in a true aeroponic system because the microenvironment of an aeroponic can be finely controlled. Another limitation of hydroponics is that certain species of plants can only survive for so long in water before they become waterlogged. In contrast, suspended aeroponic plants receive 100% of the available oxygen and carbon dioxide to their roots zone, stems, and leaves, thus accelerating biomass growth and reducing rooting times. NASA research has shown that aeroponically grown plants have an 80% increase in dry weight biomass (essential minerals) compared to hydroponically grown plants. Aeroponics also uses 65% less water than hydroponics. NASA concluded that aeroponically grown plants require ¼ the nutrient input compared to hydroponics. Unlike hydroponically grown plants, aeroponically grown plants will not suffer transplant shock when transplanted to soil, and offers growers the ability to reduce the spread of disease and pathogens. Aeroponics is also widely used in laboratory studies of plant physiology and plant pathology. Aeroponic techniques have been given special attention from NASA since a mist is easier to handle than a liquid in a zero-gravity environment.
Fogponics is a derivation of aeroponics wherein the nutrient solution is aerosolized by a diaphragm vibrating at ultrasonic frequencies. Solution droplets produced by this method tend to be 5–10 µm in diameter, smaller than those produced by forcing a nutrient solution through pressurized nozzles, as in aeroponics. The smaller size of the droplets allows them to diffuse through the air more easily, and deliver nutrients to the roots without limiting their access to oxygen.
Passive sub-irrigation, also known as passive hydroponics, semi-hydroponics, or hydroculture, is a method wherein plants are grown in an inert porous medium that moves water and fertilizer to the roots by capillary action from a separate reservoir as necessary, reducing labor and providing a constant supply of water to the roots. In the simplest method, the pot sits in a shallow solution of fertilizer and water or on a capillary mat saturated with nutrient solution. The various hydroponic media available, such as expanded clay and coconut husk, contain more air space than more traditional potting mixes, delivering increased oxygen to the roots, which is important in epiphytic plants such as orchids and bromeliads, whose roots are exposed to the air in nature. Additional advantages of passive hydroponics are the reduction of root rot and the additional ambient humidity provided through evaporations.
Hydroculture compared to traditional farming in terms of crops yield per area in a controlled environment was roughly 10 times more efficient than traditional farming, uses 13 times less water in one crop cycle than traditional farming, but on average uses 100 times more kilojoules per kilogram of energy than traditional farming.
In its simplest form, nutrient-enriched water is pumped into containers with plants in a growing medium such as Expanded clay aggregate At regular intervals, a simple timer causes a pump to fill the containers with nutrient solution, after which the solution drains back down into the reservoir. This keeps the medium regularly flushed with nutrients and air.
In a run-to-waste system, nutrient and water solution is periodically applied to the medium surface. The method was invented in Bengal in 1946; for this reason it is sometimes referred to as "The Bengal System".
This method can be set up in various configurations. In its simplest form, a nutrient-and-water solution is manually applied one or more times per day to a container of inert growing media, such as rockwool, perlite, vermiculite, coco fibre, or sand. In a slightly more complex system, it is automated with a delivery pump, a timer and irrigation tubing to deliver nutrient solution with a delivery frequency that is governed by the key parameters of plant size, plant growing stage, climate, substrate, and substrate conductivity, pH, and water content.
In a commercial setting, watering frequency is multi-factorial and governed by computers or PLCs.
Commercial hydroponics production of large plants like tomatoes, cucumber, and peppers uses one form or another of run-to-waste hydroponics.
The hydroponic method of plant production by means of suspending the plant roots in a solution of nutrient-rich, oxygenated water. Traditional methods favor the use of plastic buckets and large containers with the plant contained in a net pot suspended from the centre of the lid and the roots suspended in the nutrient solution. The solution is oxygen saturated by an air pump combined with porous stones. With this method, the plants grow much faster because of the high amount of oxygen that the roots receive. The Kratky Method is similar to deep water culture, but uses a non-circulating water reservoir.
Top-fed deep water culture is a technique involving delivering highly oxygenated nutrient solution direct to the root zone of plants. While deep water culture involves the plant roots hanging down into a reservoir of nutrient solution, in top-fed deep water culture the solution is pumped from the reservoir up to the roots (top feeding). The water is released over the plant's roots and then runs back into the reservoir below in a constantly recirculating system. As with deep water culture, there is an airstone in the reservoir that pumps air into the water via a hose from outside the reservoir. The airstone helps add oxygen to the water. Both the airstone and the water pump run 24 hours a day.
The biggest advantage of top-fed deep water culture over standard deep water culture is increased growth during the first few weeks. With deep water culture, there is a time when the roots have not reached the water yet. With top-fed deep water culture, the roots get easy access to water from the beginning and will grow to the reservoir below much more quickly than with a deep water culture system. Once the roots have reached the reservoir below, there is not a huge advantage with top-fed deep water culture over standard deep water culture. However, due to the quicker growth in the beginning, grow time can be reduced by a few weeks.
A rotary hydroponic garden is a style of commercial hydroponics created within a circular frame which rotates continuously during the entire growth cycle of whatever plant is being grown.
While system specifics vary, systems typically rotate once per hour, giving a plant 24 full turns within the circle each 24-hour period. Within the center of each rotary hydroponic garden can be a high intensity grow light, designed to simulate sunlight, often with the assistance of a mechanized timer.
Each day, as the plants rotate, they are periodically watered with a hydroponic growth solution to provide all nutrients necessary for robust growth. Due to the plants continuous fight against gravity, plants typically mature much more quickly than when grown in soil or other traditional hydroponic growing systems. Because rotary hydroponic systems have a small size, they allow for more plant material to be grown per area of floor space than other traditional hydroponic systems.
Rotary hydroponic systems should be avoided in most circumstances, mainly because of their experimental nature and their high costs for finding, buying, operating, and maintaining them.
Different media are appropriate for different growing techniques.
Rock wool (mineral wool) is the most widely used medium in hydroponics. Rock wool is an inert substrate suitable for both run-to-waste and recirculating systems. Rock wool is made from molten rock, basalt or 'slag' that is spun into bundles of single filament fibres, and bonded into a medium capable of capillary action, and is, in effect, protected from most common microbiological degradation. Rock wool is typically used only for the seedling stage, or with newly cut clones, but can remain with the plant base for its lifetime. Rock wool has many advantages and some disadvantages. The latter being the possible skin irritancy (mechanical) whilst handling (1:1000). Flushing with cold water usually brings relief. Advantages include its proven efficiency and effectiveness as a commercial hydroponic substrate. Most of the rock wool sold to date is a non-hazardous, non-carcinogenic material, falling under Note Q of the European Union Classification Packaging and Labeling Regulation (CLP).
Mineral wool products can be engineered to hold large quantities of water and air that aid root growth and nutrient uptake in hydroponics; their fibrous nature also provides a good mechanical structure to hold the plant stable. The naturally high pH of mineral wool makes them initially unsuitable to plant growth and requires "conditioning" to produce a wool with an appropriate, stable pH.
Baked clay pellets are suitable for hydroponic systems in which all nutrients are carefully controlled in water solution. The clay pellets are inert, pH-neutral, and do not contain any nutrient value.
The clay is formed into round pellets and fired in rotary kilns at 1,200 °C (2,190 °F). This causes the clay to expand, like popcorn, and become porous. It is light in weight, and does not compact over time. The shape of an individual pellet can be irregular or uniform depending on brand and manufacturing process. The manufacturers consider expanded clay to be an ecologically sustainable and re-usable growing medium because of its ability to be cleaned and sterilized, typically by washing in solutions of white vinegar, chlorine bleach, or hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and rinsing completely.
Another view is that clay pebbles are best not re-used even when they are cleaned, due to root growth that may enter the medium. Breaking open a clay pebble after use can reveal this growth.
Growstones, made from glass waste, have both more air and water retention space than perlite and peat. This aggregate holds more water than parboiled rice hulls. Growstones by volume consist of 0.5 to 5% calcium carbonate – for a standard 5.1 kg bag of Growstones that corresponds to 25.8 to 258 grams of calcium carbonate. The remainder is soda-lime glass.
Coconut coir, also known as coir peat, is a natural byproduct derived from coconut processing. The outer husk of a coconut consists of fibers which are commonly used to make a myriad of items ranging from floor mats to brushes. After the long fibers are used for those applications, the dust and short fibers are merged to create coir. Coconuts absorb high levels of nutrients throughout their life cycle, so the coir must undergo a maturation process before it becomes a viable growth medium. This process removes salt, tannins and phenolic compounds through substantial water washing. Contaminated water is a byproduct of this process, as three hundred to six hundred liters of water per one cubic meter of coir are needed. Additionally, this maturation can take up to six months and one study concluded the working conditions during the maturation process are dangerous and would be illegal in North America and Europe. Despite requiring attention, posing health risks and environmental impacts, coconut coir has impressive material properties. When exposed to water, the brown, dry, chunky and fibrous material expands nearly three or four times its original size. This characteristic combined with coconut coir's water retention capacity and resistance to pests and diseases make it an effective growth medium. Used as an alternative to rock wool, coconut coir offers optimized growing conditions.
Parboiled rice husks (PBH) are an agricultural byproduct that would otherwise have little use. They decay over time, and allow drainage, and even retain less water than growstones. A study showed that rice husks did not affect the effects of plant growth regulators.
Perlite is a volcanic rock that has been superheated into very lightweight expanded glass pebbles. It is used loose or in plastic sleeves immersed in the water. It is also used in potting soil mixes to decrease soil density. It does contain a high amount of fluorine which could be harmful to some plants. Perlite has similar properties and uses to vermiculite but, in general, holds more air and less water and is buoyant.
Like perlite, vermiculite is a mineral that has been superheated until it has expanded into light pebbles. Vermiculite holds more water than perlite and has a natural "wicking" property that can draw water and nutrients in a passive hydroponic system. If too much water and not enough air surrounds the plants roots, it is possible to gradually lower the medium's water-retention capability by mixing in increasing quantities of perlite.
Like perlite, pumice is a lightweight, mined volcanic rock that finds application in hydroponics.
Sand is cheap and easily available. However, it is heavy, does not hold water very well, and it must be sterilized between uses.
The same type that is used in aquariums, though any small gravel can be used, provided it is washed first. Indeed, plants growing in a typical traditional gravel filter bed, with water circulated using electric powerhead pumps, are in effect being grown using gravel hydroponics, also termed "nutriculture". Gravel is inexpensive, easy to keep clean, drains well and will not become waterlogged. However, it is also heavy, and, if the system does not provide continuous water, the plant roots may dry out.
Wood fibre, produced from steam friction of wood, is an efficient organic substrate for hydroponics. It has the advantage that it keeps its structure for a very long time. Wood wool (i.e. wood slivers) have been used since the earliest days of the hydroponics research. However, more recent research suggests that wood fibre may have detrimental effects on "plant growth regulators".
Wool from shearing sheep is a little-used yet promising renewable growing medium. In a study comparing wool with peat slabs, coconut fibre slabs, perlite and rockwool slabs to grow cucumber plants, sheep wool had a greater air capacity of 70%, which decreased with use to a comparable 43%, and water capacity that increased from 23% to 44% with use. Using sheep wool resulted in the greatest yield out of the tested substrates, while application of a biostimulator consisting of humic acid, lactic acid and Bacillus subtilis improved yields in all substrates.
Brick shards have similar properties to gravel. They have the added disadvantages of possibly altering the pH and requiring extra cleaning before reuse.
Polystyrene packing peanuts are inexpensive, readily available, and have excellent drainage. However, they can be too lightweight for some uses. They are used mainly in closed-tube systems. Note that non-biodegradable polystyrene peanuts must be used; biodegradable packing peanuts will decompose into a sludge. Plants may absorb styrene and pass it to their consumers; this is a possible health risk.
The formulation of hydroponic solutions is an application of plant nutrition, with nutrient deficiency symptoms mirroring those found in traditional soil based agriculture. However, the underlying chemistry of hydroponic solutions can differ from soil chemistry in many significant ways. Important differences include:
As in conventional agriculture, nutrients should be adjusted to satisfy Liebig's law of the minimum for each specific plant variety. Nevertheless, generally acceptable concentrations for nutrient solutions exist, with minimum and maximum concentration ranges for most plants being somewhat similar. Most nutrient solutions are mixed to have concentrations between 1,000 and 2,500 ppm. Acceptable concentrations for the individual nutrient ions, which comprise that total ppm figure, are summarized in the following table. For essential nutrients, concentrations below these ranges often lead to nutrient deficiencies while exceeding these ranges can lead to nutrient toxicity. Optimum nutrition concentrations for plant varieties are found empirically by experience or by plant tissue tests.
Organic fertilizers can be used to supplement or entirely replace the inorganic compounds used in conventional hydroponic solutions. However, using organic fertilizers introduces a number of challenges that are not easily resolved. Examples include:
Nevertheless, if precautions are taken, organic fertilizers can be used successfully in hydroponics.
Examples of suitable materials, with their average nutritional contents tabulated in terms of percent dried mass, are listed in the following table.
Micronutrients can be sourced from organic fertilizers as well. For example, composted pine bark is high in manganese and is sometimes used to fulfill that mineral requirement in hydroponic solutions. To satisfy requirements for National Organic Programs, pulverized, unrefined minerals (e.g. Gypsum, Calcite, and glauconite) can also be added to satisfy a plant's nutritional needs.
Compounds can be added in both organic and conventional hydroponic systems to improve nutrition acquisition and uptake by the plant. Chelating agents and humic acid have been shown to increase nutrient uptake. Additionally, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), which are regularly utilized in field and greenhouse agriculture, have been shown to benefit hydroponic plant growth development and nutrient acquisition. Some PGPR are known to increase nitrogen fixation. While nitrogen is generally abundant in hydroponic systems with properly maintained fertilizer regimens, Azospirillum and Azotobacter genera can help maintain mobilized forms of nitrogen in systems with higher microbial growth in the rhizosphere. Traditional fertilizer methods often lead to high accumulated concentrations of nitrate within plant tissue at harvest. Rhodopseudo-monas palustris has been shown to increase nitrogen use efficiency, increase yield, and decrease nitrate concentration by 88% at harvest compared to traditional hydroponic fertilizer methods in leafy greens. Many Bacillus spp., Pseudomonas spp. and Streptomyces spp. convert forms of phosphorus in the soil that are unavailable to the plant into soluble anions by decreasing soil pH, releasing phosphorus bound in chelated form that is available in a wider pH range, and mineralizing organic phosphorus.
Some studies have found that Bacillus inoculants allow hydroponic leaf lettuce to overcome high salt stress that would otherwise reduce growth. This can be especially beneficial in regions with high electrical conductivity or salt content in their water source. This could potentially avoid costly reverse osmosis filtration systems while maintaining high crop yield.
Managing nutrient concentrations, oxygen saturation, and pH values within acceptable ranges is essential for successful hydroponic horticulture. Common tools used to manage hydroponic solutions include:
Chemical equipment can also be used to perform accurate chemical analyses of nutrient solutions. Examples include:
Using chemical equipment for hydroponic solutions can be beneficial to growers of any background because nutrient solutions are often reusable. Because nutrient solutions are virtually never completely depleted, and should never be due to the unacceptably low osmotic pressure that would result, re-fortification of old solutions with new nutrients can save growers money and can control point source pollution, a common source for the eutrophication of nearby lakes and streams.
Although pre-mixed concentrated nutrient solutions are generally purchased from commercial nutrient manufacturers by hydroponic hobbyists and small commercial growers, several tools exist to help anyone prepare their own solutions without extensive knowledge about chemistry. The free and open source tools HydroBuddy and HydroCal have been created by professional chemists to help any hydroponics grower prepare their own nutrient solutions. The first program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux while the second one can be used through a simple JavaScript interface. Both programs allow for basic nutrient solution preparation although HydroBuddy provides added functionality to use and save custom substances, save formulations and predict electrical conductivity values.
Often mixing hydroponic solutions using individual salts is impractical for hobbyists or small-scale commercial growers because commercial products are available at reasonable prices. However, even when buying commercial products, multi-component fertilizers are popular. Often these products are bought as three part formulas which emphasize certain nutritional roles. For example, solutions for vegetative growth (i.e. high in nitrogen), flowering (i.e. high in potassium and phosphorus), and micronutrient solutions (i.e. with trace minerals) are popular. The timing and application of these multi-part fertilizers should coincide with a plant's growth stage. For example, at the end of an annual plant's life cycle, a plant should be restricted from high nitrogen fertilizers. In most plants, nitrogen restriction inhibits vegetative growth and helps induce flowering.
With pest problems reduced and nutrients constantly fed to the roots, productivity in hydroponics is high; however, growers can further increase yield by manipulating a plant's environment by constructing sophisticated growrooms.
To increase yield further, some sealed greenhouses inject CO2 into their environment to help improve growth and plant fertility. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hydroponics is a type of horticulture and a subset of hydroculture which involves growing plants, usually crops or medicinal plants, without soil, by using water-based mineral nutrient solutions. Terrestrial or aquatic plants may grow with their roots exposed to the nutritious liquid or the roots may be mechanically supported by an inert medium such as perlite, gravel, or other substrates.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Despite inert media, roots can cause changes of the rhizosphere pH and root exudates can affect rhizosphere biology and physiological balance of the nutrient solution when secondary metabolites are produced in plants. Transgenic plants grown hydroponically allow the release of pharmaceutical proteins as part of the root exudate into the hydroponic medium.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The nutrients used in hydroponic systems can come from many different organic or inorganic sources, including fish excrement, duck manure, purchased chemical fertilizers, or artificial standard or hybrid nutrient solutions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In contrast to field cultivation, plants are commonly grown hydroponically in a greenhouse or contained environment on inert media, adapted to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) process. Plants commonly grown hydroponically include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, lettuces, and cannabis, usually for commercial use, as well as Arabidopsis thaliana, which serves as a model organism in plant science and genetics.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Hydroponics offers many advantages, notably a decrease in water usage in agriculture. To grow 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of tomatoes using intensive farming methods requires 214 liters (47 imp gal; 57 U.S. gal) of water; using hydroponics, 70 liters (15 imp gal; 18 U.S. gal); and only 20 liters (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 U.S. gal) using aeroponics.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hydroponic cultures lead to highest biomass and protein production compared to other growth substrates, of plants cultivated in the same environmental conditions and supplied with equal amounts of nutrients.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Since hydroponic growing takes much less water and nutrients to grow produce, and climate change threatens agricultural yields, it could be possible in the future for people in harsh environments with little accessible water to hydroponically grow their own plant-based food.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Hydroponics is not only used on earth, but has also proven itself in plant production experiments in space.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book Sylva Sylvarum or 'A Natural History' by Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. As a result of his work, water culture became a popular research technique. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and the discoveries of German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop, in the years 1859–1875, resulted in a development of the technique of soilless cultivation. To quote von Sachs directly: \"In the year 1860, I published the results of experiments which demonstrated that land plants are capable of absorbing their nutritive matters out of watery solutions, without the aid of soil, and that it is possible in this way not only to maintain plants alive and growing for a long time, as had long been known, but also to bring about a vigorous increase of their organic substance, and even the production of seed capable of germination.\" Growth of terrestrial plants without soil in mineral nutrient solutions was later called \"solution culture\" in reference to \"soil culture\". It quickly became a standard research and teaching technique in the 19th and 20th centuries and is still widely used in plant nutrition science.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Around the 1930s plant nutritionists investigated diseases of certain plants, and thereby, observed symptoms related to existing soil conditions such as salinity. In this context, water culture experiments were undertaken with the hope of delivering similar symptoms under controlled laboratory conditions. This approach forced by Dennis Robert Hoagland led to innovative model systems (e.g., green algae Nitella) and standardized nutrient recipes playing an increasingly important role in modern plant physiology. In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that the principles of solution culture be used for agricultural crop production. He first termed this cultivation method \"aquiculture\" created in analogy to \"agriculture\" but later found that the cognate term aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Gericke created a sensation by growing tomato vines twenty-five feet (7.6 metres) high in his back yard in mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil. He then introduced the term Hydroponics, water culture, in 1937, proposed to him by W. A. Setchell, a phycologist with an extensive education in the classics. Hydroponics is derived from neologism υδρωπονικά (derived from Greek ύδωρ=water and πονέω=cultivate), constructed in analogy to γεωπονικά (derived from Greek γαία=earth and πονέω=cultivate), geoponica, that which concerns agriculture, replacing, γεω-, earth, with ὑδρο-, water.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Despite initial successes, however, Gericke realized that the time was not yet ripe for the general technical application and commercial use of hydroponics for producing crops. He also wanted to make sure all aspects of hydroponic cultivation were researched and tested before making any of the specifics available to the public. Reports of Gericke's work and his claims that hydroponics would revolutionize plant agriculture prompted a huge number of requests for further information. Gericke had been denied use of the university's greenhouses for his experiments due to the administration's skepticism, and when the university tried to compel him to release his preliminary nutrient recipes developed at home, he requested greenhouse space and time to improve them using appropriate research facilities. While he was eventually provided greenhouse space, the university assigned Hoagland and Arnon to re-evaluate Gericke's claims and show his formula held no benefit over soil grown plant yields, a view held by Hoagland. Because of these irreconcilable conflicts, Gericke left his academic position in 1937 in a climate that was politically unfavorable and continued his research independently in his greenhouse. In 1940, Gericke, whose work is considered to be the basis for all forms of hydroponic growing, published the book, Complete Guide to Soilless Gardening. Therein, for the first time, he published his basic formula involving the macro- and micronutrient salts for hydroponically-grown plants.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "As a result of research of Gericke's claims by order of the Director of the California Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of California, Claude Hutchison, Dennis Hoagland and Daniel Arnon wrote a classic 1938 agricultural bulletin, The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants Without Soil, one of the most important works on solution culture ever, which made the claim that hydroponic crop yields were no better than crop yields obtained with good-quality soils. Ultimately, crop yields would be limited by factors other than mineral nutrients, especially light and aeration of the culture medium. However, in the introduction to his landmark book on soilless cultivation, published two years later, Gericke pointed out that the results published by Hoagland and Arnon in comparing the yields of experimental plants in sand, soil and solution cultures, were based on several systemic errors (\"...these experimenters have made the mistake of limiting the productive capacity of hydroponics to that of soil. Comparison can be only by growing as great a number of plants in each case as the fertility of the culture medium can support\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "For example, the Hoagland and Arnon study did not adequately appreciate that hydroponics has other key benefits compared to soil culture including the fact that the roots of the plant have constant access to oxygen and that the plants have access to as much or as little water and nutrients as they need. This is important as one of the most common errors when cultivating plants is over- and underwatering; hydroponics prevents this from occurring as large amounts of water, which may drown root systems in soil, can be made available to the plant in hydroponics, and any water not used, is drained away, recirculated, or actively aerated, eliminating anoxic conditions in the root area. In soil, a grower needs to be very experienced to know exactly with how much water to feed the plant. Too much and the plant will be unable to access oxygen because air in the soil pores is displaced, which can lead to root rot; too little and the plant will undergo water stress or lose the ability to absorb nutrients, which are typically moved into the roots while dissolved, leading to nutrient deficiency symptoms such as chlorosis or fertilizer burn. Eventually, Gericke's advanced ideas led to the implementation of hydroponics into commercial agriculture while Hoagland's views and helpful support by the University prompted Hoagland and his associates to develop several new formulas (recipes) for mineral nutrient solutions, universally known as Hoagland solution.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One of the earliest successes of hydroponics occurred on Wake Island, a rocky atoll in the Pacific Ocean used as a refueling stop for Pan American Airlines. Hydroponics was used there in the 1930s to grow vegetables for the passengers. Hydroponics was a necessity on Wake Island because there was no soil, and it was prohibitively expensive to airlift in fresh vegetables.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "From 1943 to 1946, Daniel I. Arnon served as a major in the United States Army and used his prior expertise with plant nutrition to feed troops stationed on barren Ponape Island in the western Pacific by growing crops in gravel and nutrient-rich water because there was no arable land available.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 1960s, Allen Cooper of England developed the nutrient film technique. The Land Pavilion at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center opened in 1982 and prominently features a variety of hydroponic techniques.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In recent decades, NASA has done extensive hydroponic research for its Controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS). Hydroponics research mimicking a Martian environment uses LED lighting to grow in a different color spectrum with much less heat. Ray Wheeler, a plant physiologist at Kennedy Space Center's Space Life Science Lab, believes that hydroponics will create advances within space travel, as a bioregenerative life support system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As of 2017, Canada had hundreds of acres of large-scale commercial hydroponic greenhouses, producing tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Due to technological advancements within the industry and numerous economic factors, the global hydroponics market is forecast to grow from US$226.45 million in 2016 to US$724.87 million by 2023.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "There are two main variations for each medium: sub-irrigation and top irrigation. For all techniques, most hydroponic reservoirs are now built of plastic, but other materials have been used, including concrete, glass, metal, vegetable solids, and wood. The containers should exclude light to prevent algae and fungal growth in the hydroponic medium.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In static solution culture, plants are grown in containers of nutrient solution, such as glass Mason jars (typically, in-home applications), pots, buckets, tubs, or tanks. The solution is usually gently aerated but may be un-aerated. If un-aerated, the solution level is kept low enough that enough roots are above the solution so they get adequate oxygen. A hole is cut (or drilled) in the top of the reservoir for each plant; if it is a jar or tub, it may be its lid, but otherwise, cardboard, foil, paper, wood or metal may be put on top. A single reservoir can be dedicated to a single plant, or to various plants. Reservoir size can be increased as plant size increases. A home-made system can be constructed from food containers or glass canning jars with aeration provided by an aquarium pump, aquarium airline tubing, aquarium valves or even a biofilm of green algae on the glass, through photosynthesis. Clear containers can also be covered with aluminium foil, butcher paper, black plastic, or other material to eliminate the effects of negative phototropism. The nutrient solution is changed either on a schedule, such as once per week, or when the concentration drops below a certain level as determined with an electrical conductivity meter. Whenever the solution is depleted below a certain level, either water or fresh nutrient solution is added. A Mariotte's bottle, or a float valve, can be used to automatically maintain the solution level. In raft solution culture, plants are placed in a sheet of buoyant plastic that is floated on the surface of the nutrient solution. That way, the solution level never drops below the roots.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In continuous-flow solution culture, the nutrient solution constantly flows past the roots. It is much easier to automate than the static solution culture because sampling and adjustments to the temperature, pH, and nutrient concentrations can be made in a large storage tank that has potential to serve thousands of plants. A popular variation is the nutrient film technique or NFT, whereby a very shallow stream of water containing all the dissolved nutrients required for plant growth is recirculated in a thin layer past a bare root mat of plants in a watertight channel, with an upper surface exposed to air. As a consequence, an abundant supply of oxygen is provided to the roots of the plants. A properly designed NFT system is based on using the right channel slope, the right flow rate, and the right channel length. The main advantage of the NFT system over other forms of hydroponics is that the plant roots are exposed to adequate supplies of water, oxygen, and nutrients. In all other forms of production, there is a conflict between the supply of these requirements, since excessive or deficient amounts of one results in an imbalance of one or both of the others. NFT, because of its design, provides a system where all three requirements for healthy plant growth can be met at the same time, provided that the simple concept of NFT is always remembered and practised. The result of these advantages is that higher yields of high-quality produce are obtained over an extended period of cropping. A downside of NFT is that it has very little buffering against interruptions in the flow (e.g., power outages). But, overall, it is probably one of the more productive techniques.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The same design characteristics apply to all conventional NFT systems. While slopes along channels of 1:100 have been recommended, in practice it is difficult to build a base for channels that is sufficiently true to enable nutrient films to flow without ponding in locally depressed areas. As a consequence, it is recommended that slopes of 1:30 to 1:40 are used. This allows for minor irregularities in the surface, but, even with these slopes, ponding and water logging may occur. The slope may be provided by the floor, benches or racks may hold the channels and provide the required slope. Both methods are used and depend on local requirements, often determined by the site and crop requirements.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "As a general guide, flow rates for each gully should be one liter per minute. At planting, rates may be half this and the upper limit of 2 L/min appears about the maximum. Flow rates beyond these extremes are often associated with nutritional problems. Depressed growth rates of many crops have been observed when channels exceed 12 meters in length. On rapidly growing crops, tests have indicated that, while oxygen levels remain adequate, nitrogen may be depleted over the length of the gully. As a consequence, channel length should not exceed 10–15 meters. In situations where this is not possible, the reductions in growth can be eliminated by placing another nutrient feed halfway along the gully and halving the flow rates through each outlet.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Aeroponics is a system wherein roots are continuously or discontinuously kept in an environment saturated with fine drops (a mist or aerosol) of nutrient solution. The method requires no substrate and entails growing plants with their roots suspended in a deep air or growth chamber with the roots periodically wetted with a fine mist of atomized nutrients. Excellent aeration is the main advantage of aeroponics.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Aeroponic techniques have proven to be commercially successful for propagation, seed germination, seed potato production, tomato production, leaf crops, and micro-greens. Since inventor Richard Stoner commercialized aeroponic technology in 1983, aeroponics has been implemented as an alternative to water intensive hydroponic systems worldwide. A major limitation of hydroponics is the fact that 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of water can only hold 8 milligrams (0.12 gr) of air, no matter whether aerators are utilized or not.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Another distinct advantage of aeroponics over hydroponics is that any species of plants can be grown in a true aeroponic system because the microenvironment of an aeroponic can be finely controlled. Another limitation of hydroponics is that certain species of plants can only survive for so long in water before they become waterlogged. In contrast, suspended aeroponic plants receive 100% of the available oxygen and carbon dioxide to their roots zone, stems, and leaves, thus accelerating biomass growth and reducing rooting times. NASA research has shown that aeroponically grown plants have an 80% increase in dry weight biomass (essential minerals) compared to hydroponically grown plants. Aeroponics also uses 65% less water than hydroponics. NASA concluded that aeroponically grown plants require ¼ the nutrient input compared to hydroponics. Unlike hydroponically grown plants, aeroponically grown plants will not suffer transplant shock when transplanted to soil, and offers growers the ability to reduce the spread of disease and pathogens. Aeroponics is also widely used in laboratory studies of plant physiology and plant pathology. Aeroponic techniques have been given special attention from NASA since a mist is easier to handle than a liquid in a zero-gravity environment.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Fogponics is a derivation of aeroponics wherein the nutrient solution is aerosolized by a diaphragm vibrating at ultrasonic frequencies. Solution droplets produced by this method tend to be 5–10 µm in diameter, smaller than those produced by forcing a nutrient solution through pressurized nozzles, as in aeroponics. The smaller size of the droplets allows them to diffuse through the air more easily, and deliver nutrients to the roots without limiting their access to oxygen.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Passive sub-irrigation, also known as passive hydroponics, semi-hydroponics, or hydroculture, is a method wherein plants are grown in an inert porous medium that moves water and fertilizer to the roots by capillary action from a separate reservoir as necessary, reducing labor and providing a constant supply of water to the roots. In the simplest method, the pot sits in a shallow solution of fertilizer and water or on a capillary mat saturated with nutrient solution. The various hydroponic media available, such as expanded clay and coconut husk, contain more air space than more traditional potting mixes, delivering increased oxygen to the roots, which is important in epiphytic plants such as orchids and bromeliads, whose roots are exposed to the air in nature. Additional advantages of passive hydroponics are the reduction of root rot and the additional ambient humidity provided through evaporations.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Hydroculture compared to traditional farming in terms of crops yield per area in a controlled environment was roughly 10 times more efficient than traditional farming, uses 13 times less water in one crop cycle than traditional farming, but on average uses 100 times more kilojoules per kilogram of energy than traditional farming.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In its simplest form, nutrient-enriched water is pumped into containers with plants in a growing medium such as Expanded clay aggregate At regular intervals, a simple timer causes a pump to fill the containers with nutrient solution, after which the solution drains back down into the reservoir. This keeps the medium regularly flushed with nutrients and air.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In a run-to-waste system, nutrient and water solution is periodically applied to the medium surface. The method was invented in Bengal in 1946; for this reason it is sometimes referred to as \"The Bengal System\".",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "This method can be set up in various configurations. In its simplest form, a nutrient-and-water solution is manually applied one or more times per day to a container of inert growing media, such as rockwool, perlite, vermiculite, coco fibre, or sand. In a slightly more complex system, it is automated with a delivery pump, a timer and irrigation tubing to deliver nutrient solution with a delivery frequency that is governed by the key parameters of plant size, plant growing stage, climate, substrate, and substrate conductivity, pH, and water content.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In a commercial setting, watering frequency is multi-factorial and governed by computers or PLCs.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Commercial hydroponics production of large plants like tomatoes, cucumber, and peppers uses one form or another of run-to-waste hydroponics.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The hydroponic method of plant production by means of suspending the plant roots in a solution of nutrient-rich, oxygenated water. Traditional methods favor the use of plastic buckets and large containers with the plant contained in a net pot suspended from the centre of the lid and the roots suspended in the nutrient solution. The solution is oxygen saturated by an air pump combined with porous stones. With this method, the plants grow much faster because of the high amount of oxygen that the roots receive. The Kratky Method is similar to deep water culture, but uses a non-circulating water reservoir.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Top-fed deep water culture is a technique involving delivering highly oxygenated nutrient solution direct to the root zone of plants. While deep water culture involves the plant roots hanging down into a reservoir of nutrient solution, in top-fed deep water culture the solution is pumped from the reservoir up to the roots (top feeding). The water is released over the plant's roots and then runs back into the reservoir below in a constantly recirculating system. As with deep water culture, there is an airstone in the reservoir that pumps air into the water via a hose from outside the reservoir. The airstone helps add oxygen to the water. Both the airstone and the water pump run 24 hours a day.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The biggest advantage of top-fed deep water culture over standard deep water culture is increased growth during the first few weeks. With deep water culture, there is a time when the roots have not reached the water yet. With top-fed deep water culture, the roots get easy access to water from the beginning and will grow to the reservoir below much more quickly than with a deep water culture system. Once the roots have reached the reservoir below, there is not a huge advantage with top-fed deep water culture over standard deep water culture. However, due to the quicker growth in the beginning, grow time can be reduced by a few weeks.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A rotary hydroponic garden is a style of commercial hydroponics created within a circular frame which rotates continuously during the entire growth cycle of whatever plant is being grown.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "While system specifics vary, systems typically rotate once per hour, giving a plant 24 full turns within the circle each 24-hour period. Within the center of each rotary hydroponic garden can be a high intensity grow light, designed to simulate sunlight, often with the assistance of a mechanized timer.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Each day, as the plants rotate, they are periodically watered with a hydroponic growth solution to provide all nutrients necessary for robust growth. Due to the plants continuous fight against gravity, plants typically mature much more quickly than when grown in soil or other traditional hydroponic growing systems. Because rotary hydroponic systems have a small size, they allow for more plant material to be grown per area of floor space than other traditional hydroponic systems.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Rotary hydroponic systems should be avoided in most circumstances, mainly because of their experimental nature and their high costs for finding, buying, operating, and maintaining them.",
"title": "Techniques"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Different media are appropriate for different growing techniques.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Rock wool (mineral wool) is the most widely used medium in hydroponics. Rock wool is an inert substrate suitable for both run-to-waste and recirculating systems. Rock wool is made from molten rock, basalt or 'slag' that is spun into bundles of single filament fibres, and bonded into a medium capable of capillary action, and is, in effect, protected from most common microbiological degradation. Rock wool is typically used only for the seedling stage, or with newly cut clones, but can remain with the plant base for its lifetime. Rock wool has many advantages and some disadvantages. The latter being the possible skin irritancy (mechanical) whilst handling (1:1000). Flushing with cold water usually brings relief. Advantages include its proven efficiency and effectiveness as a commercial hydroponic substrate. Most of the rock wool sold to date is a non-hazardous, non-carcinogenic material, falling under Note Q of the European Union Classification Packaging and Labeling Regulation (CLP).",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Mineral wool products can be engineered to hold large quantities of water and air that aid root growth and nutrient uptake in hydroponics; their fibrous nature also provides a good mechanical structure to hold the plant stable. The naturally high pH of mineral wool makes them initially unsuitable to plant growth and requires \"conditioning\" to produce a wool with an appropriate, stable pH.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Baked clay pellets are suitable for hydroponic systems in which all nutrients are carefully controlled in water solution. The clay pellets are inert, pH-neutral, and do not contain any nutrient value.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The clay is formed into round pellets and fired in rotary kilns at 1,200 °C (2,190 °F). This causes the clay to expand, like popcorn, and become porous. It is light in weight, and does not compact over time. The shape of an individual pellet can be irregular or uniform depending on brand and manufacturing process. The manufacturers consider expanded clay to be an ecologically sustainable and re-usable growing medium because of its ability to be cleaned and sterilized, typically by washing in solutions of white vinegar, chlorine bleach, or hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and rinsing completely.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Another view is that clay pebbles are best not re-used even when they are cleaned, due to root growth that may enter the medium. Breaking open a clay pebble after use can reveal this growth.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Growstones, made from glass waste, have both more air and water retention space than perlite and peat. This aggregate holds more water than parboiled rice hulls. Growstones by volume consist of 0.5 to 5% calcium carbonate – for a standard 5.1 kg bag of Growstones that corresponds to 25.8 to 258 grams of calcium carbonate. The remainder is soda-lime glass.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Coconut coir, also known as coir peat, is a natural byproduct derived from coconut processing. The outer husk of a coconut consists of fibers which are commonly used to make a myriad of items ranging from floor mats to brushes. After the long fibers are used for those applications, the dust and short fibers are merged to create coir. Coconuts absorb high levels of nutrients throughout their life cycle, so the coir must undergo a maturation process before it becomes a viable growth medium. This process removes salt, tannins and phenolic compounds through substantial water washing. Contaminated water is a byproduct of this process, as three hundred to six hundred liters of water per one cubic meter of coir are needed. Additionally, this maturation can take up to six months and one study concluded the working conditions during the maturation process are dangerous and would be illegal in North America and Europe. Despite requiring attention, posing health risks and environmental impacts, coconut coir has impressive material properties. When exposed to water, the brown, dry, chunky and fibrous material expands nearly three or four times its original size. This characteristic combined with coconut coir's water retention capacity and resistance to pests and diseases make it an effective growth medium. Used as an alternative to rock wool, coconut coir offers optimized growing conditions.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Parboiled rice husks (PBH) are an agricultural byproduct that would otherwise have little use. They decay over time, and allow drainage, and even retain less water than growstones. A study showed that rice husks did not affect the effects of plant growth regulators.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Perlite is a volcanic rock that has been superheated into very lightweight expanded glass pebbles. It is used loose or in plastic sleeves immersed in the water. It is also used in potting soil mixes to decrease soil density. It does contain a high amount of fluorine which could be harmful to some plants. Perlite has similar properties and uses to vermiculite but, in general, holds more air and less water and is buoyant.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Like perlite, vermiculite is a mineral that has been superheated until it has expanded into light pebbles. Vermiculite holds more water than perlite and has a natural \"wicking\" property that can draw water and nutrients in a passive hydroponic system. If too much water and not enough air surrounds the plants roots, it is possible to gradually lower the medium's water-retention capability by mixing in increasing quantities of perlite.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Like perlite, pumice is a lightweight, mined volcanic rock that finds application in hydroponics.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Sand is cheap and easily available. However, it is heavy, does not hold water very well, and it must be sterilized between uses.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The same type that is used in aquariums, though any small gravel can be used, provided it is washed first. Indeed, plants growing in a typical traditional gravel filter bed, with water circulated using electric powerhead pumps, are in effect being grown using gravel hydroponics, also termed \"nutriculture\". Gravel is inexpensive, easy to keep clean, drains well and will not become waterlogged. However, it is also heavy, and, if the system does not provide continuous water, the plant roots may dry out.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Wood fibre, produced from steam friction of wood, is an efficient organic substrate for hydroponics. It has the advantage that it keeps its structure for a very long time. Wood wool (i.e. wood slivers) have been used since the earliest days of the hydroponics research. However, more recent research suggests that wood fibre may have detrimental effects on \"plant growth regulators\".",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Wool from shearing sheep is a little-used yet promising renewable growing medium. In a study comparing wool with peat slabs, coconut fibre slabs, perlite and rockwool slabs to grow cucumber plants, sheep wool had a greater air capacity of 70%, which decreased with use to a comparable 43%, and water capacity that increased from 23% to 44% with use. Using sheep wool resulted in the greatest yield out of the tested substrates, while application of a biostimulator consisting of humic acid, lactic acid and Bacillus subtilis improved yields in all substrates.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Brick shards have similar properties to gravel. They have the added disadvantages of possibly altering the pH and requiring extra cleaning before reuse.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Polystyrene packing peanuts are inexpensive, readily available, and have excellent drainage. However, they can be too lightweight for some uses. They are used mainly in closed-tube systems. Note that non-biodegradable polystyrene peanuts must be used; biodegradable packing peanuts will decompose into a sludge. Plants may absorb styrene and pass it to their consumers; this is a possible health risk.",
"title": "Substrates (growing support materials)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The formulation of hydroponic solutions is an application of plant nutrition, with nutrient deficiency symptoms mirroring those found in traditional soil based agriculture. However, the underlying chemistry of hydroponic solutions can differ from soil chemistry in many significant ways. Important differences include:",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "As in conventional agriculture, nutrients should be adjusted to satisfy Liebig's law of the minimum for each specific plant variety. Nevertheless, generally acceptable concentrations for nutrient solutions exist, with minimum and maximum concentration ranges for most plants being somewhat similar. Most nutrient solutions are mixed to have concentrations between 1,000 and 2,500 ppm. Acceptable concentrations for the individual nutrient ions, which comprise that total ppm figure, are summarized in the following table. For essential nutrients, concentrations below these ranges often lead to nutrient deficiencies while exceeding these ranges can lead to nutrient toxicity. Optimum nutrition concentrations for plant varieties are found empirically by experience or by plant tissue tests.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Organic fertilizers can be used to supplement or entirely replace the inorganic compounds used in conventional hydroponic solutions. However, using organic fertilizers introduces a number of challenges that are not easily resolved. Examples include:",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Nevertheless, if precautions are taken, organic fertilizers can be used successfully in hydroponics.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Examples of suitable materials, with their average nutritional contents tabulated in terms of percent dried mass, are listed in the following table.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Micronutrients can be sourced from organic fertilizers as well. For example, composted pine bark is high in manganese and is sometimes used to fulfill that mineral requirement in hydroponic solutions. To satisfy requirements for National Organic Programs, pulverized, unrefined minerals (e.g. Gypsum, Calcite, and glauconite) can also be added to satisfy a plant's nutritional needs.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Compounds can be added in both organic and conventional hydroponic systems to improve nutrition acquisition and uptake by the plant. Chelating agents and humic acid have been shown to increase nutrient uptake. Additionally, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), which are regularly utilized in field and greenhouse agriculture, have been shown to benefit hydroponic plant growth development and nutrient acquisition. Some PGPR are known to increase nitrogen fixation. While nitrogen is generally abundant in hydroponic systems with properly maintained fertilizer regimens, Azospirillum and Azotobacter genera can help maintain mobilized forms of nitrogen in systems with higher microbial growth in the rhizosphere. Traditional fertilizer methods often lead to high accumulated concentrations of nitrate within plant tissue at harvest. Rhodopseudo-monas palustris has been shown to increase nitrogen use efficiency, increase yield, and decrease nitrate concentration by 88% at harvest compared to traditional hydroponic fertilizer methods in leafy greens. Many Bacillus spp., Pseudomonas spp. and Streptomyces spp. convert forms of phosphorus in the soil that are unavailable to the plant into soluble anions by decreasing soil pH, releasing phosphorus bound in chelated form that is available in a wider pH range, and mineralizing organic phosphorus.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Some studies have found that Bacillus inoculants allow hydroponic leaf lettuce to overcome high salt stress that would otherwise reduce growth. This can be especially beneficial in regions with high electrical conductivity or salt content in their water source. This could potentially avoid costly reverse osmosis filtration systems while maintaining high crop yield.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Managing nutrient concentrations, oxygen saturation, and pH values within acceptable ranges is essential for successful hydroponic horticulture. Common tools used to manage hydroponic solutions include:",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Chemical equipment can also be used to perform accurate chemical analyses of nutrient solutions. Examples include:",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Using chemical equipment for hydroponic solutions can be beneficial to growers of any background because nutrient solutions are often reusable. Because nutrient solutions are virtually never completely depleted, and should never be due to the unacceptably low osmotic pressure that would result, re-fortification of old solutions with new nutrients can save growers money and can control point source pollution, a common source for the eutrophication of nearby lakes and streams.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Although pre-mixed concentrated nutrient solutions are generally purchased from commercial nutrient manufacturers by hydroponic hobbyists and small commercial growers, several tools exist to help anyone prepare their own solutions without extensive knowledge about chemistry. The free and open source tools HydroBuddy and HydroCal have been created by professional chemists to help any hydroponics grower prepare their own nutrient solutions. The first program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux while the second one can be used through a simple JavaScript interface. Both programs allow for basic nutrient solution preparation although HydroBuddy provides added functionality to use and save custom substances, save formulations and predict electrical conductivity values.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Often mixing hydroponic solutions using individual salts is impractical for hobbyists or small-scale commercial growers because commercial products are available at reasonable prices. However, even when buying commercial products, multi-component fertilizers are popular. Often these products are bought as three part formulas which emphasize certain nutritional roles. For example, solutions for vegetative growth (i.e. high in nitrogen), flowering (i.e. high in potassium and phosphorus), and micronutrient solutions (i.e. with trace minerals) are popular. The timing and application of these multi-part fertilizers should coincide with a plant's growth stage. For example, at the end of an annual plant's life cycle, a plant should be restricted from high nitrogen fertilizers. In most plants, nitrogen restriction inhibits vegetative growth and helps induce flowering.",
"title": "Nutrient solutions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "With pest problems reduced and nutrients constantly fed to the roots, productivity in hydroponics is high; however, growers can further increase yield by manipulating a plant's environment by constructing sophisticated growrooms.",
"title": "Additional improvements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "To increase yield further, some sealed greenhouses inject CO2 into their environment to help improve growth and plant fertility.",
"title": "Additional improvements"
}
]
| Hydroponics is a type of horticulture and a subset of hydroculture which involves growing plants, usually crops or medicinal plants, without soil, by using water-based mineral nutrient solutions. Terrestrial or aquatic plants may grow with their roots exposed to the nutritious liquid or the roots may be mechanically supported by an inert medium such as perlite, gravel, or other substrates. Despite inert media, roots can cause changes of the rhizosphere pH and root exudates can affect rhizosphere biology and physiological balance of the nutrient solution when secondary metabolites are produced in plants. Transgenic plants grown hydroponically allow the release of pharmaceutical proteins as part of the root exudate into the hydroponic medium. The nutrients used in hydroponic systems can come from many different organic or inorganic sources, including fish excrement, duck manure, purchased chemical fertilizers, or artificial standard or hybrid nutrient solutions. In contrast to field cultivation, plants are commonly grown hydroponically in a greenhouse or contained environment on inert media, adapted to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) process. Plants commonly grown hydroponically include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, lettuces, and cannabis, usually for commercial use, as well as Arabidopsis thaliana, which serves as a model organism in plant science and genetics. Hydroponics offers many advantages, notably a decrease in water usage in agriculture. To grow 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of tomatoes using intensive farming methods requires 214 liters of water; using hydroponics, 70 liters; and only 20 liters using aeroponics. Hydroponic cultures lead to highest biomass and protein production compared to other growth substrates, of plants cultivated in the same environmental conditions and supplied with equal amounts of nutrients. Since hydroponic growing takes much less water and nutrients to grow produce, and climate change threatens agricultural yields, it could be possible in the future for people in harsh environments with little accessible water to hydroponically grow their own plant-based food. Hydroponics is not only used on earth, but has also proven itself in plant production experiments in space. | 2001-11-13T16:22:35Z | 2023-12-22T21:11:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics |
14,134 | Humanist (disambiguation) | Humanist may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Humanist may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Humanist may refer to: A proponent or practitioner of humanism, which has several distinct senses, which are listed at:
Humanism (disambiguation)
A Renaissance Humanist or scholar in the Renaissance
Humanist, a typeface class under the Vox-ATypI classification, which may refer to:
Humanist sans-serif typefaces
Humanist or old-style serif typefaces
Humanist, an email discussion list on humanities computing, described as “an international online seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities”
The Humanist (journal), a magazine published by the American Humanist Association
Humanist (journal), a magazine published by the Norwegian Humanist Association
A scholar or academic in the Humanities
Humanism
Humanistic (album), the 2001 debut album by Abandoned Pools
Humanist minuscule, a style of handwriting invented in 15th century Italy
Humanist Movement, international volunteer organisation linked to Silo, sometimes referred to as New Humanism | 2023-01-16T19:01:24Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_(disambiguation) |
|
14,135 | Henry Purcell | Henry Purcell (/ˈpɜːrsəl/, rare: /pərˈsɛl/ c. 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer of Baroque music.
Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.
Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster – the area of London later known as Devil's Acre, a notorious slum – in 1659. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell was a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell, the youngest of the brothers, was also a prolific composer who wrote the music for much of the final act of The Indian Queen after his brother Henry's death. The family lived just a few hundred yards west of Westminster Abbey from 1659 onwards.
After his father's death in 1664, Purcell was placed under the guardianship of his uncle Thomas, who showed him great affection and kindness. Thomas arranged for Henry to be admitted as a chorister. Henry studied first under Captain Henry Cooke, Master of the Children, and afterwards under Pelham Humfrey, Cooke's successor, who was a pupil of Lully. The composer Matthew Locke was a family friend and, particularly with his semi-operas, probably also had a musical influence on the young Purcell. Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673 when he became assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, who held the post of keeper of wind instruments to the King.
Purcell is said to have been composing at nine years old, but the earliest work that can be certainly identified as his is an ode for the King's birthday, written in 1670, when he was eleven. The dates for his compositions are often uncertain, despite considerable research. It is assumed that the three-part song Sweet tyranness, I now resign was written by him as a child. After Humfrey's death, Purcell continued his studies under Dr John Blow. He attended Westminster School and in 1676 was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey. Henry Purcell's earliest anthem, Lord, who can tell, was composed in 1678. It is a psalm that is prescribed for Christmas Day and also to be read at morning prayer on the fourth day of the month.
In 1679, he wrote songs for John Playford's Choice Ayres, Songs and Dialogues and an anthem, the name of which is unknown, for the Chapel Royal. From an extant letter written by Thomas Purcell we learn that this anthem was composed for the exceptionally fine voice of the Rev. John Gostling, then at Canterbury, but afterwards a gentleman of His Majesty's Chapel. Purcell wrote several anthems at different times for Gostling's extraordinary basso profondo voice, which is known to have had a range of at least two full octaves, from D below the bass staff to the D above it. The dates of very few of these sacred compositions are known; perhaps the most notable example is the anthem They that go down to the sea in ships. In gratitude for the providential escape of King Charles II from shipwreck, Gostling, who had been of the royal party, put together some verses from the Psalms in the form of an anthem and requested Purcell to set them to music. The challenging work opens with a passage which traverses the full extent of Gostling's range, beginning on the upper D and descending two octaves to the lower.
Between 1680 and 1688 Purcell wrote music for seven plays. The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689. It was written to a libretto furnished by Nahum Tate, and performed in 1689 in cooperation with Josias Priest, a dancing master and the choreographer for the Dorset Garden Theatre. Priest's wife kept a boarding school for young gentlewomen, first in Leicester Fields and afterwards at Chelsea, where the opera was performed. It is occasionally considered the first genuine English opera, though that title is usually given to Blow's Venus and Adonis: as in Blow's work, the action does not progress in spoken dialogue but in Italian-style recitative. Each work runs to less than one hour. At the time, Dido and Aeneas never found its way to the theatre, though it appears to have been very popular in private circles. It is believed to have been extensively copied, but only one song was printed by Purcell's widow in Orpheus Britannicus, and the complete work remained in manuscript until 1840 when it was printed by the Musical Antiquarian Society under the editorship of Sir George Macfarren. The composition of Dido and Aeneas gave Purcell his first chance to write a sustained musical setting of a dramatic text. It was his only opportunity to compose a work in which the music carried the entire drama. The story of Dido and Aeneas derives from the original source in Virgil's epic the Aeneid. During the early part of 1679, he produced two important works for the stage, the music for Nathaniel Lee's Theodosius, and Thomas d'Urfey's Virtuous Wife.
In 1679, Blow, who had been appointed organist of Westminster Abbey 10 years before, resigned his office in favour of Purcell. Purcell now devoted himself almost entirely to the composition of sacred music, and for six years severed his connection with the theatre. He had probably written his two important stage works before taking up his new office.
Soon after Purcell's marriage in 1682, on the death of Edward Lowe, he was appointed organist of the Chapel Royal, an office which he was able to hold simultaneously with his position at Westminster Abbey. His eldest son was born in this same year, but he was short-lived. His first printed composition, Twelve Sonatas, was published in 1683. For some years after this, he was busy in the production of sacred music, odes addressed to the king and royal family, and other similar works. In 1685, he wrote two of his finest anthems, I was glad and My heart is inditing, for the coronation of King James II. In 1690 he composed a setting of the birthday ode for Queen Mary, Arise, my muse and four years later wrote one of his most elaborate, important and magnificent works – a setting for another birthday ode for the Queen, written by Nahum Tate, entitled Come Ye Sons of Art.
In 1687, he resumed his connection with the theatre by furnishing the music for John Dryden's tragedy Tyrannick Love. In this year, Purcell also composed a march and passepied called Quick-step, which became so popular that Lord Wharton adapted the latter to the fatal verses of Lillibullero; and in or before January 1688, Purcell composed his anthem Blessed are they that fear the Lord by the express command of the King. A few months later, he wrote the music for D'Urfey's play, The Fool's Preferment. In 1690, he composed the music for Betterton's adaptation of Fletcher and Massinger's Prophetess (afterwards called Dioclesian) and Dryden's Amphitryon. In 1691, he wrote the music for what is sometimes considered his dramatic masterpiece, King Arthur, or The British Worthy. In 1692, he composed The Fairy-Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), the score of which (his longest for theatre) was rediscovered in 1901 and published by the Purcell Society. The Indian Queen followed in 1695, in which year he also wrote songs for Dryden and Davenant's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (recently, this has been disputed by music scholars), probably including "Full fathom five" and "Come unto these yellow sands". The Indian Queen was adapted from a tragedy by Dryden and Sir Robert Howard. In these semi-operas (another term for which at the time was "dramatic opera"), the main characters of the plays do not sing but speak their lines: the action moves in dialogue rather than recitative. The related songs are sung "for" them by singers, who have minor dramatic roles.
Purcell's Te Deum and Jubilate Deo were written for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1694, the first English Te Deum ever composed with orchestral accompaniment. This work was annually performed at St Paul's Cathedral until 1712, after which it was performed alternately with Handel's Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate until 1743, when both works were replaced by Handel's Dettingen Te Deum.
He composed an anthem and two elegies for Queen Mary II's funeral, his Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. Besides the operas and semi-operas already mentioned, Purcell wrote the music and songs for Thomas d'Urfey's The Comical History of Don Quixote, Bonduca, The Indian Queen and others, a vast quantity of sacred music, and numerous odes, cantatas, and other miscellaneous pieces. The quantity of his instrumental chamber music is minimal after his early career, and his keyboard music consists of an even more minimal number of harpsichord suites and organ pieces. In 1693, Purcell composed music for two comedies: The Old Bachelor, and The Double Dealer. Purcell also composed for five other plays within the same year. In July 1695, Purcell composed an ode for the Duke of Gloucester for his sixth birthday. The ode is titled Who can from joy refrain? Purcell's four-part sonatas were issued in 1697. In the final six years of his life, Purcell wrote music for forty-two plays.
Purcell died on 21 November 1695 at his home in Marsham Street, at the height of his career. He is believed to have been 35 or 36 years old at the time. The cause of his death is unclear: one theory is that he caught a chill after returning home late from the theatre one night to find that his wife had locked him out. Another is that he succumbed to tuberculosis. The beginning of Purcell's will reads:
In the name of God Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the City of Westminster, gentleman, being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God) do by these presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament. And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving wife, Frances Purcell, all my estate both real and personal of what nature and kind soever...
Purcell is buried adjacent to the organ in Westminster Abbey. The music that he had earlier composed for Queen Mary's funeral was performed during his funeral. Purcell was universally mourned as "a very great master of music." Following his death, the officials at Westminster honoured him by unanimously voting that he be buried with no expense spared in the north aisle of the Abbey. His epitaph reads: "Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq., who left this life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only His harmony can be exceeded."
Purcell and his wife Frances had six children, four of whom died in infancy. His wife, as well as his son Edward (1689–1740) and daughter Frances, survived him. His wife Frances died in 1706, having published a number of her husband's works, including the now-famous collection called Orpheus Britannicus, in two volumes, printed in 1698 and 1702, respectively. Edward was appointed organist of St Clement's, Eastcheap, London, in 1711 and was succeeded by his son Edward Henry Purcell (died 1765). Both men were buried in St Clement's near the organ gallery.
Purcell worked in many genres, both in works closely linked to the court, such as symphony song, to the Chapel Royal, such as the symphony anthem, and the theatre.
Among Purcell's most notable works are his opera Dido and Aeneas (1688), his semi-operas Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Timon of Athens (1695), as well as the compositions Hail! Bright Cecilia (1692), Come Ye Sons of Art (1694) and Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (1695).
After his death, Purcell was honoured by many of his contemporaries, including his old friend John Blow, who wrote An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell (Mark how the lark and linnet sing) with text by his old collaborator, John Dryden. William Croft's 1724 setting for the Burial Service was written in the style of "the great Master". Croft preserved Purcell's setting of "Thou knowest Lord" (Z 58) in his service, for reasons "obvious to any artist"; it has been sung at every British state funeral ever since. More recently, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a famous sonnet entitled simply "Henry Purcell", with a headnote reading: "The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally."
Purcell also had a strong influence on the composers of the English musical renaissance of the early 20th century, most notably Benjamin Britten, who arranged many of Purcell's vocal works for voice(s) and piano in Britten's Purcell Realizations, including from Dido and Aeneas, and whose The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is based on a theme from Purcell's Abdelazar. Stylistically, the aria "I know a bank" from Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream is clearly inspired by Purcell's aria "Sweeter than Roses", which Purcell originally wrote as part of incidental music to Richard Norton's Pausanias, the Betrayer of His Country.
In a 1940 interview Ignaz Friedman stated that he considered Purcell as great as Bach and Beethoven. In Victoria Street, Westminster, England, there is a bronze monument to Purcell, sculpted by Glynn Williams and unveiled in 1995 to mark the 300th anniversary of his death. In 2009, Purcell was selected by the Royal Mail for their "Eminent Britons" commemorative postage stamp issue.
A Purcell Club was founded in London in 1836 for promoting the performance of his music but was dissolved in 1863. In 1876 a Purcell Society was founded, which published new editions of his works. A modern-day Purcell Club has been created, and provides guided tours and concerts in support of Westminster Abbey.
Today there is a Henry Purcell Society of Boston, which performs his music in live concert. There is a Purcell Society in London, which collects and studies Purcell manuscripts and musical scores, concentrating on producing revised versions of the scores of all his music. Purcell's works have been catalogued by Franklin Zimmerman, who gave them a number preceded by Z.
So strong was his reputation that a popular wedding processional was incorrectly attributed to Purcell for many years. The so-called Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary was in fact written around 1700 by a British composer named Jeremiah Clarke as the Prince of Denmark's March.
Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary was reworked by Wendy Carlos for the title music of the 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange. The 1973 Rolling Stone review of Jethro Tull's A Passion Play compared the musical style of the album with that of Purcell. In 2009 Pete Townshend of The Who, an English rock band that established itself in the 1960s, identified Purcell's harmonies, particularly the use of suspension and resolution (Townshend has mentioned Chaconne from The Gordian Knot Untied) that he had learned from producer Kit Lambert, as an influence on the band's music (in songs such as "Won't Get Fooled Again" (1971), "I Can See for Miles" (1967) and the very Purcellian intro to "Pinball Wizard"). Purcell's music was widely featured as background music in the Academy Award winning 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer, with a soundtrack on CBS Masterworks Records. The 1995 film, England, My England, tells the story of an actor who is himself writing a play about Purcell's life and music, and features many of his compositions.
In the 21st century, the soundtrack of the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice features a dance titled "A Postcard to Henry Purcell". This is a version by composer Dario Marianelli of Purcell's Abdelazar theme. In the German-language 2004 movie, Downfall, the music of Dido's Lament is used repeatedly as Nazi Germany collapses. The 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom contains Benjamin Britten's version of the Rondeau in Purcell's Abdelazar created for his 1946 The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. In 2013, the Pet Shop Boys released their single "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" incorporating one of the same ground basses from King Arthur used by Michael Nyman in his The Draughtsman's Contract score. Olivia Chaney performs her adaptation of "There's Not a Swain" on her CD "The Longest River." The song "Music for a while" from Purcell's incidental music to Oedipus, Z. 583 was included in the soundtrack of the 2018 film The Favourite, along with the second movement of his Trumpet Sonata in D major, Z. 850, performed by the English Baroque Soloists, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
"What Power Art Thou" (from King Arthur, or The British Worthy (Z. 628), a semi-opera in five acts with music by Purcell and a libretto by John Dryden) is featured in The Crown. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry Purcell (/ˈpɜːrsəl/, rare: /pərˈsɛl/ c. 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer of Baroque music.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster – the area of London later known as Devil's Acre, a notorious slum – in 1659. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell was a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell, the youngest of the brothers, was also a prolific composer who wrote the music for much of the final act of The Indian Queen after his brother Henry's death. The family lived just a few hundred yards west of Westminster Abbey from 1659 onwards.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After his father's death in 1664, Purcell was placed under the guardianship of his uncle Thomas, who showed him great affection and kindness. Thomas arranged for Henry to be admitted as a chorister. Henry studied first under Captain Henry Cooke, Master of the Children, and afterwards under Pelham Humfrey, Cooke's successor, who was a pupil of Lully. The composer Matthew Locke was a family friend and, particularly with his semi-operas, probably also had a musical influence on the young Purcell. Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673 when he became assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, who held the post of keeper of wind instruments to the King.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Purcell is said to have been composing at nine years old, but the earliest work that can be certainly identified as his is an ode for the King's birthday, written in 1670, when he was eleven. The dates for his compositions are often uncertain, despite considerable research. It is assumed that the three-part song Sweet tyranness, I now resign was written by him as a child. After Humfrey's death, Purcell continued his studies under Dr John Blow. He attended Westminster School and in 1676 was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey. Henry Purcell's earliest anthem, Lord, who can tell, was composed in 1678. It is a psalm that is prescribed for Christmas Day and also to be read at morning prayer on the fourth day of the month.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1679, he wrote songs for John Playford's Choice Ayres, Songs and Dialogues and an anthem, the name of which is unknown, for the Chapel Royal. From an extant letter written by Thomas Purcell we learn that this anthem was composed for the exceptionally fine voice of the Rev. John Gostling, then at Canterbury, but afterwards a gentleman of His Majesty's Chapel. Purcell wrote several anthems at different times for Gostling's extraordinary basso profondo voice, which is known to have had a range of at least two full octaves, from D below the bass staff to the D above it. The dates of very few of these sacred compositions are known; perhaps the most notable example is the anthem They that go down to the sea in ships. In gratitude for the providential escape of King Charles II from shipwreck, Gostling, who had been of the royal party, put together some verses from the Psalms in the form of an anthem and requested Purcell to set them to music. The challenging work opens with a passage which traverses the full extent of Gostling's range, beginning on the upper D and descending two octaves to the lower.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Between 1680 and 1688 Purcell wrote music for seven plays. The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689. It was written to a libretto furnished by Nahum Tate, and performed in 1689 in cooperation with Josias Priest, a dancing master and the choreographer for the Dorset Garden Theatre. Priest's wife kept a boarding school for young gentlewomen, first in Leicester Fields and afterwards at Chelsea, where the opera was performed. It is occasionally considered the first genuine English opera, though that title is usually given to Blow's Venus and Adonis: as in Blow's work, the action does not progress in spoken dialogue but in Italian-style recitative. Each work runs to less than one hour. At the time, Dido and Aeneas never found its way to the theatre, though it appears to have been very popular in private circles. It is believed to have been extensively copied, but only one song was printed by Purcell's widow in Orpheus Britannicus, and the complete work remained in manuscript until 1840 when it was printed by the Musical Antiquarian Society under the editorship of Sir George Macfarren. The composition of Dido and Aeneas gave Purcell his first chance to write a sustained musical setting of a dramatic text. It was his only opportunity to compose a work in which the music carried the entire drama. The story of Dido and Aeneas derives from the original source in Virgil's epic the Aeneid. During the early part of 1679, he produced two important works for the stage, the music for Nathaniel Lee's Theodosius, and Thomas d'Urfey's Virtuous Wife.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1679, Blow, who had been appointed organist of Westminster Abbey 10 years before, resigned his office in favour of Purcell. Purcell now devoted himself almost entirely to the composition of sacred music, and for six years severed his connection with the theatre. He had probably written his two important stage works before taking up his new office.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Soon after Purcell's marriage in 1682, on the death of Edward Lowe, he was appointed organist of the Chapel Royal, an office which he was able to hold simultaneously with his position at Westminster Abbey. His eldest son was born in this same year, but he was short-lived. His first printed composition, Twelve Sonatas, was published in 1683. For some years after this, he was busy in the production of sacred music, odes addressed to the king and royal family, and other similar works. In 1685, he wrote two of his finest anthems, I was glad and My heart is inditing, for the coronation of King James II. In 1690 he composed a setting of the birthday ode for Queen Mary, Arise, my muse and four years later wrote one of his most elaborate, important and magnificent works – a setting for another birthday ode for the Queen, written by Nahum Tate, entitled Come Ye Sons of Art.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1687, he resumed his connection with the theatre by furnishing the music for John Dryden's tragedy Tyrannick Love. In this year, Purcell also composed a march and passepied called Quick-step, which became so popular that Lord Wharton adapted the latter to the fatal verses of Lillibullero; and in or before January 1688, Purcell composed his anthem Blessed are they that fear the Lord by the express command of the King. A few months later, he wrote the music for D'Urfey's play, The Fool's Preferment. In 1690, he composed the music for Betterton's adaptation of Fletcher and Massinger's Prophetess (afterwards called Dioclesian) and Dryden's Amphitryon. In 1691, he wrote the music for what is sometimes considered his dramatic masterpiece, King Arthur, or The British Worthy. In 1692, he composed The Fairy-Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), the score of which (his longest for theatre) was rediscovered in 1901 and published by the Purcell Society. The Indian Queen followed in 1695, in which year he also wrote songs for Dryden and Davenant's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (recently, this has been disputed by music scholars), probably including \"Full fathom five\" and \"Come unto these yellow sands\". The Indian Queen was adapted from a tragedy by Dryden and Sir Robert Howard. In these semi-operas (another term for which at the time was \"dramatic opera\"), the main characters of the plays do not sing but speak their lines: the action moves in dialogue rather than recitative. The related songs are sung \"for\" them by singers, who have minor dramatic roles.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Purcell's Te Deum and Jubilate Deo were written for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1694, the first English Te Deum ever composed with orchestral accompaniment. This work was annually performed at St Paul's Cathedral until 1712, after which it was performed alternately with Handel's Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate until 1743, when both works were replaced by Handel's Dettingen Te Deum.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "He composed an anthem and two elegies for Queen Mary II's funeral, his Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. Besides the operas and semi-operas already mentioned, Purcell wrote the music and songs for Thomas d'Urfey's The Comical History of Don Quixote, Bonduca, The Indian Queen and others, a vast quantity of sacred music, and numerous odes, cantatas, and other miscellaneous pieces. The quantity of his instrumental chamber music is minimal after his early career, and his keyboard music consists of an even more minimal number of harpsichord suites and organ pieces. In 1693, Purcell composed music for two comedies: The Old Bachelor, and The Double Dealer. Purcell also composed for five other plays within the same year. In July 1695, Purcell composed an ode for the Duke of Gloucester for his sixth birthday. The ode is titled Who can from joy refrain? Purcell's four-part sonatas were issued in 1697. In the final six years of his life, Purcell wrote music for forty-two plays.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Purcell died on 21 November 1695 at his home in Marsham Street, at the height of his career. He is believed to have been 35 or 36 years old at the time. The cause of his death is unclear: one theory is that he caught a chill after returning home late from the theatre one night to find that his wife had locked him out. Another is that he succumbed to tuberculosis. The beginning of Purcell's will reads:",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the name of God Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the City of Westminster, gentleman, being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God) do by these presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament. And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving wife, Frances Purcell, all my estate both real and personal of what nature and kind soever...",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Purcell is buried adjacent to the organ in Westminster Abbey. The music that he had earlier composed for Queen Mary's funeral was performed during his funeral. Purcell was universally mourned as \"a very great master of music.\" Following his death, the officials at Westminster honoured him by unanimously voting that he be buried with no expense spared in the north aisle of the Abbey. His epitaph reads: \"Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq., who left this life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only His harmony can be exceeded.\"",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Purcell and his wife Frances had six children, four of whom died in infancy. His wife, as well as his son Edward (1689–1740) and daughter Frances, survived him. His wife Frances died in 1706, having published a number of her husband's works, including the now-famous collection called Orpheus Britannicus, in two volumes, printed in 1698 and 1702, respectively. Edward was appointed organist of St Clement's, Eastcheap, London, in 1711 and was succeeded by his son Edward Henry Purcell (died 1765). Both men were buried in St Clement's near the organ gallery.",
"title": "Life and work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Purcell worked in many genres, both in works closely linked to the court, such as symphony song, to the Chapel Royal, such as the symphony anthem, and the theatre.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Among Purcell's most notable works are his opera Dido and Aeneas (1688), his semi-operas Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Timon of Athens (1695), as well as the compositions Hail! Bright Cecilia (1692), Come Ye Sons of Art (1694) and Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (1695).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After his death, Purcell was honoured by many of his contemporaries, including his old friend John Blow, who wrote An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell (Mark how the lark and linnet sing) with text by his old collaborator, John Dryden. William Croft's 1724 setting for the Burial Service was written in the style of \"the great Master\". Croft preserved Purcell's setting of \"Thou knowest Lord\" (Z 58) in his service, for reasons \"obvious to any artist\"; it has been sung at every British state funeral ever since. More recently, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a famous sonnet entitled simply \"Henry Purcell\", with a headnote reading: \"The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Purcell also had a strong influence on the composers of the English musical renaissance of the early 20th century, most notably Benjamin Britten, who arranged many of Purcell's vocal works for voice(s) and piano in Britten's Purcell Realizations, including from Dido and Aeneas, and whose The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is based on a theme from Purcell's Abdelazar. Stylistically, the aria \"I know a bank\" from Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream is clearly inspired by Purcell's aria \"Sweeter than Roses\", which Purcell originally wrote as part of incidental music to Richard Norton's Pausanias, the Betrayer of His Country.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In a 1940 interview Ignaz Friedman stated that he considered Purcell as great as Bach and Beethoven. In Victoria Street, Westminster, England, there is a bronze monument to Purcell, sculpted by Glynn Williams and unveiled in 1995 to mark the 300th anniversary of his death. In 2009, Purcell was selected by the Royal Mail for their \"Eminent Britons\" commemorative postage stamp issue.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A Purcell Club was founded in London in 1836 for promoting the performance of his music but was dissolved in 1863. In 1876 a Purcell Society was founded, which published new editions of his works. A modern-day Purcell Club has been created, and provides guided tours and concerts in support of Westminster Abbey.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Today there is a Henry Purcell Society of Boston, which performs his music in live concert. There is a Purcell Society in London, which collects and studies Purcell manuscripts and musical scores, concentrating on producing revised versions of the scores of all his music. Purcell's works have been catalogued by Franklin Zimmerman, who gave them a number preceded by Z.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "So strong was his reputation that a popular wedding processional was incorrectly attributed to Purcell for many years. The so-called Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary was in fact written around 1700 by a British composer named Jeremiah Clarke as the Prince of Denmark's March.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary was reworked by Wendy Carlos for the title music of the 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange. The 1973 Rolling Stone review of Jethro Tull's A Passion Play compared the musical style of the album with that of Purcell. In 2009 Pete Townshend of The Who, an English rock band that established itself in the 1960s, identified Purcell's harmonies, particularly the use of suspension and resolution (Townshend has mentioned Chaconne from The Gordian Knot Untied) that he had learned from producer Kit Lambert, as an influence on the band's music (in songs such as \"Won't Get Fooled Again\" (1971), \"I Can See for Miles\" (1967) and the very Purcellian intro to \"Pinball Wizard\"). Purcell's music was widely featured as background music in the Academy Award winning 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer, with a soundtrack on CBS Masterworks Records. The 1995 film, England, My England, tells the story of an actor who is himself writing a play about Purcell's life and music, and features many of his compositions.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the 21st century, the soundtrack of the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice features a dance titled \"A Postcard to Henry Purcell\". This is a version by composer Dario Marianelli of Purcell's Abdelazar theme. In the German-language 2004 movie, Downfall, the music of Dido's Lament is used repeatedly as Nazi Germany collapses. The 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom contains Benjamin Britten's version of the Rondeau in Purcell's Abdelazar created for his 1946 The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. In 2013, the Pet Shop Boys released their single \"Love Is a Bourgeois Construct\" incorporating one of the same ground basses from King Arthur used by Michael Nyman in his The Draughtsman's Contract score. Olivia Chaney performs her adaptation of \"There's Not a Swain\" on her CD \"The Longest River.\" The song \"Music for a while\" from Purcell's incidental music to Oedipus, Z. 583 was included in the soundtrack of the 2018 film The Favourite, along with the second movement of his Trumpet Sonata in D major, Z. 850, performed by the English Baroque Soloists, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "\"What Power Art Thou\" (from King Arthur, or The British Worthy (Z. 628), a semi-opera in five acts with music by Purcell and a libretto by John Dryden) is featured in The Crown.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Henry Purcell was an English composer of Baroque music. Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century. | 2001-11-14T07:55:20Z | 2023-10-12T11:50:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Purcell |
14,136 | Hydrophobe | In chemistry, hydrophobicity is the physical property of a molecule that is seemingly repelled from a mass of water (known as a hydrophobe). In contrast, hydrophiles are attracted to water.
Hydrophobic molecules tend to be nonpolar and, thus, prefer other neutral molecules and nonpolar solvents. Because water molecules are polar, hydrophobes do not dissolve well among them. Hydrophobic molecules in water often cluster together, forming micelles. Water on hydrophobic surfaces will exhibit a high contact angle.
Examples of hydrophobic molecules include the alkanes, oils, fats, and greasy substances in general. Hydrophobic materials are used for oil removal from water, the management of oil spills, and chemical separation processes to remove non-polar substances from polar compounds.
Hydrophobic is often used interchangeably with lipophilic, "fat-loving". However, the two terms are not synonymous. While hydrophobic substances are usually lipophilic, there are exceptions, such as the silicones and fluorocarbons.
The term hydrophobe comes from the Ancient Greek ὑδρόφοβος (hydróphobos), "having a fear of water", constructed from Ancient Greek ὕδωρ (húdōr) 'water', and Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos) 'fear'.
The hydrophobic interaction is mostly an entropic effect originating from the disruption of the highly dynamic hydrogen bonds between molecules of liquid water by the nonpolar solute, causing the water to form a clathrate-like structure around the non-polar molecules. This structure formed is more highly ordered than free water molecules due to the water molecules arranging themselves to interact as much as possible with themselves, and thus results in a higher entropic state which causes non-polar molecules to clump together to reduce the surface area exposed to water and decrease the entropy of the system. Thus, the two immiscible phases (hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic) will change so that their corresponding interfacial area will be minimal. This effect can be visualized in the phenomenon called phase separation.
Superhydrophobic surfaces, such as the leaves of the lotus plant, are those that are extremely difficult to wet. The contact angles of a water droplet exceeds 150°. This is referred to as the lotus effect, and is primarily a physical property related to interfacial tension, rather than a chemical property.
In 1805, Thomas Young defined the contact angle θ by analyzing the forces acting on a fluid droplet resting on a solid surface surrounded by a gas.
where
θ can be measured using a contact angle goniometer.
Wenzel determined that when the liquid is in intimate contact with a microstructured surface, θ will change to θW*
where r is the ratio of the actual area to the projected area. Wenzel's equation shows that microstructuring a surface amplifies the natural tendency of the surface. A hydrophobic surface (one that has an original contact angle greater than 90°) becomes more hydrophobic when microstructured – its new contact angle becomes greater than the original. However, a hydrophilic surface (one that has an original contact angle less than 90°) becomes more hydrophilic when microstructured – its new contact angle becomes less than the original. Cassie and Baxter found that if the liquid is suspended on the tops of microstructures, θ will change to θCB*:
where φ is the area fraction of the solid that touches the liquid. Liquid in the Cassie–Baxter state is more mobile than in the Wenzel state.
We can predict whether the Wenzel or Cassie–Baxter state should exist by calculating the new contact angle with both equations. By a minimization of free energy argument, the relation that predicted the smaller new contact angle is the state most likely to exist. Stated in mathematical terms, for the Cassie–Baxter state to exist, the following inequality must be true.
A recent alternative criterion for the Cassie–Baxter state asserts that the Cassie–Baxter state exists when the following 2 criteria are met:1) Contact line forces overcome body forces of unsupported droplet weight and 2) The microstructures are tall enough to prevent the liquid that bridges microstructures from touching the base of the microstructures.
A new criterion for the switch between Wenzel and Cassie-Baxter states has been developed recently based on surface roughness and surface energy. The criterion focuses on the air-trapping capability under liquid droplets on rough surfaces, which could tell whether Wenzel's model or Cassie-Baxter's model should be used for certain combination of surface roughness and energy.
Contact angle is a measure of static hydrophobicity, and contact angle hysteresis and slide angle are dynamic measures. Contact angle hysteresis is a phenomenon that characterizes surface heterogeneity. When a pipette injects a liquid onto a solid, the liquid will form some contact angle. As the pipette injects more liquid, the droplet will increase in volume, the contact angle will increase, but its three-phase boundary will remain stationary until it suddenly advances outward. The contact angle the droplet had immediately before advancing outward is termed the advancing contact angle. The receding contact angle is now measured by pumping the liquid back out of the droplet. The droplet will decrease in volume, the contact angle will decrease, but its three-phase boundary will remain stationary until it suddenly recedes inward. The contact angle the droplet had immediately before receding inward is termed the receding contact angle. The difference between advancing and receding contact angles is termed contact angle hysteresis and can be used to characterize surface heterogeneity, roughness, and mobility. Surfaces that are not homogeneous will have domains that impede motion of the contact line. The slide angle is another dynamic measure of hydrophobicity and is measured by depositing a droplet on a surface and tilting the surface until the droplet begins to slide. In general, liquids in the Cassie–Baxter state exhibit lower slide angles and contact angle hysteresis than those in the Wenzel state.
Dettre and Johnson discovered in 1964 that the superhydrophobic lotus effect phenomenon was related to rough hydrophobic surfaces, and they developed a theoretical model based on experiments with glass beads coated with paraffin or TFE telomer. The self-cleaning property of superhydrophobic micro-nanostructured surfaces was reported in 1977. Perfluoroalkyl, perfluoropolyether, and RF plasma -formed superhydrophobic materials were developed, used for electrowetting and commercialized for bio-medical applications between 1986 and 1995. Other technology and applications have emerged since the mid-1990s. A durable superhydrophobic hierarchical composition, applied in one or two steps, was disclosed in 2002 comprising nano-sized particles ≤ 100 nanometers overlaying a surface having micrometer-sized features or particles ≤ 100 micrometers. The larger particles were observed to protect the smaller particles from mechanical abrasion.
In recent research, superhydrophobicity has been reported by allowing alkylketene dimer (AKD) to solidify into a nanostructured fractal surface. Many papers have since presented fabrication methods for producing superhydrophobic surfaces including particle deposition, sol-gel techniques, plasma treatments, vapor deposition, and casting techniques. Current opportunity for research impact lies mainly in fundamental research and practical manufacturing. Debates have recently emerged concerning the applicability of the Wenzel and Cassie–Baxter models. In an experiment designed to challenge the surface energy perspective of the Wenzel and Cassie–Baxter model and promote a contact line perspective, water drops were placed on a smooth hydrophobic spot in a rough hydrophobic field, a rough hydrophobic spot in a smooth hydrophobic field, and a hydrophilic spot in a hydrophobic field. Experiments showed that the surface chemistry and geometry at the contact line affected the contact angle and contact angle hysteresis, but the surface area inside the contact line had no effect. An argument that increased jaggedness in the contact line enhances droplet mobility has also been proposed.
Many hydrophobic materials found in nature rely on Cassie's law and are biphasic on the submicrometer level with one component air. The lotus effect is based on this principle. Inspired by it, many functional superhydrophobic surfaces have been prepared.
An example of a bionic or biomimetic superhydrophobic material in nanotechnology is nanopin film.
One study presents a vanadium pentoxide surface that switches reversibly between superhydrophobicity and superhydrophilicity under the influence of UV radiation. According to the study, any surface can be modified to this effect by application of a suspension of rose-like V2O5 particles, for instance with an inkjet printer. Once again hydrophobicity is induced by interlaminar air pockets (separated by 2.1 nm distances). The UV effect is also explained. UV light creates electron-hole pairs, with the holes reacting with lattice oxygen, creating surface oxygen vacancies, while the electrons reduce V to V. The oxygen vacancies are met by water, and it is this water absorbency by the vanadium surface that makes it hydrophilic. By extended storage in the dark, water is replaced by oxygen and hydrophilicity is once again lost.
A significant majority of hydrophobic surfaces have their hydrophobic properties imparted by structural or chemical modification of a surface of a bulk material, through either coatings or surface treatments. That is to say, the presence of molecular species (usually organic) or structural features results in high contact angles of water. In recent years, rare earth oxides have been shown to possess intrinsic hydrophobicity. The intrinsic hydrophobicity of rare earth oxides depends on surface orientation and oxygen vacancy levels, and is naturally more robust than coatings or surface treatments, having potential applications in condensers and catalysts that can operate at high temperatures or corrosive environments.
Hydrophobic concrete has been produced since the mid-20th century.
Active recent research on superhydrophobic materials might eventually lead to more industrial applications.
A simple routine of coating cotton fabric with silica or titania particles by sol-gel technique has been reported, which protects the fabric from UV light and makes it superhydrophobic.
An efficient routine has been reported for making polyethylene superhydrophobic and thus self-cleaning. 99% of dirt on such a surface is easily washed away.
Patterned superhydrophobic surfaces also have promise for lab-on-a-chip microfluidic devices and can drastically improve surface-based bioanalysis.
In pharmaceuticals, hydrophobicity of pharmaceutical blends affects important quality attributes of final products, such as drug dissolution and hardness. Methods have been developed to measure the hydrophobicity of pharmaceutical materials.
The development of hydrophobic passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) surfaces, whose effectiveness at solar reflectance and thermal emittance is predicated on their cleanliness, has improved the "self-cleaning" of these surfaces. Scalable and sustainable hydrophobic PDRCs that avoid VOCs have further been developed. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In chemistry, hydrophobicity is the physical property of a molecule that is seemingly repelled from a mass of water (known as a hydrophobe). In contrast, hydrophiles are attracted to water.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hydrophobic molecules tend to be nonpolar and, thus, prefer other neutral molecules and nonpolar solvents. Because water molecules are polar, hydrophobes do not dissolve well among them. Hydrophobic molecules in water often cluster together, forming micelles. Water on hydrophobic surfaces will exhibit a high contact angle.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Examples of hydrophobic molecules include the alkanes, oils, fats, and greasy substances in general. Hydrophobic materials are used for oil removal from water, the management of oil spills, and chemical separation processes to remove non-polar substances from polar compounds.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hydrophobic is often used interchangeably with lipophilic, \"fat-loving\". However, the two terms are not synonymous. While hydrophobic substances are usually lipophilic, there are exceptions, such as the silicones and fluorocarbons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term hydrophobe comes from the Ancient Greek ὑδρόφοβος (hydróphobos), \"having a fear of water\", constructed from Ancient Greek ὕδωρ (húdōr) 'water', and Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos) 'fear'.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The hydrophobic interaction is mostly an entropic effect originating from the disruption of the highly dynamic hydrogen bonds between molecules of liquid water by the nonpolar solute, causing the water to form a clathrate-like structure around the non-polar molecules. This structure formed is more highly ordered than free water molecules due to the water molecules arranging themselves to interact as much as possible with themselves, and thus results in a higher entropic state which causes non-polar molecules to clump together to reduce the surface area exposed to water and decrease the entropy of the system. Thus, the two immiscible phases (hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic) will change so that their corresponding interfacial area will be minimal. This effect can be visualized in the phenomenon called phase separation.",
"title": "Chemical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Superhydrophobic surfaces, such as the leaves of the lotus plant, are those that are extremely difficult to wet. The contact angles of a water droplet exceeds 150°. This is referred to as the lotus effect, and is primarily a physical property related to interfacial tension, rather than a chemical property.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1805, Thomas Young defined the contact angle θ by analyzing the forces acting on a fluid droplet resting on a solid surface surrounded by a gas.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "where",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "θ can be measured using a contact angle goniometer.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Wenzel determined that when the liquid is in intimate contact with a microstructured surface, θ will change to θW*",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "where r is the ratio of the actual area to the projected area. Wenzel's equation shows that microstructuring a surface amplifies the natural tendency of the surface. A hydrophobic surface (one that has an original contact angle greater than 90°) becomes more hydrophobic when microstructured – its new contact angle becomes greater than the original. However, a hydrophilic surface (one that has an original contact angle less than 90°) becomes more hydrophilic when microstructured – its new contact angle becomes less than the original. Cassie and Baxter found that if the liquid is suspended on the tops of microstructures, θ will change to θCB*:",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "where φ is the area fraction of the solid that touches the liquid. Liquid in the Cassie–Baxter state is more mobile than in the Wenzel state.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "We can predict whether the Wenzel or Cassie–Baxter state should exist by calculating the new contact angle with both equations. By a minimization of free energy argument, the relation that predicted the smaller new contact angle is the state most likely to exist. Stated in mathematical terms, for the Cassie–Baxter state to exist, the following inequality must be true.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A recent alternative criterion for the Cassie–Baxter state asserts that the Cassie–Baxter state exists when the following 2 criteria are met:1) Contact line forces overcome body forces of unsupported droplet weight and 2) The microstructures are tall enough to prevent the liquid that bridges microstructures from touching the base of the microstructures.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A new criterion for the switch between Wenzel and Cassie-Baxter states has been developed recently based on surface roughness and surface energy. The criterion focuses on the air-trapping capability under liquid droplets on rough surfaces, which could tell whether Wenzel's model or Cassie-Baxter's model should be used for certain combination of surface roughness and energy.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Contact angle is a measure of static hydrophobicity, and contact angle hysteresis and slide angle are dynamic measures. Contact angle hysteresis is a phenomenon that characterizes surface heterogeneity. When a pipette injects a liquid onto a solid, the liquid will form some contact angle. As the pipette injects more liquid, the droplet will increase in volume, the contact angle will increase, but its three-phase boundary will remain stationary until it suddenly advances outward. The contact angle the droplet had immediately before advancing outward is termed the advancing contact angle. The receding contact angle is now measured by pumping the liquid back out of the droplet. The droplet will decrease in volume, the contact angle will decrease, but its three-phase boundary will remain stationary until it suddenly recedes inward. The contact angle the droplet had immediately before receding inward is termed the receding contact angle. The difference between advancing and receding contact angles is termed contact angle hysteresis and can be used to characterize surface heterogeneity, roughness, and mobility. Surfaces that are not homogeneous will have domains that impede motion of the contact line. The slide angle is another dynamic measure of hydrophobicity and is measured by depositing a droplet on a surface and tilting the surface until the droplet begins to slide. In general, liquids in the Cassie–Baxter state exhibit lower slide angles and contact angle hysteresis than those in the Wenzel state.",
"title": "Superhydrophobicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Dettre and Johnson discovered in 1964 that the superhydrophobic lotus effect phenomenon was related to rough hydrophobic surfaces, and they developed a theoretical model based on experiments with glass beads coated with paraffin or TFE telomer. The self-cleaning property of superhydrophobic micro-nanostructured surfaces was reported in 1977. Perfluoroalkyl, perfluoropolyether, and RF plasma -formed superhydrophobic materials were developed, used for electrowetting and commercialized for bio-medical applications between 1986 and 1995. Other technology and applications have emerged since the mid-1990s. A durable superhydrophobic hierarchical composition, applied in one or two steps, was disclosed in 2002 comprising nano-sized particles ≤ 100 nanometers overlaying a surface having micrometer-sized features or particles ≤ 100 micrometers. The larger particles were observed to protect the smaller particles from mechanical abrasion.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In recent research, superhydrophobicity has been reported by allowing alkylketene dimer (AKD) to solidify into a nanostructured fractal surface. Many papers have since presented fabrication methods for producing superhydrophobic surfaces including particle deposition, sol-gel techniques, plasma treatments, vapor deposition, and casting techniques. Current opportunity for research impact lies mainly in fundamental research and practical manufacturing. Debates have recently emerged concerning the applicability of the Wenzel and Cassie–Baxter models. In an experiment designed to challenge the surface energy perspective of the Wenzel and Cassie–Baxter model and promote a contact line perspective, water drops were placed on a smooth hydrophobic spot in a rough hydrophobic field, a rough hydrophobic spot in a smooth hydrophobic field, and a hydrophilic spot in a hydrophobic field. Experiments showed that the surface chemistry and geometry at the contact line affected the contact angle and contact angle hysteresis, but the surface area inside the contact line had no effect. An argument that increased jaggedness in the contact line enhances droplet mobility has also been proposed.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Many hydrophobic materials found in nature rely on Cassie's law and are biphasic on the submicrometer level with one component air. The lotus effect is based on this principle. Inspired by it, many functional superhydrophobic surfaces have been prepared.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "An example of a bionic or biomimetic superhydrophobic material in nanotechnology is nanopin film.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "One study presents a vanadium pentoxide surface that switches reversibly between superhydrophobicity and superhydrophilicity under the influence of UV radiation. According to the study, any surface can be modified to this effect by application of a suspension of rose-like V2O5 particles, for instance with an inkjet printer. Once again hydrophobicity is induced by interlaminar air pockets (separated by 2.1 nm distances). The UV effect is also explained. UV light creates electron-hole pairs, with the holes reacting with lattice oxygen, creating surface oxygen vacancies, while the electrons reduce V to V. The oxygen vacancies are met by water, and it is this water absorbency by the vanadium surface that makes it hydrophilic. By extended storage in the dark, water is replaced by oxygen and hydrophilicity is once again lost.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A significant majority of hydrophobic surfaces have their hydrophobic properties imparted by structural or chemical modification of a surface of a bulk material, through either coatings or surface treatments. That is to say, the presence of molecular species (usually organic) or structural features results in high contact angles of water. In recent years, rare earth oxides have been shown to possess intrinsic hydrophobicity. The intrinsic hydrophobicity of rare earth oxides depends on surface orientation and oxygen vacancy levels, and is naturally more robust than coatings or surface treatments, having potential applications in condensers and catalysts that can operate at high temperatures or corrosive environments.",
"title": "Research and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Hydrophobic concrete has been produced since the mid-20th century.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Active recent research on superhydrophobic materials might eventually lead to more industrial applications.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A simple routine of coating cotton fabric with silica or titania particles by sol-gel technique has been reported, which protects the fabric from UV light and makes it superhydrophobic.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "An efficient routine has been reported for making polyethylene superhydrophobic and thus self-cleaning. 99% of dirt on such a surface is easily washed away.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Patterned superhydrophobic surfaces also have promise for lab-on-a-chip microfluidic devices and can drastically improve surface-based bioanalysis.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In pharmaceuticals, hydrophobicity of pharmaceutical blends affects important quality attributes of final products, such as drug dissolution and hardness. Methods have been developed to measure the hydrophobicity of pharmaceutical materials.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The development of hydrophobic passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) surfaces, whose effectiveness at solar reflectance and thermal emittance is predicated on their cleanliness, has improved the \"self-cleaning\" of these surfaces. Scalable and sustainable hydrophobic PDRCs that avoid VOCs have further been developed.",
"title": "Applications and potential applications"
}
]
| In chemistry, hydrophobicity is the physical property of a molecule that is seemingly repelled from a mass of water. In contrast, hydrophiles are attracted to water. Hydrophobic molecules tend to be nonpolar and, thus, prefer other neutral molecules and nonpolar solvents. Because water molecules are polar, hydrophobes do not dissolve well among them. Hydrophobic molecules in water often cluster together, forming micelles. Water on hydrophobic surfaces will exhibit a high contact angle. Examples of hydrophobic molecules include the alkanes, oils, fats, and greasy substances in general. Hydrophobic materials are used for oil removal from water, the management of oil spills, and chemical separation processes to remove non-polar substances from polar compounds. Hydrophobic is often used interchangeably with lipophilic, "fat-loving". However, the two terms are not synonymous. While hydrophobic substances are usually lipophilic, there are exceptions, such as the silicones and fluorocarbons. The term hydrophobe comes from the Ancient Greek ὑδρόφοβος (hydróphobos), "having a fear of water", constructed from Ancient Greek ὕδωρ (húdōr) 'water', and Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos) 'fear'. | 2001-11-14T11:42:57Z | 2023-11-04T11:06:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophobe |
14,142 | Harley-Davidson | Harley-Davidson, Inc. (H-D, or simply Harley) is an American motorcycle manufacturer headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1903, it is one of two major American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression along with its historical rival, Indian Motorcycles. The company has survived numerous ownership arrangements, subsidiary arrangements, periods of poor economic health and product quality, and intense global competition to become one of the world's largest motorcycle manufacturers and an iconic brand widely known for its loyal following. There are owner clubs and events worldwide, as well as a company-sponsored, brand-focused museum.
Harley-Davidson is noted for a style of customization that gave rise to the chopper motorcycle style. The company traditionally marketed heavyweight, air-cooled cruiser motorcycles with engine displacements greater than 700 cc, but it has broadened its offerings to include more contemporary VRSC (2002) and middle-weight Street (2015) platforms.
Harley-Davidson manufactures its motorcycles at factories in York, Pennsylvania; Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin; Tomahawk, Wisconsin; Manaus, Brazil; and Rayong, Thailand. The company markets its products worldwide, and also licenses and markets merchandise under the Harley-Davidson brand, among them apparel, home décor and ornaments, accessories, toys, scale models of its motorcycles, and video games based on its motorcycle line and the community.
In 1901, 20-year-old William S. Harley drew up plans for a small engine with a displacement of 7.07 cubic inches (116 cc) and four-inch (102 mm) flywheels designed for use in a regular pedal-bicycle frame. Over the next two years, he and his childhood friend Arthur Davidson worked on their motor-bicycle using the northside Milwaukee machine shop at the home of their friend Henry Melk. It was finished in 1903 with the help of Arthur's brother Walter Davidson. Upon testing their power-cycle, Harley and the Davidson brothers found it unable to climb the hills around Milwaukee without pedal assistance, and they wrote off their first motor-bicycle as a valuable learning experiment.
The three began work on a new and improved machine with an engine of 24.74 cubic inches (405 cc) with 9.75 in (24.8 cm) flywheels weighing 28 lb (13 kg). Its advanced loop-frame pattern was similar to the 1903 Milwaukee Merkel motorcycle designed by Joseph Merkel, later of Flying Merkel fame. The bigger engine and loop-frame design took it out of the motorized bicycle category and marked the path to future motorcycle designs. They also received help with their bigger engine from outboard motor pioneer Ole Evinrude, who was then building gas engines of his own design for automotive use on Milwaukee's Lake Street.
The prototype of the new loop-frame Harley-Davidson was assembled in a 10 ft × 15 ft (3.0 m × 4.6 m) shed in the Davidson family backyard. Most of the major parts, however, were made elsewhere, including some probably fabricated at the West Milwaukee railshops where oldest brother William A. Davidson was toolroom foreman. This prototype machine was functional by September 8, 1904, when it competed in a Milwaukee motorcycle race held at State Fair Park. Edward Hildebrand rode it and placed fourth in the race.
In January 1905, the company placed small advertisements in the Automobile and Cycle Trade Journal offering bare Harley-Davidson engines to the do-it-yourself trade. By April, they were producing complete motorcycles on a very limited basis. That year, Harley-Davidson dealer Carl H. Lang of Chicago sold three bikes from the five built in the Davidson backyard shed. Years later, the company moved the original shed to the Juneau Avenue factory where it stood for many decades as a tribute.
In 1906, Harley and the Davidson brothers built their first factory on Chestnut Street (later Juneau Avenue), at the current location of Harley-Davidson's corporate headquarters. The first Juneau Avenue plant was a 40 ft × 60 ft (12 m × 18 m) single-story wooden structure. The company produced about 50 motorcycles that year.
In 1907, William S. Harley graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a degree in mechanical engineering. That year, they expanded the factory with a second floor and later with facings and additions of Milwaukee pale yellow ("cream") brick. With the new facilities, production increased to 150 motorcycles in 1907. The company was officially incorporated that September. They also began selling their motorcycles to police departments around this time, a market that has been important to them ever since. In 1907, William A. Davidson quit his job as tool foreman for the Milwaukee Road railroad and joined the Motor Company.
Production in 1905 and 1906 were all single-cylinder models with 26.84-cubic-inch (440 cc) engines. In February 1907, they displayed a prototype model at the Chicago Automobile Show with a 45-degree V-Twin engine. Very few V-Twin models were built between 1907 and 1910. These first V-Twins displaced 53.68 cubic inches (880 cc) and produced about 7 horsepower (5.2 kW). This gave about double the power of the first singles, and top speed was about 60 mph (100 km/h). Production jumped from 450 motorcycles in 1908 to 1,149 machines in 1909.
In 1911, the company introduced an improved V-Twin model with a displacement of 49.48 cubic inches (811 cc) and mechanically operated intake valves, as opposed to the "automatic" intake valves used on earlier V-Twins that opened by engine vacuum. It was smaller than earlier twins but gave better performance. After 1913, the majority of bikes produced by Harley-Davidson were V-Twin models.
In 1912, Harley-Davidson introduced their patented "Ful-Floteing Seat", which was suspended by a coil spring inside the seat tube. The spring tension could be adjusted to suit the rider's weight, and more than 3 inches (76 mm) of travel was available. Harley-Davidson used seats of this type until 1958.
By 1913, the yellow brick factory had been demolished and a new five-story structure had been built on the site which took up two blocks along Juneau Avenue and around the corner on 38th Street. Despite the competition, Harley-Davidson was already pulling ahead of Indian and dominated motorcycle racing after 1914. Production that year swelled to 16,284 machines.
In 1917, the United States entered World War I and the military demanded motorcycles for the war effort. Harleys had already been used by the military in the Pancho Villa Expedition but World War I was the first time that it was adopted for military issue, first with the British Model H produced by Triumph Motorcycles Ltd in 1915. The U.S. military purchased over 20,000 motorcycles from Harley-Davidson.
Harley-Davidson launched a line of bicycles in 1917 in hopes of recruiting more domestic customers for its motorcycles. Models included the traditional diamond frame men's bicycle, a step-through frame 3–18 "Ladies Standard", and a 5–17 "Boy Scout" for youth. The effort was discontinued in 1923 because of disappointing sales. The bicycles were built for Harley-Davidson in Dayton, Ohio by the Davis Machine Company from 1917 to 1921, when Davis stopped manufacturing bicycles.
By 1920 Harley-Davidson was the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world, with 28,189 machines produced and dealers in 67 countries. In 1921, Otto Walker set a record on a Harley-Davidson as the first motorcycle to win a race at an average speed greater than 100 mph (160 km/h).
Harley-Davidson put several improvements in place during the 1920s, such as a new 74 cubic inch (1,212.6 cc) V-Twin introduced in 1921, and the "teardrop" gas tank in 1925. They added a front brake in 1928, although only on the J/JD models. In the late summer of 1929, Harley-Davidson introduced its 45-cubic-inch (737 cc) flathead V-Twin to compete with the Indian 101 Scout and the Excelsior Super X. This was the "D" model produced from 1929 to 1931. Riders of Indian motorcycles derisively referred to it as the "three cylinder Harley" because the generator was upright and parallel to the front cylinder. In 1929, Vivian Bales drove a record 5,000 miles across the United States and Canada on a D-model.
The Great Depression began a few months after the introduction of their 45 cu in (740 cm) model. Harley-Davidson's sales fell from 21,000 in 1929 to 3,703 in 1933. Despite this, Harley-Davidson unveiled a new lineup for 1934, which included a flathead engine and Art Deco styling.
In order to survive the remainder of the Depression, the company manufactured industrial powerplants based on their motorcycle engines. They also designed and built a three-wheeled delivery vehicle called the Servi-Car, which remained in production until 1973.
Alfred Rich Child opened a production line in Japan in the mid-1930s with the 74 cu in (1,210 cm) VL. The Japanese license-holder, Sankyo Seiyaku Corporation, severed its business relations with Harley-Davidson in 1936 and continued manufacturing the VL under the Rikuo name.
An 80 cubic inches (1,300 cm) flathead engine was added to the line in 1935, by which time the single-cylinder motorcycles had been discontinued.
In 1936, the 61E and 61EL models with the "Knucklehead" OHV engines were introduced. Valvetrain problems in early Knucklehead engines required a redesign halfway through its first year of production and retrofitting of the new valvetrain on earlier engines.
By 1937, all Harley-Davidson flathead engines were equipped with dry-sump oil recirculation systems similar to the one introduced in the "Knucklehead" OHV engine. The revised 74 cubic inches (1,210 cm) V and VL models were renamed U and UL, the 80 cu in (1,300 cm) VH and VLH to be renamed UH and ULH, and the 45 cu in (740 cm) R to be renamed W.
In 1941, the 74-cubic-inch "Knucklehead" was introduced as the F and the FL. The 80 cu in (1,300 cm) flathead UH and ULH models were discontinued after 1941, while the 74-cubic-inchU & UL flathead models were produced up to 1948.
One of only two American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression (the other being the Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company), Harley-Davidson again produced large numbers of motorcycles for the US Army in World War II and resumed civilian production afterwards, producing a range of large V-twin motorcycles that were successful both on racetracks and for private buyers.
Harley-Davidson, on the eve of World War II, was already supplying the Army with a military-specific version of its 45 cubic inches (740 cm) WL line, called the WLA. The A in this case stood for "Army". Upon the outbreak of war, the company, along with most other manufacturing enterprises, shifted to war work. More than 90,000 military motorcycles, mostly WLAs and WLCs (the Canadian version) were produced, many to be provided to allies. Harley-Davidson received two Army-Navy "E" Awards, one in 1943 and the other in 1945, which were awarded for Excellence in Production.
Shipments to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program numbered at least 30,000. The WLAs produced during all four years of war production generally have 1942 serial numbers. Production of the WLA stopped at the end of World War II, but was resumed from 1950 to 1952 for use in the Korean War.
The U.S. Army also asked Harley-Davidson to produce a new motorcycle with many of the features of BMW's side-valve and shaft-driven R71. Harley-Davidson largely copied the BMW engine and drive train and produced the shaft-driven 750 cc 1942 Harley-Davidson XA. This shared no dimensions, no parts or no design concepts (except side valves) with any prior Harley-Davidson engine. Due to the superior cooling of the flat-twin engine with the cylinders across the frame, Harley's XA cylinder heads ran 100 °F (56 °C) cooler than its V-twins. The XA never entered full production: the motorcycle by that time had been eclipsed by the Jeep as the Army's general-purpose vehicle, and the WLA – already in production – was sufficient for its limited police, escort, and courier roles. Only 1,000 were made and the XA never went into full production. It remains the only shaft-driven Harley-Davidson ever made.
As part of war reparations, Harley-Davidson acquired the design of a small German motorcycle, the DKW RT 125, which they adapted, manufactured, and sold from 1948 to 1966. Various models were made, including the Hummer from 1955 to 1959, but they are all colloquially referred to as "Hummers" at present. BSA in the United Kingdom took the same design as the foundation of their BSA Bantam.
In 1960, Harley-Davidson consolidated the Model 165 and Hummer lines into the Super-10, introduced the Topper scooter, and bought fifty percent of Aermacchi's motorcycle division. Importation of Aermacchi's 250 cc horizontal single began the following year. The bike bore Harley-Davidson badges and was marketed as the Harley-Davidson Sprint. The engine of the Sprint was increased to 350 cc in 1969 and would remain that size until 1974, when the four-stroke Sprint was discontinued.
After the Pacer and Scat models were discontinued at the end of 1965, the Bobcat became the last of Harley-Davidson's American-made two-stroke motorcycles. The Bobcat was manufactured only in the 1966 model year.
Harley-Davidson replaced their American-made lightweight two-stroke motorcycles with the Italian Aermacchi-built two-stroke powered M-65, M-65S, and Rapido. The M-65 had a semi-step-through frame and tank. The M-65S was a M-65 with a larger tank that eliminated the step-through feature. The Rapido was a larger bike with a 125 cc engine. The Aermacchi-built Harley-Davidsons became entirely two-stroke powered when the 250 cc two-stroke SS-250 replaced the four-stroke 350 cc Sprint in 1974.
Harley-Davidson purchased full control of Aermacchi's motorcycle production in 1974 and continued making two-stroke motorcycles there until 1978, when they sold the facility to Cagiva, owned by the Castiglioni family.
In 1952, following their application to the U.S. Tariff Commission for a 40 percent tax on imported motorcycles, Harley-Davidson was charged with restrictive practices.
In 1969, American Machine and Foundry (AMF) bought the company, streamlined production, and slashed the workforce. This tactic resulted in a labor strike and cost-cutting produced lower-quality bikes. Simultaneously, the Japanese "big four" manufacturers (Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha) revolutionized the North American market by introducing what the motoring press would call the Universal Japanese Motorcycle. In comparison, Harley-Davidson's bikes were expensive and inferior in performance, handling, and quality. Sales and quality declined, and the company almost went bankrupt. The "Harley-Davidson" name was mocked as "Hardly Ableson", "Hardly Driveable", and "Hogly Ferguson", and the nickname "Hog" became pejorative.
In 1977, following the successful manufacture of the Liberty Edition to commemorate America's bicentennial in 1976, Harley-Davidson produced what has become one of its most controversial models, the Harley-Davidson Confederate Edition. The bike was essentially a stock Harley-Davidson with Confederate-specific paint and details.
In 1981, AMF sold the company to a group of 13 investors led by Vaughn Beals and Willie G. Davidson for $80 million. The new management team improved product quality, introduced new technologies, and adopted just-in-time inventory management. These operational and product improvements were matched with a strategy of seeking tariff protection for large-displacement motorcycles in the face of intense competition with Japanese manufacturers. These protections were granted by the Reagan administration in 1983, giving Harley-Davidson time to implement their new strategies.
Revising stagnated product designs was a crucial centerpiece of Harley-Davidson's turnaround strategy. Rather than trying to mimic popular Japanese designs, the new management deliberately exploited the "retro" appeal of Harley motorcycles, building machines that deliberately adopted the look and feel of their earlier bikes and the subsequent customizations of owners of that era. Many components such as brakes, forks, shocks, carburetors, electrics and wheels were outsourced from foreign manufacturers and quality increased, technical improvements were made, and buyers slowly returned.
Harley-Davidson bought the "Sub Shock" cantilever-swingarm rear suspension design from Missouri engineer Bill Davis and developed it into its Softail series of motorcycles, introduced in 1984 with the FXST Softail.
In response to possible motorcycle market loss due to the aging of baby-boomers, Harley-Davidson bought luxury motorhome manufacturer Holiday Rambler in 1986. In 1996, the company sold Holiday Rambler to the Monaco Coach Corporation.
The "Sturgis" model, boasting a dual belt-drive, was introduced initially in 1980 and was made for three years. This bike was then brought back as a commemorative model in 1991.
By 1990, with the introduction of the "Fat Boy", Harley-Davidson once again became the sales leader in the heavyweight (over 750 cc) market. At the time of the Fat Boy model introduction, a false etymology spread that "Fat Boy" was a combination of the names of the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy. This has been debunked, as the name "Fat Boy" actually comes from the observation that the motorcycle is somewhat wider than other bikes when viewed head-on.
1993 and 1994 saw the replacement of FXR models with the Dyna (FXD), which became the sole rubber mount FX Big Twin frame in 1994. The FXR was revived briefly from 1999 to 2000 for special limited editions (FXR, FXR & FXR).
Harley-Davidson celebrated their 100th anniversary on September 1, 2003 with a large event and concert featuring performances from Elton John, The Doobie Brothers, Kid Rock, and Tim McGraw.
Construction started on the $75 million, 130,000 square-foot (12,000 m) Harley-Davidson Museum in the Menomonee Valley of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 1, 2006. It opened in 2008 and houses the company's vast collection of historic motorcycles and corporate archives, along with a restaurant, café and meeting space.
Established in 1918, the oldest continuously operating Harley-Davidson dealership outside of the United States is in Australia. Sales in Japan started in 1912 then in 1929, Harley-Davidsons were produced in Japan under license to the company Rikuo (Rikuo Internal Combustion Company) under the name of Harley-Davidson and using the company's tooling, and later under the name Rikuo. Production continued until 1958.
In 1998, the first Harley-Davidson factory outside the US opened in Manaus, Brazil, taking advantage of the free economic zone there. The location was positioned to sell motorcycles in the southern hemisphere market.
In August 2009, Harley-Davidson launched Harley-Davidson India and started selling motorcycles there in 2010. The company established the subsidiary in Gurgaon, near Delhi, in 2011 and created an Indian dealer network. On September 24, 2020, Harley Davidson announced that it would discontinue its sales and manufacturing operations in India due to weak demand and sales. The move involves $75 million in restructuring costs, 70 layoffs and the closure of its Bawal plant in northern India.
Harley-Davidson's association with sportbike manufacturer Buell Motorcycle Company began in 1987 when they supplied Buell with fifty surplus XR1000 engines. Buell continued to buy engines from Harley-Davidson until 1993, when Harley-Davidson bought 49 percent of the Buell Motorcycle Company. Harley-Davidson increased its share in Buell to ninety-eight percent in 1998, and to complete ownership in 2003.
In an attempt to attract newcomers to motorcycling in general and to Harley-Davidson in particular, Buell developed a low-cost, low-maintenance motorcycle. The resulting single-cylinder Buell Blast was introduced in 2000, and was made through 2009, which, according to Buell, was to be the final year of production. The Buell Blast was the training vehicle for the Harley-Davidson Rider's Edge New Rider Course from 2000 until May 2014, when the company re-branded the training academy and started using the Harley-Davidson Street 500 motorcycles. In those 14 years, more than 350,000 participants in the course learned to ride on the Buell Blast.
On October 15, 2009, Harley-Davidson Inc. issued an official statement that it would be discontinuing the Buell line and ceasing production immediately, in order to focus on the Harley-Davidson brand. The company refused to consider selling Buell. Founder Erik Buell subsequently established Erik Buell Racing and continued to manufacture and develop the company's 1125RR racing motorcycle.
During its period of peak demand, during the late 1990s and early first decade of the 21st century, Harley-Davidson embarked on a program of expanding the number of dealerships throughout the country. At the same time, its current dealers typically had waiting lists that extended up to a year for some of the most popular models. Harley-Davidson, like the auto manufacturers, records a sale not when a consumer buys their product, but rather when it is delivered to a dealer. Therefore, it is possible for the manufacturer to inflate sales numbers by requiring dealers to accept more inventory than desired in a practice called channel stuffing. When demand softened following the unique 2003 model year, this news led to a dramatic decline in the stock price. In April 2004 alone, the price of HOG shares dropped from more than $60 to less than $40. Immediately prior to this decline, retiring CEO Jeffrey Bleustein profited $42 million on the exercise of employee stock options. Harley-Davidson was named as a defendant in numerous class action suits filed by investors who claimed they were intentionally defrauded by Harley-Davidson's management and directors. By January 2007, the price of Harley-Davidson shares reached $70.
Starting around 2000, several police departments started reporting problems with high-speed instability on the Harley-Davidson Touring motorcycles. A Raleigh, North Carolina police officer, Charles Paul, was killed when his 2002 police touring motorcycle crashed after reportedly experiencing a high-speed wobble. The California Highway Patrol conducted testing of the Police Touring motorcycles in 2006. The CHP test riders reported experiencing wobble or weave instability while operating the motorcycles on the test track.
On February 2, 2007, upon the expiration of their union contract, about 2,700 employees at Harley-Davidson Inc.'s largest manufacturing plant in York, Pennsylvania, went on strike after failing to agree on wages and health benefits. During the pendency of the strike, the company refused to pay for any portion of the striking employees' health care.
The day before the strike, after the union voted against the proposed contract and to authorize the strike, the company shut down all production at the plant. The York facility employs more than 3,200 workers, both union and non-union.
Harley-Davidson announced on February 16, 2007, that it had reached a labor agreement with union workers at its largest manufacturing plant, a breakthrough in the two-week-old strike. The strike disrupted Harley-Davidson's national production and was felt in Wisconsin, where 440 employees were laid off, and many Harley suppliers also laid off workers because of the strike.
On July 11, 2008, Harley-Davidson announced they had signed a definitive agreement to acquire the MV Agusta Group for US$109 million (€70M). MV Agusta Group contains two lines of motorcycles: the high-performance MV Agusta brand and the lightweight Cagiva brand. The acquisition was completed on August 8.
On October 15, 2009, Harley-Davidson announced that it would divest its interest in MV Agusta. Harley-Davidson Inc. sold Italian motorcycle maker MV Agusta to Claudio Castiglioni – a member of the family that had purchased Aermacchi from H-D in 1978 – for a reported 3 euros, ending the transaction in the first week of August 2010. Castiglioni was MV Agusta's former owner, and had been MV Agusta's chairman since Harley-Davidson bought it in 2008. As part of the deal, Harley-Davidson put $26M into MV Agusta's accounts, essentially giving Castiglioni $26M to take the brand.
The 2007–2008 financial crisis and 2008–2010 automotive industry crisis affected also the motorcycle industry. According to Interbrand, the value of the Harley-Davidson brand fell by 43 percent to $4.34 billion in 2009. The fall in value is believed to be connected to the 66 percent drop in the company profits in two-quarters of the previous year. On April 29, 2010, Harley-Davidson stated that they must cut $54 million in manufacturing costs from its production facilities in Wisconsin, and that they would explore alternative U.S. sites to accomplish this. The announcement came in the wake of a massive company-wide restructuring, which began in early 2009 and involved the closing of two factories, one distribution center, and the planned elimination of nearly 25 percent of its total workforce (around 3,500 employees). The company announced on September 14, 2010, that it would remain in Wisconsin.
The classic Harley-Davidson engines are V-twin engines, with a 45° angle between the cylinders. The crankshaft has a single pin, and both pistons are connected to this pin through their connecting rods.
This 45° angle is covered under several United States patents and is an engineering tradeoff that allows a large, high-torque engine in a relatively small space. It causes the cylinders to fire at uneven intervals and produces the choppy "potato-potato" sound so strongly linked to the Harley-Davidson brand.
To simplify the engine and reduce costs, the V-twin ignition was designed to operate with a single set of points and no distributor. This is known as a dual fire ignition system, causing both spark plugs to fire regardless of which cylinder was on its compression stroke, with the other spark plug firing on its cylinder's exhaust stroke, effectively "wasting a spark". The exhaust note is basically a throaty growling sound with some popping. The 45° design of the engine thus creates a plug firing sequencing as such: The first cylinder fires, the second (rear) cylinder fires 315° later, then there is a 405° gap until the first cylinder fires again, giving the engine its unique sound.
Harley-Davidson has used various ignition systems, including the early points and condenser system on Big Twins and Sportsters up to 1978, a magneto ignition system used on some 1958 to 1969 Sportsters, an early electronic with centrifugal mechanical advance weights on all models from mid-1978 until 1979, and a later electronic with a transistorized ignition control module (more familiarly known as a black box or a brain) on all models 1980 to present.
Starting in 1995, the company introduced Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) as an option for the 30th anniversary edition Electra Glide. EFI became standard on all Harley-Davidson motorcycles, including Sportsters, upon the introduction of the 2007 product line.
In 1991, Harley-Davidson began to participate in the Sound Quality Working Group, founded by Orfield Labs, Bruel and Kjaer, TEAC, Yamaha, Sennheiser, SMS and Cortex. This was the nation's first group to share research on psychological acoustics. Later that year, Harley-Davidson participated in a series of sound quality studies at Orfield Labs, based on recordings taken at the Talladega Superspeedway, with the objective to lower the sound level for EU standards while analytically capturing the "Harley Sound". This research resulted in the bikes that were introduced in compliance with EU standards for 1998.
On February 1, 1994, the company filed a sound trademark application for the distinctive sound of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine: "The mark consists of the exhaust sound of applicant's motorcycles, produced by V-twin, common crankpin motorcycle engines when the goods are in use". Nine of Harley-Davidson's competitors filed comments opposing the application, arguing that cruiser-style motorcycles of various brands use a single-crankpin V-twin engine which produce a similar sound. These objections were followed by litigation. In June 2000, the company dropped efforts to register a sound trademark.
The Revolution engine is based on the VR-1000 Superbike race program, developed by Harley-Davidson's Powertrain Engineering with Porsche helping to make the engine suitable for street use. It is a liquid cooled, dual overhead cam, internally counterbalanced 60 degree V-twin engine with a displacement of 69 cubic inch (1,130 cc), producing 115 hp (86 kW) at 8,250 rpm at the crank, with a redline of 9,000 rpm. It was introduced for the new VRSC (V-Rod) line in 2001 for the 2002 model year, starting with the single VRSCA (V-Twin Racing Street Custom) model. The Revolution marks Harley's first collaboration with Porsche since the V4 Nova project, which, like the V-Rod, was a radical departure from Harley's traditional lineup until it was cancelled by AMF in 1981 in favor of the Evolution engine.
A 1,250 cc Screamin' Eagle version of the Revolution engine was made available for 2005 and 2006, and was present thereafter in a single production model from 2005 to 2007. In 2008, the 1,250 cc Revolution Engine became standard for the entire VRSC line. Harley-Davidson claims 123 hp (92 kW) at the crank for the 2008 VRSCAW model. The VRXSE Destroyer dragbike is equipped with a stroker (75 mm crank) Screamin' Eagle 79 cubic inch (1,300 cc) Revolution Engine, producing 97 pound-feet (132 N⋅m), and more than 165 hp (123 kW).
750 cc and 500 cc versions of the Revolution engine are used in Harley-Davidson's Street line of light cruisers. These motors, named the Revolution X, use a single overhead cam, screw and locknut valve adjustment, a single internal counterbalancer, and vertically split crankcases; all of these changes making it different from the original Revolution design.
An extreme endurance test of the Revolution engine was performed in a dynamometer installation at the Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee, simulating the German Autobahn (highways without general speed limit) between the Porsche research and development center in Weissach, near Stuttgart to Düsseldorf. An undisclosed number of samples of engines failed, until an engine successfully passed the 500-hour nonstop run. This was the benchmark for the engineers to approve the start of production for the Revolution engine, which was documented in the Discovery channel special Harley-Davidson: Birth of the V-Rod, October 14, 2001.
The first Harley-Davidson motorcycles were powered by single-cylinder IOE engines with the inlet valve operated by engine vacuum, based on the DeDion-Bouton pattern. Singles of this type continued to be made until 1913, when a pushrod and rocker system was used to operate the overhead inlet valve on the single, a similar system having been used on their V-twins since 1911. Single-cylinder motorcycle engines were discontinued in 1918.
Single-cylinder engines were reintroduced in 1925 as 1926 models. These singles were available either as flathead engines or as overhead valve engines until 1930, after which they were only available as flatheads. The flathead single-cylinder motorcycles were designated Model A for engines with magneto systems only and Model B for engines with battery and coil systems, while overhead valve versions were designated Model AA and Model BA respectively, and a magneto-only racing version was designated Model S. This line of single-cylinder motorcycles ended production in 1934.
Modern Harley-branded motorcycles fall into one of seven model families: Touring, Softail, Dyna, Sportster, Vrod, Street and LiveWire. These model families are distinguished by the frame, engine, suspension, and other characteristics.
Touring models use Big-Twin engines and large-diameter telescopic forks. All Touring designations begin with the letters FL, e.g., FLHR (Road King) and FLTR (Road Glide).
The touring family, also known as "dressers" or "baggers", includes Road King, Road Glide, Electra Glide and Street Glide models offered in various trims. The Road Kings have a "retro cruiser" appearance and are equipped with a large clear windshield. Road Kings are reminiscent of big-twin models from the 1940s and 1950s. Electra Glides can be identified by their full front fairings. Most Electra Glides sport a fork-mounted fairing referred to as the "Batwing" due to its unmistakable shape. The Road Glide and Road Glide Ultra Classic have a frame-mounted fairing, referred to as the "Sharknose". The Sharknose includes a unique, dual front headlight.
Touring models are distinguishable by their large saddlebags, rear coil-over air suspension and are the only models to offer full fairings with radios and CBs. All touring models use the same frame, first introduced with a Shovelhead motor in 1980, and carried forward with only modest upgrades until 2009, when it was extensively redesigned. The frame is distinguished by the location of the steering head in front of the forks and was the first H-D frame to rubber mount the drivetrain to isolate the rider from the vibration of the big V-twin.
The frame was modified for the 1993 model year when the oil tank went under the transmission and the battery was moved inboard from under the right saddlebag to under the seat. In 1997, the frame was again modified to allow for a larger battery under the seat and to lower seat height. In 2007, Harley-Davidson introduced the 96 cubic inches (1,570 cubic centimetres) Twin Cam 96 engine, as well the six-speed transmission to give the rider better speeds on the highway.
In 2006, Harley introduced the FLHX Street Glide, a bike designed by Willie G. Davidson to be his personal ride, to its touring line.
In 2008, Harley added anti-lock braking systems and cruise control as a factory installed option on all touring models (standard on CVO and Anniversary models). Also new for 2008 is the 6-US-gallon (23 L; 5.0 imp gal) fuel tank for all touring models. 2008 also brought throttle-by-wire to all touring models.
For the 2009 model year, Harley-Davidson redesigned the entire touring range with several changes, including a new frame, new swingarm, a completely revised engine-mounting system, 17-inch (430 mm) front wheels for all but the FLHRC Road King Classic, and a 2–1–2 exhaust. The changes result in greater load carrying capacity, better handling, a smoother engine, longer range and less exhaust heat transmitted to the rider and passenger. Also released for the 2009 model year is the FLHTCUTG Tri-Glide Ultra Classic, the first three-wheeled Harley since the Servi-Car was discontinued in 1973. The model features a unique frame and a 103-cubic-inch (1,690 cc) engine exclusive to the trike.
In 2014, Harley-Davidson released a redesign for specific touring bikes and called it "Project Rushmore". Changes include a new 103CI High Output engine, one handed easy open saddlebags and compartments, a new Boom! Box Infotainment system with either 4.3-inch (10 cm) or 6.5-inch (16.5 cm) screens featuring touchscreen functionality [6.5-inch (16.5 cm) models only], Bluetooth (media and phone with approved compatible devices), available GPS and SiriusXM, Text-to-Speech functionality (with approved compatible devices) and USB connectivity with charging. Other features include ABS with Reflex linked brakes, improved styling, Halogen or LED lighting and upgraded passenger comfort.
These big-twin motorcycles capitalize on Harley's strong value on tradition. With the rear-wheel suspension hidden under the transmission, they are visually similar to the "hardtail" choppers popular in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as from their own earlier history. In keeping with that tradition, Harley offers Softail models with "Heritage" styling that incorporate design cues from throughout their history and used to offer "Springer" front ends on these Softail models from the factory.
Softail models utilize the big-twin engine (F) and the Softail chassis (ST).
Dyna-frame motorcycles were developed in the 1980s and early 1990s and debuted in the 1991 model year with the FXDB Sturgis offered in limited edition quantities. In 1992 the line continued with the limited edition FXDB Daytona and a production model FXD Super Glide. The new DYNA frame featured big-twin engines and traditional styling. They can be distinguished from the Softail by the traditional coil-over suspension that connects the swingarm to the frame, and from the Sportster by their larger engines. On these models, the transmission also houses the engine's oil reservoir.
Prior to 2006, Dyna models typically featured a narrow, XL-style 39mm front fork and front wheel, as well as footpegs which the manufacturer indicated with the letter "X" in the model designation. This lineup traditionally included the Super Glide (FXD), Super Glide Custom (FXDC), Street Bob (FXDB), and Low Rider (FXDL). One exception was the Wide Glide (FXDWG), which featured thicker 41mm forks and a narrow front wheel, but positioned the forks on wider triple-trees that give a beefier appearance. In 2008, the Dyna Fat Bob (FXDF) was introduced to the Dyna lineup, featuring aggressive styling like a new 2–1–2 exhaust, twin headlamps, a 180 mm rear tire, and, for the first time in the Dyna lineup, a 130 mm front tire. For the 2012 model year, the Dyna Switchback (FLD) became the first Dyna to break the tradition of having an FX model designation with floorboards, detachable painted hard saddlebags, touring windshield, headlight nacelle and a wide front tire with full fender. The new front end resembled the big-twin FL models from 1968 to 1971.
The Dyna family used the 88-cubic-inch (1,440 cc) twin cam from 1999 to 2006. In 2007, the displacement was increased to 96 cubic inches (1,570 cc) as the factory increased the stroke to 4.375 inches (111.1 mm). For the 2012 model year, the manufacturer began to offer Dyna models with the 103-cubic-inch (1,690 cc) upgrade. All Dyna models use a rubber-mounted engine to isolate engine vibration. Harley discontinued the Dyna platform in 2017 for the 2018 model year, having been replaced by a completely-redesigned Softail chassis; some of the existing models previously released by the company under the Dyna nameplate have since been carried over to the new Softail line.
Dyna models utilize the big-twin engine (F), footpegs noted as (X) with the exception of the 2012 FLD Switchback, a Dyna model which used floorboards as featured on the Touring (L) models, and the Dyna chassis (D). Therefore, except for the FLD from 2012 to 2016, all Dyna models have designations that begin with FXD, e.g., FXDWG (Dyna Wide Glide) and FXDL (Dyna Low Rider).
Introduced in 1957, the Sportster family were conceived as racing motorcycles, and were popular on dirt and flat-track race courses through the 1960s and 1970s. Smaller and lighter than the other Harley models, contemporary Sportsters make use of 883 cc or 1,200 cc Evolution engines and, though often modified, remain similar in appearance to their racing ancestors.
Up until the 2003 model year, the engine on the Sportster was rigidly mounted to the frame. The 2004 Sportster received a new frame accommodating a rubber-mounted engine. This made the bike heavier and reduced the available lean angle, while it reduced the amount of vibration transmitted to the frame and the rider, providing a smoother ride for rider and passenger.
In the 2007 model year, Harley-Davidson celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Sportster and produced a limited edition called the XL50, of which only 2000 were made for sale worldwide. Each motorcycle was individually numbered and came in one of two colors, Mirage Pearl Orange or Vivid Black. Also in 2007, electronic fuel injection was introduced to the Sportster family, and the Nightster model was introduced in mid-year. In 2009, Harley-Davidson added the Iron 883 to the Sportster line, as part of the Dark Custom series. In the 2008 model year, Harley-Davidson released the XR1200 Sportster in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The XR1200 had an Evolution engine tuned to produce 91 bhp (68 kW), four-piston dual front disc brakes, and an aluminum swing arm. Motorcyclist featured the XR1200 on the cover of its July 2008 issue and was generally positive about it in their "First Ride" story, in which Harley-Davidson was repeatedly asked to sell it in the United States. One possible reason for the delayed availability in the United States was that Harley-Davidson had to obtain the "XR1200" naming rights from Storz Performance, a Harley customizing shop in Ventura, Calif. The XR1200 was released in the United States in 2009 in a special color scheme including Mirage Orange highlighting its dirt-tracker heritage. The first 750 XR1200 models in 2009 were pre-ordered and came with a number 1 tag for the front of the bike, autographed by Kenny Coolbeth and Scott Parker and a thank you/welcome letter from the company, signed by Bill Davidson. The XR1200 was discontinued in model year 2013.
In 2021, Harley-Davidson launched the Sportster S model, with a 121 hp engine and 228 Kg ready-to-ride weight. The Sportster S was one of the first Harleys to come with cornering-ABS and lean-sensitive traction control. The Sportster S is also the first model under the Sportster nameplate since 1957 to receive a completely new engine.
Except for the street-going XR1000 of the 1980s and the XR1200, most Sportsters made for street use have the prefix XL in their model designation. For the Sportster Evolution engines used since the mid-1980s, there have been two engine sizes. Motorcycles with the smaller engine are designated XL883, while those with the larger engine were initially designated XL1100. When the size of the larger engine was increased from 1,100 cc to 1,200 cc, the designation was changed accordingly from XL1100 to XL1200. Subsequent letters in the designation refer to model variations within the Sportster range, e.g. the XL883C refers to an 883 cc Sportster Custom, while the XL1200S designates the now-discontinued 1200 Sportster Sport.
Introduced in 2001 and produced until 2017, the VRSC muscle bike family bears little resemblance to Harley's more traditional lineup. Competing against Japanese and American muscle bikes in the upcoming muscle bike/power cruiser segment, the "V-Rod" makes use of the revolution engine that, for the first time in Harley history, incorporates overhead cams and liquid cooling. The V-Rod is visually distinctive, easily identified by the 60-degree V-Twin engine, the radiator and the hydroformed frame members that support the round-topped air cleaner cover. The VRSC platform was also used for factory drag-racing motorcycles.
In 2008, Harley added the anti-lock braking system as a factory-installed option on all VRSC models. Harley also increased the displacement of the stock engine from 1,130 to 1,250 cc (69 to 76 cu in), which had only previously been available from Screamin' Eagle, and added a slipper clutch as standard equipment.
VRSC models include:
VRSC models utilize the Revolution engine (VR), and the street versions are designated Street Custom (SC). After the VRSC prefix common to all street Revolution bikes, the next letter denotes the model, either A (base V-Rod: discontinued), AW (base V-Rod + W for Wide with a 240 mm rear tire), B (discontinued), D (Night Rod: discontinued), R (Street Rod: discontinued), SE and SEII (CVO Special Edition), or X (Special edition). Further differentiation within models are made with an additional letter, e.g., VRSCDX denotes the Night Rod Special.
The VRXSE V-Rod Destroyer is Harley-Davidson's production drag racing motorcycle, constructed to run the quarter mile in less than ten seconds. It is based on the same revolution engine that powers the VRSC line, but the VRXSE uses the Screamin' Eagle 1,300 cc "stroked" incarnation, featuring a 75 mm crankshaft, 105 mm Pistons, and 58 mm throttle bodies.
The V-Rod Destroyer is not a street-legal motorcycle. As such, it uses "X" instead of "SC" to denote a non-street bike. "SE" denotes a CVO Special Edition.
The Street, Harley-Davidson's newest platform and their first all new platform in thirteen years, was designed to appeal to younger riders looking for a lighter bike at a cheaper price. The Street 750 model was launched in India at the 2014 Indian Auto Expo, Delhi-NCR on February 5, 2014. The Street 750 weighs 218 kg and has a ground clearance of 144 mm giving it the lowest weight and the highest ground clearance of Harley-Davidson motorcycles currently available.
The Street 750 uses an all-new, liquid-cooled, 60° V-twin engine called the Revolution X. In the Street 750, the engine displaces 749 cc (45.7 cu in) and produces 65 Nm at 4,000 rpm. A six speed transmission is used.
The Street 750 and the smaller-displacement Street 500 have been available since late 2014. Street series motorcycles for the North American market will be built in Harley-Davidson's Kansas City, Missouri plant, while those for other markets around the world will be built completely in their plant in Bawal, India.
Harley-Davidson's LiveWire, released in 2019, is their first electric vehicle. The high-voltage battery provides a minimum city range of 98 miles (158 km). The LiveWire targets a different type of customer than their classic V-twin powered motorcycles.
In March 2020, a Harley-Davidson LiveWire was used to break the 24-hour distance record for an electric motorcycle. The bike traveled a reported 1,723 km (1,079 miles) in 23 hours and 48 minutes. The LiveWire offers a Level 1 slow recharge, which uses a regular wall outlet to refill an empty battery overnight, or a quick Level 3 DC Fast Charge. The Fast Charge fills the battery most of the way in about 40 minutes. Swiss rider Michel von Tell used the Level 3 charging to make the 24-hour ride.
In December 2021, the company announced that that LiveWire was to be spun-off from parent Harley Davidson, set to go public in the first half of 2022 as a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with the value estimated to be $1.77 billion.
Custom Vehicle Operations (CVO) is a team within Harley-Davidson that produces limited-edition customizations of Harley's stock models. Every year since 1999, the team has selected two to five of the company's base models and added higher-displacement engines, performance upgrades, special-edition paint jobs, more chromed or accented components, audio system upgrades, and electronic accessories to create high-dollar, premium-quality customizations for the factory custom market. The models most commonly upgraded in such a fashion are the Ultra Classic Electra Glide, which has been selected for CVO treatment every year from 2006 to the present, and the Road King, which was selected in 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2008. The Dyna, Softail, and VRSC families have also been selected for CVO customization.
The Environmental Protection Agency conducted emissions-certification and representative emissions test in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2005. Subsequently, Harley-Davidson produced an "environmental warranty". The warranty ensures each owner that the vehicle is designed and built free of any defects in materials and workmanship that would cause the vehicle to not meet EPA standards. In 2005, the EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) confirmed Harley-Davidson to be the first corporation to voluntarily enroll in the One Clean-Up Program. This program is designed for the clean-up of the affected soil and groundwater at the former York Naval Ordnance Plant. The program is backed by the state and local government along with participating organizations and corporations.
Paul Gotthold, Director of Operations for the EPA, congratulated the motor company:
Harley-Davidson has taken their environmental responsibilities very seriously and has already made substantial progress in the investigation and cleanup of past contamination. Proof of Harley's efforts can be found in the recent EPA determination that designates the Harley property as 'under control' for cleanup purposes. This determination means that there are no serious contamination problems at the facility. Under the new One Cleanup Program, Harley, EPA, and PADEP will expedite the completion of the property investigation and reach a final solution that will permanently protect human health and the environment.
Harley-Davidson also purchased most of Castalloy, a South Australian producer of cast motorcycle wheels and hubs. The South Australian government has set forth "protection to the purchaser (Harley-Davidson) against environmental risks".
In August 2016, Harley-Davidson settled with the EPA for $12 million, without admitting wrongdoing, over the sale of after-market "super tuners". Super tuners were devices, marketed for competition, which enabled increased performance of Harley-Davidson products. However, the devices also modified the emission control systems, producing increased hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide. Harley-Davidson is required to buy back and destroy any super tuners which do not meet Clean Air Act requirements and spend $3 million on air pollution mitigation.
According to a recent Harley-Davidson study, in 1987 half of all Harley riders were under age 35. However, by 2006, only 15 percent of Harley buyers were under 35, and as of 2005, the median age had risen to 46.7. In 2008, Harley-Davidson stopped disclosing the average age of riders; at this point it was 48 years old.
In 1987, the median household income of a Harley-Davidson rider was $38,000. By 1997, the median household income for those riders had more than doubled, to $83,000.
Many Harley-Davidson Clubs exist nowadays around the world; the oldest one, founded in 1928, is in Prague.
Harley-Davidson attracts a loyal brand community, with licensing of the Harley-Davidson logo accounting for almost 5 percent of the company's net revenue ($41 million in 2004). Harley-Davidson supplies many American police forces with their motorcycle fleets.
From its founding, Harley-Davidson had worked to brand its motorcycles as respectable and refined products, with ads that showed what motorcycling writer Fred Rau called "refined-looking ladies with parasols, and men in conservative suits as the target market". The 1906 Harley-Davidson's effective, and polite, muffler was emphasized in advertisements with the nickname "The Silent Gray Fellow". That began to shift in the 1960s, partially in response to the clean-cut motorcyclist portrayed in Honda's "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" campaign, when Harley-Davidson sought to draw a contrast with Honda by underscoring the more working-class, macho, and even a little anti-social attitude associated with motorcycling's dark side. With the 1971 FX Super Glide, the company embraced, rather than distanced itself from, chopper style and the counterculture custom Harley scene. Their marketing cultivated the "bad boy" image of biker and motorcycle clubs, and to a point, even outlaw or one-percenter motorcycle clubs.
Beginning in 1920, a team of farm boys, including Ray Weishaar, who became known as the "hog boys", consistently won races. The group had a live hog as their mascot. Following a win, they would put the hog on their Harley and take a victory lap. In 1983, the Motor Company formed a club for owners of its product, taking advantage of the long-standing nickname by turning "hog" into the acronym HOG, for Harley Owners Group. Harley-Davidson attempted to trademark "hog", but lost a case against an independent Harley-Davidson specialist, The Hog Farm of West Seneca, New York, in 1999, when the appellate panel ruled that "hog" had become a generic term for large motorcycles and was therefore unprotectable as a trademark.
On August 15, 2006, Harley-Davidson Inc. had its NYSE ticker symbol changed from HDI to HOG.
Harley-Davidson FL "big twins" normally had heavy steel fenders, chrome trim, and other ornate and heavy accessories. After World War II, riders wanting more speed would often shorten the fenders or take them off completely to reduce the weight of the motorcycle. These bikes were called "bobbers" or sometimes "choppers", because parts considered unnecessary were chopped off. Those who made or rode choppers and bobbers, especially members of motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels, referred to stock FLs as "garbage wagons".
Harley-Davidson established the Harley Owners Group (HOG) in 1983 to build on the loyalty of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts as a means to promote a lifestyle alongside its products. The HOG also opened new revenue streams for the company, with the production of tie-in merchandise offered to club members, numbering more than one million. Other motorcycle brands, and other and consumer brands outside motorcycling, have also tried to create factory-sponsored community marketing clubs of their own. HOG members typically spend 30 percent more than other Harley owners on such items as clothing and Harley-Davidson-sponsored events.
In 1991, HOG went international, with the first official European HOG Rally in Cheltenham, England. Today, more than one million members and more than 1400 chapters worldwide make HOG the largest factory-sponsored motorcycle organization in the world.
HOG benefits include organized group rides, exclusive products and product discounts, insurance discounts, and the Hog Tales newsletter. A one-year full membership is included with the purchase of a new, unregistered Harley-Davidson.
In 2008, HOG celebrated its 25th anniversary in conjunction with the Harley 105th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
3rd Southern HOG Rally set to bring together largest gathering of Harley-Davidson owners in South India. More than 600 Harley-Davidson Owners expected to ride to Hyderabad from across 13 HOG Chapters.
Harley-Davidson offers factory tours at four of its manufacturing sites, and the Harley-Davidson Museum, which opened in 2008, exhibits Harley-Davidson's history, culture, and vehicles, including the motor company's corporate archives.
Due to the consolidation of operations, the Capitol Drive Tour Center in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was closed in 2009.
Some of the company's buildings have been listed on state and national historic registers, including:
Beginning with Harley-Davidson's 90th anniversary in 1993, Harley-Davidson has had celebratory rides to Milwaukee called the "Ride Home". This new tradition has continued every five years, and is referred to unofficially as "Harleyfest", in line with Milwaukee's other festivals (Summerfest, German fest, Festa Italiana, etc.). This event brings Harley riders from all around the world. The 105th anniversary celebration was held on August 28–31, 2008, and included events in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine, and Kenosha counties, in Southeast Wisconsin. The 110th-anniversary celebration was held on August 29–31, 2013. The 115th anniversary was held in Prague, Czech Republic, the home country of the oldest existing Harley Davidson Club, on July 5–8, 2018 and attracted more than 100,000 visitors and 60,000 bikes. The 120th anniversary was held in Budapest, Hungary, with the parade on June 24.
William S. Harley, Arthur Davidson, William A. Davidson and Walter Davidson Sr were, in 2004, inducted into the Labor Hall of Fame for their accomplishments for the H-D company and its workforce.
The company's origins were dramatized in a 2016 miniseries entitled Harley and the Davidsons, starring Robert Aramayo as William Harley, Bug Hall as Arthur Davidson and Michiel Huisman as Walter Davidson, and premiered on the Discovery Channel as a "three-night event series" on September 5, 2016. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harley-Davidson, Inc. (H-D, or simply Harley) is an American motorcycle manufacturer headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1903, it is one of two major American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression along with its historical rival, Indian Motorcycles. The company has survived numerous ownership arrangements, subsidiary arrangements, periods of poor economic health and product quality, and intense global competition to become one of the world's largest motorcycle manufacturers and an iconic brand widely known for its loyal following. There are owner clubs and events worldwide, as well as a company-sponsored, brand-focused museum.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Harley-Davidson is noted for a style of customization that gave rise to the chopper motorcycle style. The company traditionally marketed heavyweight, air-cooled cruiser motorcycles with engine displacements greater than 700 cc, but it has broadened its offerings to include more contemporary VRSC (2002) and middle-weight Street (2015) platforms.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Harley-Davidson manufactures its motorcycles at factories in York, Pennsylvania; Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin; Tomahawk, Wisconsin; Manaus, Brazil; and Rayong, Thailand. The company markets its products worldwide, and also licenses and markets merchandise under the Harley-Davidson brand, among them apparel, home décor and ornaments, accessories, toys, scale models of its motorcycles, and video games based on its motorcycle line and the community.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1901, 20-year-old William S. Harley drew up plans for a small engine with a displacement of 7.07 cubic inches (116 cc) and four-inch (102 mm) flywheels designed for use in a regular pedal-bicycle frame. Over the next two years, he and his childhood friend Arthur Davidson worked on their motor-bicycle using the northside Milwaukee machine shop at the home of their friend Henry Melk. It was finished in 1903 with the help of Arthur's brother Walter Davidson. Upon testing their power-cycle, Harley and the Davidson brothers found it unable to climb the hills around Milwaukee without pedal assistance, and they wrote off their first motor-bicycle as a valuable learning experiment.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The three began work on a new and improved machine with an engine of 24.74 cubic inches (405 cc) with 9.75 in (24.8 cm) flywheels weighing 28 lb (13 kg). Its advanced loop-frame pattern was similar to the 1903 Milwaukee Merkel motorcycle designed by Joseph Merkel, later of Flying Merkel fame. The bigger engine and loop-frame design took it out of the motorized bicycle category and marked the path to future motorcycle designs. They also received help with their bigger engine from outboard motor pioneer Ole Evinrude, who was then building gas engines of his own design for automotive use on Milwaukee's Lake Street.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The prototype of the new loop-frame Harley-Davidson was assembled in a 10 ft × 15 ft (3.0 m × 4.6 m) shed in the Davidson family backyard. Most of the major parts, however, were made elsewhere, including some probably fabricated at the West Milwaukee railshops where oldest brother William A. Davidson was toolroom foreman. This prototype machine was functional by September 8, 1904, when it competed in a Milwaukee motorcycle race held at State Fair Park. Edward Hildebrand rode it and placed fourth in the race.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In January 1905, the company placed small advertisements in the Automobile and Cycle Trade Journal offering bare Harley-Davidson engines to the do-it-yourself trade. By April, they were producing complete motorcycles on a very limited basis. That year, Harley-Davidson dealer Carl H. Lang of Chicago sold three bikes from the five built in the Davidson backyard shed. Years later, the company moved the original shed to the Juneau Avenue factory where it stood for many decades as a tribute.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1906, Harley and the Davidson brothers built their first factory on Chestnut Street (later Juneau Avenue), at the current location of Harley-Davidson's corporate headquarters. The first Juneau Avenue plant was a 40 ft × 60 ft (12 m × 18 m) single-story wooden structure. The company produced about 50 motorcycles that year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1907, William S. Harley graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a degree in mechanical engineering. That year, they expanded the factory with a second floor and later with facings and additions of Milwaukee pale yellow (\"cream\") brick. With the new facilities, production increased to 150 motorcycles in 1907. The company was officially incorporated that September. They also began selling their motorcycles to police departments around this time, a market that has been important to them ever since. In 1907, William A. Davidson quit his job as tool foreman for the Milwaukee Road railroad and joined the Motor Company.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Production in 1905 and 1906 were all single-cylinder models with 26.84-cubic-inch (440 cc) engines. In February 1907, they displayed a prototype model at the Chicago Automobile Show with a 45-degree V-Twin engine. Very few V-Twin models were built between 1907 and 1910. These first V-Twins displaced 53.68 cubic inches (880 cc) and produced about 7 horsepower (5.2 kW). This gave about double the power of the first singles, and top speed was about 60 mph (100 km/h). Production jumped from 450 motorcycles in 1908 to 1,149 machines in 1909.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1911, the company introduced an improved V-Twin model with a displacement of 49.48 cubic inches (811 cc) and mechanically operated intake valves, as opposed to the \"automatic\" intake valves used on earlier V-Twins that opened by engine vacuum. It was smaller than earlier twins but gave better performance. After 1913, the majority of bikes produced by Harley-Davidson were V-Twin models.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1912, Harley-Davidson introduced their patented \"Ful-Floteing Seat\", which was suspended by a coil spring inside the seat tube. The spring tension could be adjusted to suit the rider's weight, and more than 3 inches (76 mm) of travel was available. Harley-Davidson used seats of this type until 1958.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "By 1913, the yellow brick factory had been demolished and a new five-story structure had been built on the site which took up two blocks along Juneau Avenue and around the corner on 38th Street. Despite the competition, Harley-Davidson was already pulling ahead of Indian and dominated motorcycle racing after 1914. Production that year swelled to 16,284 machines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1917, the United States entered World War I and the military demanded motorcycles for the war effort. Harleys had already been used by the military in the Pancho Villa Expedition but World War I was the first time that it was adopted for military issue, first with the British Model H produced by Triumph Motorcycles Ltd in 1915. The U.S. military purchased over 20,000 motorcycles from Harley-Davidson.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Harley-Davidson launched a line of bicycles in 1917 in hopes of recruiting more domestic customers for its motorcycles. Models included the traditional diamond frame men's bicycle, a step-through frame 3–18 \"Ladies Standard\", and a 5–17 \"Boy Scout\" for youth. The effort was discontinued in 1923 because of disappointing sales. The bicycles were built for Harley-Davidson in Dayton, Ohio by the Davis Machine Company from 1917 to 1921, when Davis stopped manufacturing bicycles.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By 1920 Harley-Davidson was the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world, with 28,189 machines produced and dealers in 67 countries. In 1921, Otto Walker set a record on a Harley-Davidson as the first motorcycle to win a race at an average speed greater than 100 mph (160 km/h).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Harley-Davidson put several improvements in place during the 1920s, such as a new 74 cubic inch (1,212.6 cc) V-Twin introduced in 1921, and the \"teardrop\" gas tank in 1925. They added a front brake in 1928, although only on the J/JD models. In the late summer of 1929, Harley-Davidson introduced its 45-cubic-inch (737 cc) flathead V-Twin to compete with the Indian 101 Scout and the Excelsior Super X. This was the \"D\" model produced from 1929 to 1931. Riders of Indian motorcycles derisively referred to it as the \"three cylinder Harley\" because the generator was upright and parallel to the front cylinder. In 1929, Vivian Bales drove a record 5,000 miles across the United States and Canada on a D-model.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Great Depression began a few months after the introduction of their 45 cu in (740 cm) model. Harley-Davidson's sales fell from 21,000 in 1929 to 3,703 in 1933. Despite this, Harley-Davidson unveiled a new lineup for 1934, which included a flathead engine and Art Deco styling.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In order to survive the remainder of the Depression, the company manufactured industrial powerplants based on their motorcycle engines. They also designed and built a three-wheeled delivery vehicle called the Servi-Car, which remained in production until 1973.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Alfred Rich Child opened a production line in Japan in the mid-1930s with the 74 cu in (1,210 cm) VL. The Japanese license-holder, Sankyo Seiyaku Corporation, severed its business relations with Harley-Davidson in 1936 and continued manufacturing the VL under the Rikuo name.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "An 80 cubic inches (1,300 cm) flathead engine was added to the line in 1935, by which time the single-cylinder motorcycles had been discontinued.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1936, the 61E and 61EL models with the \"Knucklehead\" OHV engines were introduced. Valvetrain problems in early Knucklehead engines required a redesign halfway through its first year of production and retrofitting of the new valvetrain on earlier engines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "By 1937, all Harley-Davidson flathead engines were equipped with dry-sump oil recirculation systems similar to the one introduced in the \"Knucklehead\" OHV engine. The revised 74 cubic inches (1,210 cm) V and VL models were renamed U and UL, the 80 cu in (1,300 cm) VH and VLH to be renamed UH and ULH, and the 45 cu in (740 cm) R to be renamed W.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1941, the 74-cubic-inch \"Knucklehead\" was introduced as the F and the FL. The 80 cu in (1,300 cm) flathead UH and ULH models were discontinued after 1941, while the 74-cubic-inchU & UL flathead models were produced up to 1948.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "One of only two American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression (the other being the Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company), Harley-Davidson again produced large numbers of motorcycles for the US Army in World War II and resumed civilian production afterwards, producing a range of large V-twin motorcycles that were successful both on racetracks and for private buyers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Harley-Davidson, on the eve of World War II, was already supplying the Army with a military-specific version of its 45 cubic inches (740 cm) WL line, called the WLA. The A in this case stood for \"Army\". Upon the outbreak of war, the company, along with most other manufacturing enterprises, shifted to war work. More than 90,000 military motorcycles, mostly WLAs and WLCs (the Canadian version) were produced, many to be provided to allies. Harley-Davidson received two Army-Navy \"E\" Awards, one in 1943 and the other in 1945, which were awarded for Excellence in Production.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Shipments to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program numbered at least 30,000. The WLAs produced during all four years of war production generally have 1942 serial numbers. Production of the WLA stopped at the end of World War II, but was resumed from 1950 to 1952 for use in the Korean War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The U.S. Army also asked Harley-Davidson to produce a new motorcycle with many of the features of BMW's side-valve and shaft-driven R71. Harley-Davidson largely copied the BMW engine and drive train and produced the shaft-driven 750 cc 1942 Harley-Davidson XA. This shared no dimensions, no parts or no design concepts (except side valves) with any prior Harley-Davidson engine. Due to the superior cooling of the flat-twin engine with the cylinders across the frame, Harley's XA cylinder heads ran 100 °F (56 °C) cooler than its V-twins. The XA never entered full production: the motorcycle by that time had been eclipsed by the Jeep as the Army's general-purpose vehicle, and the WLA – already in production – was sufficient for its limited police, escort, and courier roles. Only 1,000 were made and the XA never went into full production. It remains the only shaft-driven Harley-Davidson ever made.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "As part of war reparations, Harley-Davidson acquired the design of a small German motorcycle, the DKW RT 125, which they adapted, manufactured, and sold from 1948 to 1966. Various models were made, including the Hummer from 1955 to 1959, but they are all colloquially referred to as \"Hummers\" at present. BSA in the United Kingdom took the same design as the foundation of their BSA Bantam.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1960, Harley-Davidson consolidated the Model 165 and Hummer lines into the Super-10, introduced the Topper scooter, and bought fifty percent of Aermacchi's motorcycle division. Importation of Aermacchi's 250 cc horizontal single began the following year. The bike bore Harley-Davidson badges and was marketed as the Harley-Davidson Sprint. The engine of the Sprint was increased to 350 cc in 1969 and would remain that size until 1974, when the four-stroke Sprint was discontinued.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "After the Pacer and Scat models were discontinued at the end of 1965, the Bobcat became the last of Harley-Davidson's American-made two-stroke motorcycles. The Bobcat was manufactured only in the 1966 model year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Harley-Davidson replaced their American-made lightweight two-stroke motorcycles with the Italian Aermacchi-built two-stroke powered M-65, M-65S, and Rapido. The M-65 had a semi-step-through frame and tank. The M-65S was a M-65 with a larger tank that eliminated the step-through feature. The Rapido was a larger bike with a 125 cc engine. The Aermacchi-built Harley-Davidsons became entirely two-stroke powered when the 250 cc two-stroke SS-250 replaced the four-stroke 350 cc Sprint in 1974.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Harley-Davidson purchased full control of Aermacchi's motorcycle production in 1974 and continued making two-stroke motorcycles there until 1978, when they sold the facility to Cagiva, owned by the Castiglioni family.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1952, following their application to the U.S. Tariff Commission for a 40 percent tax on imported motorcycles, Harley-Davidson was charged with restrictive practices.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1969, American Machine and Foundry (AMF) bought the company, streamlined production, and slashed the workforce. This tactic resulted in a labor strike and cost-cutting produced lower-quality bikes. Simultaneously, the Japanese \"big four\" manufacturers (Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha) revolutionized the North American market by introducing what the motoring press would call the Universal Japanese Motorcycle. In comparison, Harley-Davidson's bikes were expensive and inferior in performance, handling, and quality. Sales and quality declined, and the company almost went bankrupt. The \"Harley-Davidson\" name was mocked as \"Hardly Ableson\", \"Hardly Driveable\", and \"Hogly Ferguson\", and the nickname \"Hog\" became pejorative.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1977, following the successful manufacture of the Liberty Edition to commemorate America's bicentennial in 1976, Harley-Davidson produced what has become one of its most controversial models, the Harley-Davidson Confederate Edition. The bike was essentially a stock Harley-Davidson with Confederate-specific paint and details.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1981, AMF sold the company to a group of 13 investors led by Vaughn Beals and Willie G. Davidson for $80 million. The new management team improved product quality, introduced new technologies, and adopted just-in-time inventory management. These operational and product improvements were matched with a strategy of seeking tariff protection for large-displacement motorcycles in the face of intense competition with Japanese manufacturers. These protections were granted by the Reagan administration in 1983, giving Harley-Davidson time to implement their new strategies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Revising stagnated product designs was a crucial centerpiece of Harley-Davidson's turnaround strategy. Rather than trying to mimic popular Japanese designs, the new management deliberately exploited the \"retro\" appeal of Harley motorcycles, building machines that deliberately adopted the look and feel of their earlier bikes and the subsequent customizations of owners of that era. Many components such as brakes, forks, shocks, carburetors, electrics and wheels were outsourced from foreign manufacturers and quality increased, technical improvements were made, and buyers slowly returned.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Harley-Davidson bought the \"Sub Shock\" cantilever-swingarm rear suspension design from Missouri engineer Bill Davis and developed it into its Softail series of motorcycles, introduced in 1984 with the FXST Softail.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In response to possible motorcycle market loss due to the aging of baby-boomers, Harley-Davidson bought luxury motorhome manufacturer Holiday Rambler in 1986. In 1996, the company sold Holiday Rambler to the Monaco Coach Corporation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The \"Sturgis\" model, boasting a dual belt-drive, was introduced initially in 1980 and was made for three years. This bike was then brought back as a commemorative model in 1991.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "By 1990, with the introduction of the \"Fat Boy\", Harley-Davidson once again became the sales leader in the heavyweight (over 750 cc) market. At the time of the Fat Boy model introduction, a false etymology spread that \"Fat Boy\" was a combination of the names of the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy. This has been debunked, as the name \"Fat Boy\" actually comes from the observation that the motorcycle is somewhat wider than other bikes when viewed head-on.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "1993 and 1994 saw the replacement of FXR models with the Dyna (FXD), which became the sole rubber mount FX Big Twin frame in 1994. The FXR was revived briefly from 1999 to 2000 for special limited editions (FXR, FXR & FXR).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Harley-Davidson celebrated their 100th anniversary on September 1, 2003 with a large event and concert featuring performances from Elton John, The Doobie Brothers, Kid Rock, and Tim McGraw.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Construction started on the $75 million, 130,000 square-foot (12,000 m) Harley-Davidson Museum in the Menomonee Valley of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 1, 2006. It opened in 2008 and houses the company's vast collection of historic motorcycles and corporate archives, along with a restaurant, café and meeting space.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Established in 1918, the oldest continuously operating Harley-Davidson dealership outside of the United States is in Australia. Sales in Japan started in 1912 then in 1929, Harley-Davidsons were produced in Japan under license to the company Rikuo (Rikuo Internal Combustion Company) under the name of Harley-Davidson and using the company's tooling, and later under the name Rikuo. Production continued until 1958.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In 1998, the first Harley-Davidson factory outside the US opened in Manaus, Brazil, taking advantage of the free economic zone there. The location was positioned to sell motorcycles in the southern hemisphere market.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In August 2009, Harley-Davidson launched Harley-Davidson India and started selling motorcycles there in 2010. The company established the subsidiary in Gurgaon, near Delhi, in 2011 and created an Indian dealer network. On September 24, 2020, Harley Davidson announced that it would discontinue its sales and manufacturing operations in India due to weak demand and sales. The move involves $75 million in restructuring costs, 70 layoffs and the closure of its Bawal plant in northern India.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Harley-Davidson's association with sportbike manufacturer Buell Motorcycle Company began in 1987 when they supplied Buell with fifty surplus XR1000 engines. Buell continued to buy engines from Harley-Davidson until 1993, when Harley-Davidson bought 49 percent of the Buell Motorcycle Company. Harley-Davidson increased its share in Buell to ninety-eight percent in 1998, and to complete ownership in 2003.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In an attempt to attract newcomers to motorcycling in general and to Harley-Davidson in particular, Buell developed a low-cost, low-maintenance motorcycle. The resulting single-cylinder Buell Blast was introduced in 2000, and was made through 2009, which, according to Buell, was to be the final year of production. The Buell Blast was the training vehicle for the Harley-Davidson Rider's Edge New Rider Course from 2000 until May 2014, when the company re-branded the training academy and started using the Harley-Davidson Street 500 motorcycles. In those 14 years, more than 350,000 participants in the course learned to ride on the Buell Blast.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On October 15, 2009, Harley-Davidson Inc. issued an official statement that it would be discontinuing the Buell line and ceasing production immediately, in order to focus on the Harley-Davidson brand. The company refused to consider selling Buell. Founder Erik Buell subsequently established Erik Buell Racing and continued to manufacture and develop the company's 1125RR racing motorcycle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "During its period of peak demand, during the late 1990s and early first decade of the 21st century, Harley-Davidson embarked on a program of expanding the number of dealerships throughout the country. At the same time, its current dealers typically had waiting lists that extended up to a year for some of the most popular models. Harley-Davidson, like the auto manufacturers, records a sale not when a consumer buys their product, but rather when it is delivered to a dealer. Therefore, it is possible for the manufacturer to inflate sales numbers by requiring dealers to accept more inventory than desired in a practice called channel stuffing. When demand softened following the unique 2003 model year, this news led to a dramatic decline in the stock price. In April 2004 alone, the price of HOG shares dropped from more than $60 to less than $40. Immediately prior to this decline, retiring CEO Jeffrey Bleustein profited $42 million on the exercise of employee stock options. Harley-Davidson was named as a defendant in numerous class action suits filed by investors who claimed they were intentionally defrauded by Harley-Davidson's management and directors. By January 2007, the price of Harley-Davidson shares reached $70.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Starting around 2000, several police departments started reporting problems with high-speed instability on the Harley-Davidson Touring motorcycles. A Raleigh, North Carolina police officer, Charles Paul, was killed when his 2002 police touring motorcycle crashed after reportedly experiencing a high-speed wobble. The California Highway Patrol conducted testing of the Police Touring motorcycles in 2006. The CHP test riders reported experiencing wobble or weave instability while operating the motorcycles on the test track.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On February 2, 2007, upon the expiration of their union contract, about 2,700 employees at Harley-Davidson Inc.'s largest manufacturing plant in York, Pennsylvania, went on strike after failing to agree on wages and health benefits. During the pendency of the strike, the company refused to pay for any portion of the striking employees' health care.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The day before the strike, after the union voted against the proposed contract and to authorize the strike, the company shut down all production at the plant. The York facility employs more than 3,200 workers, both union and non-union.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Harley-Davidson announced on February 16, 2007, that it had reached a labor agreement with union workers at its largest manufacturing plant, a breakthrough in the two-week-old strike. The strike disrupted Harley-Davidson's national production and was felt in Wisconsin, where 440 employees were laid off, and many Harley suppliers also laid off workers because of the strike.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "On July 11, 2008, Harley-Davidson announced they had signed a definitive agreement to acquire the MV Agusta Group for US$109 million (€70M). MV Agusta Group contains two lines of motorcycles: the high-performance MV Agusta brand and the lightweight Cagiva brand. The acquisition was completed on August 8.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On October 15, 2009, Harley-Davidson announced that it would divest its interest in MV Agusta. Harley-Davidson Inc. sold Italian motorcycle maker MV Agusta to Claudio Castiglioni – a member of the family that had purchased Aermacchi from H-D in 1978 – for a reported 3 euros, ending the transaction in the first week of August 2010. Castiglioni was MV Agusta's former owner, and had been MV Agusta's chairman since Harley-Davidson bought it in 2008. As part of the deal, Harley-Davidson put $26M into MV Agusta's accounts, essentially giving Castiglioni $26M to take the brand.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The 2007–2008 financial crisis and 2008–2010 automotive industry crisis affected also the motorcycle industry. According to Interbrand, the value of the Harley-Davidson brand fell by 43 percent to $4.34 billion in 2009. The fall in value is believed to be connected to the 66 percent drop in the company profits in two-quarters of the previous year. On April 29, 2010, Harley-Davidson stated that they must cut $54 million in manufacturing costs from its production facilities in Wisconsin, and that they would explore alternative U.S. sites to accomplish this. The announcement came in the wake of a massive company-wide restructuring, which began in early 2009 and involved the closing of two factories, one distribution center, and the planned elimination of nearly 25 percent of its total workforce (around 3,500 employees). The company announced on September 14, 2010, that it would remain in Wisconsin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The classic Harley-Davidson engines are V-twin engines, with a 45° angle between the cylinders. The crankshaft has a single pin, and both pistons are connected to this pin through their connecting rods.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "This 45° angle is covered under several United States patents and is an engineering tradeoff that allows a large, high-torque engine in a relatively small space. It causes the cylinders to fire at uneven intervals and produces the choppy \"potato-potato\" sound so strongly linked to the Harley-Davidson brand.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "To simplify the engine and reduce costs, the V-twin ignition was designed to operate with a single set of points and no distributor. This is known as a dual fire ignition system, causing both spark plugs to fire regardless of which cylinder was on its compression stroke, with the other spark plug firing on its cylinder's exhaust stroke, effectively \"wasting a spark\". The exhaust note is basically a throaty growling sound with some popping. The 45° design of the engine thus creates a plug firing sequencing as such: The first cylinder fires, the second (rear) cylinder fires 315° later, then there is a 405° gap until the first cylinder fires again, giving the engine its unique sound.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Harley-Davidson has used various ignition systems, including the early points and condenser system on Big Twins and Sportsters up to 1978, a magneto ignition system used on some 1958 to 1969 Sportsters, an early electronic with centrifugal mechanical advance weights on all models from mid-1978 until 1979, and a later electronic with a transistorized ignition control module (more familiarly known as a black box or a brain) on all models 1980 to present.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Starting in 1995, the company introduced Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) as an option for the 30th anniversary edition Electra Glide. EFI became standard on all Harley-Davidson motorcycles, including Sportsters, upon the introduction of the 2007 product line.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 1991, Harley-Davidson began to participate in the Sound Quality Working Group, founded by Orfield Labs, Bruel and Kjaer, TEAC, Yamaha, Sennheiser, SMS and Cortex. This was the nation's first group to share research on psychological acoustics. Later that year, Harley-Davidson participated in a series of sound quality studies at Orfield Labs, based on recordings taken at the Talladega Superspeedway, with the objective to lower the sound level for EU standards while analytically capturing the \"Harley Sound\". This research resulted in the bikes that were introduced in compliance with EU standards for 1998.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "On February 1, 1994, the company filed a sound trademark application for the distinctive sound of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine: \"The mark consists of the exhaust sound of applicant's motorcycles, produced by V-twin, common crankpin motorcycle engines when the goods are in use\". Nine of Harley-Davidson's competitors filed comments opposing the application, arguing that cruiser-style motorcycles of various brands use a single-crankpin V-twin engine which produce a similar sound. These objections were followed by litigation. In June 2000, the company dropped efforts to register a sound trademark.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Revolution engine is based on the VR-1000 Superbike race program, developed by Harley-Davidson's Powertrain Engineering with Porsche helping to make the engine suitable for street use. It is a liquid cooled, dual overhead cam, internally counterbalanced 60 degree V-twin engine with a displacement of 69 cubic inch (1,130 cc), producing 115 hp (86 kW) at 8,250 rpm at the crank, with a redline of 9,000 rpm. It was introduced for the new VRSC (V-Rod) line in 2001 for the 2002 model year, starting with the single VRSCA (V-Twin Racing Street Custom) model. The Revolution marks Harley's first collaboration with Porsche since the V4 Nova project, which, like the V-Rod, was a radical departure from Harley's traditional lineup until it was cancelled by AMF in 1981 in favor of the Evolution engine.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "A 1,250 cc Screamin' Eagle version of the Revolution engine was made available for 2005 and 2006, and was present thereafter in a single production model from 2005 to 2007. In 2008, the 1,250 cc Revolution Engine became standard for the entire VRSC line. Harley-Davidson claims 123 hp (92 kW) at the crank for the 2008 VRSCAW model. The VRXSE Destroyer dragbike is equipped with a stroker (75 mm crank) Screamin' Eagle 79 cubic inch (1,300 cc) Revolution Engine, producing 97 pound-feet (132 N⋅m), and more than 165 hp (123 kW).",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "750 cc and 500 cc versions of the Revolution engine are used in Harley-Davidson's Street line of light cruisers. These motors, named the Revolution X, use a single overhead cam, screw and locknut valve adjustment, a single internal counterbalancer, and vertically split crankcases; all of these changes making it different from the original Revolution design.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "An extreme endurance test of the Revolution engine was performed in a dynamometer installation at the Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee, simulating the German Autobahn (highways without general speed limit) between the Porsche research and development center in Weissach, near Stuttgart to Düsseldorf. An undisclosed number of samples of engines failed, until an engine successfully passed the 500-hour nonstop run. This was the benchmark for the engineers to approve the start of production for the Revolution engine, which was documented in the Discovery channel special Harley-Davidson: Birth of the V-Rod, October 14, 2001.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The first Harley-Davidson motorcycles were powered by single-cylinder IOE engines with the inlet valve operated by engine vacuum, based on the DeDion-Bouton pattern. Singles of this type continued to be made until 1913, when a pushrod and rocker system was used to operate the overhead inlet valve on the single, a similar system having been used on their V-twins since 1911. Single-cylinder motorcycle engines were discontinued in 1918.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Single-cylinder engines were reintroduced in 1925 as 1926 models. These singles were available either as flathead engines or as overhead valve engines until 1930, after which they were only available as flatheads. The flathead single-cylinder motorcycles were designated Model A for engines with magneto systems only and Model B for engines with battery and coil systems, while overhead valve versions were designated Model AA and Model BA respectively, and a magneto-only racing version was designated Model S. This line of single-cylinder motorcycles ended production in 1934.",
"title": "Motorcycle engines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Modern Harley-branded motorcycles fall into one of seven model families: Touring, Softail, Dyna, Sportster, Vrod, Street and LiveWire. These model families are distinguished by the frame, engine, suspension, and other characteristics.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Touring models use Big-Twin engines and large-diameter telescopic forks. All Touring designations begin with the letters FL, e.g., FLHR (Road King) and FLTR (Road Glide).",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The touring family, also known as \"dressers\" or \"baggers\", includes Road King, Road Glide, Electra Glide and Street Glide models offered in various trims. The Road Kings have a \"retro cruiser\" appearance and are equipped with a large clear windshield. Road Kings are reminiscent of big-twin models from the 1940s and 1950s. Electra Glides can be identified by their full front fairings. Most Electra Glides sport a fork-mounted fairing referred to as the \"Batwing\" due to its unmistakable shape. The Road Glide and Road Glide Ultra Classic have a frame-mounted fairing, referred to as the \"Sharknose\". The Sharknose includes a unique, dual front headlight.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Touring models are distinguishable by their large saddlebags, rear coil-over air suspension and are the only models to offer full fairings with radios and CBs. All touring models use the same frame, first introduced with a Shovelhead motor in 1980, and carried forward with only modest upgrades until 2009, when it was extensively redesigned. The frame is distinguished by the location of the steering head in front of the forks and was the first H-D frame to rubber mount the drivetrain to isolate the rider from the vibration of the big V-twin.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The frame was modified for the 1993 model year when the oil tank went under the transmission and the battery was moved inboard from under the right saddlebag to under the seat. In 1997, the frame was again modified to allow for a larger battery under the seat and to lower seat height. In 2007, Harley-Davidson introduced the 96 cubic inches (1,570 cubic centimetres) Twin Cam 96 engine, as well the six-speed transmission to give the rider better speeds on the highway.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In 2006, Harley introduced the FLHX Street Glide, a bike designed by Willie G. Davidson to be his personal ride, to its touring line.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In 2008, Harley added anti-lock braking systems and cruise control as a factory installed option on all touring models (standard on CVO and Anniversary models). Also new for 2008 is the 6-US-gallon (23 L; 5.0 imp gal) fuel tank for all touring models. 2008 also brought throttle-by-wire to all touring models.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "For the 2009 model year, Harley-Davidson redesigned the entire touring range with several changes, including a new frame, new swingarm, a completely revised engine-mounting system, 17-inch (430 mm) front wheels for all but the FLHRC Road King Classic, and a 2–1–2 exhaust. The changes result in greater load carrying capacity, better handling, a smoother engine, longer range and less exhaust heat transmitted to the rider and passenger. Also released for the 2009 model year is the FLHTCUTG Tri-Glide Ultra Classic, the first three-wheeled Harley since the Servi-Car was discontinued in 1973. The model features a unique frame and a 103-cubic-inch (1,690 cc) engine exclusive to the trike.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In 2014, Harley-Davidson released a redesign for specific touring bikes and called it \"Project Rushmore\". Changes include a new 103CI High Output engine, one handed easy open saddlebags and compartments, a new Boom! Box Infotainment system with either 4.3-inch (10 cm) or 6.5-inch (16.5 cm) screens featuring touchscreen functionality [6.5-inch (16.5 cm) models only], Bluetooth (media and phone with approved compatible devices), available GPS and SiriusXM, Text-to-Speech functionality (with approved compatible devices) and USB connectivity with charging. Other features include ABS with Reflex linked brakes, improved styling, Halogen or LED lighting and upgraded passenger comfort.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "These big-twin motorcycles capitalize on Harley's strong value on tradition. With the rear-wheel suspension hidden under the transmission, they are visually similar to the \"hardtail\" choppers popular in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as from their own earlier history. In keeping with that tradition, Harley offers Softail models with \"Heritage\" styling that incorporate design cues from throughout their history and used to offer \"Springer\" front ends on these Softail models from the factory.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Softail models utilize the big-twin engine (F) and the Softail chassis (ST).",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Dyna-frame motorcycles were developed in the 1980s and early 1990s and debuted in the 1991 model year with the FXDB Sturgis offered in limited edition quantities. In 1992 the line continued with the limited edition FXDB Daytona and a production model FXD Super Glide. The new DYNA frame featured big-twin engines and traditional styling. They can be distinguished from the Softail by the traditional coil-over suspension that connects the swingarm to the frame, and from the Sportster by their larger engines. On these models, the transmission also houses the engine's oil reservoir.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Prior to 2006, Dyna models typically featured a narrow, XL-style 39mm front fork and front wheel, as well as footpegs which the manufacturer indicated with the letter \"X\" in the model designation. This lineup traditionally included the Super Glide (FXD), Super Glide Custom (FXDC), Street Bob (FXDB), and Low Rider (FXDL). One exception was the Wide Glide (FXDWG), which featured thicker 41mm forks and a narrow front wheel, but positioned the forks on wider triple-trees that give a beefier appearance. In 2008, the Dyna Fat Bob (FXDF) was introduced to the Dyna lineup, featuring aggressive styling like a new 2–1–2 exhaust, twin headlamps, a 180 mm rear tire, and, for the first time in the Dyna lineup, a 130 mm front tire. For the 2012 model year, the Dyna Switchback (FLD) became the first Dyna to break the tradition of having an FX model designation with floorboards, detachable painted hard saddlebags, touring windshield, headlight nacelle and a wide front tire with full fender. The new front end resembled the big-twin FL models from 1968 to 1971.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Dyna family used the 88-cubic-inch (1,440 cc) twin cam from 1999 to 2006. In 2007, the displacement was increased to 96 cubic inches (1,570 cc) as the factory increased the stroke to 4.375 inches (111.1 mm). For the 2012 model year, the manufacturer began to offer Dyna models with the 103-cubic-inch (1,690 cc) upgrade. All Dyna models use a rubber-mounted engine to isolate engine vibration. Harley discontinued the Dyna platform in 2017 for the 2018 model year, having been replaced by a completely-redesigned Softail chassis; some of the existing models previously released by the company under the Dyna nameplate have since been carried over to the new Softail line.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Dyna models utilize the big-twin engine (F), footpegs noted as (X) with the exception of the 2012 FLD Switchback, a Dyna model which used floorboards as featured on the Touring (L) models, and the Dyna chassis (D). Therefore, except for the FLD from 2012 to 2016, all Dyna models have designations that begin with FXD, e.g., FXDWG (Dyna Wide Glide) and FXDL (Dyna Low Rider).",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Introduced in 1957, the Sportster family were conceived as racing motorcycles, and were popular on dirt and flat-track race courses through the 1960s and 1970s. Smaller and lighter than the other Harley models, contemporary Sportsters make use of 883 cc or 1,200 cc Evolution engines and, though often modified, remain similar in appearance to their racing ancestors.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Up until the 2003 model year, the engine on the Sportster was rigidly mounted to the frame. The 2004 Sportster received a new frame accommodating a rubber-mounted engine. This made the bike heavier and reduced the available lean angle, while it reduced the amount of vibration transmitted to the frame and the rider, providing a smoother ride for rider and passenger.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In the 2007 model year, Harley-Davidson celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Sportster and produced a limited edition called the XL50, of which only 2000 were made for sale worldwide. Each motorcycle was individually numbered and came in one of two colors, Mirage Pearl Orange or Vivid Black. Also in 2007, electronic fuel injection was introduced to the Sportster family, and the Nightster model was introduced in mid-year. In 2009, Harley-Davidson added the Iron 883 to the Sportster line, as part of the Dark Custom series. In the 2008 model year, Harley-Davidson released the XR1200 Sportster in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The XR1200 had an Evolution engine tuned to produce 91 bhp (68 kW), four-piston dual front disc brakes, and an aluminum swing arm. Motorcyclist featured the XR1200 on the cover of its July 2008 issue and was generally positive about it in their \"First Ride\" story, in which Harley-Davidson was repeatedly asked to sell it in the United States. One possible reason for the delayed availability in the United States was that Harley-Davidson had to obtain the \"XR1200\" naming rights from Storz Performance, a Harley customizing shop in Ventura, Calif. The XR1200 was released in the United States in 2009 in a special color scheme including Mirage Orange highlighting its dirt-tracker heritage. The first 750 XR1200 models in 2009 were pre-ordered and came with a number 1 tag for the front of the bike, autographed by Kenny Coolbeth and Scott Parker and a thank you/welcome letter from the company, signed by Bill Davidson. The XR1200 was discontinued in model year 2013.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "In 2021, Harley-Davidson launched the Sportster S model, with a 121 hp engine and 228 Kg ready-to-ride weight. The Sportster S was one of the first Harleys to come with cornering-ABS and lean-sensitive traction control. The Sportster S is also the first model under the Sportster nameplate since 1957 to receive a completely new engine.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Except for the street-going XR1000 of the 1980s and the XR1200, most Sportsters made for street use have the prefix XL in their model designation. For the Sportster Evolution engines used since the mid-1980s, there have been two engine sizes. Motorcycles with the smaller engine are designated XL883, while those with the larger engine were initially designated XL1100. When the size of the larger engine was increased from 1,100 cc to 1,200 cc, the designation was changed accordingly from XL1100 to XL1200. Subsequent letters in the designation refer to model variations within the Sportster range, e.g. the XL883C refers to an 883 cc Sportster Custom, while the XL1200S designates the now-discontinued 1200 Sportster Sport.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Introduced in 2001 and produced until 2017, the VRSC muscle bike family bears little resemblance to Harley's more traditional lineup. Competing against Japanese and American muscle bikes in the upcoming muscle bike/power cruiser segment, the \"V-Rod\" makes use of the revolution engine that, for the first time in Harley history, incorporates overhead cams and liquid cooling. The V-Rod is visually distinctive, easily identified by the 60-degree V-Twin engine, the radiator and the hydroformed frame members that support the round-topped air cleaner cover. The VRSC platform was also used for factory drag-racing motorcycles.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In 2008, Harley added the anti-lock braking system as a factory-installed option on all VRSC models. Harley also increased the displacement of the stock engine from 1,130 to 1,250 cc (69 to 76 cu in), which had only previously been available from Screamin' Eagle, and added a slipper clutch as standard equipment.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "VRSC models include:",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "VRSC models utilize the Revolution engine (VR), and the street versions are designated Street Custom (SC). After the VRSC prefix common to all street Revolution bikes, the next letter denotes the model, either A (base V-Rod: discontinued), AW (base V-Rod + W for Wide with a 240 mm rear tire), B (discontinued), D (Night Rod: discontinued), R (Street Rod: discontinued), SE and SEII (CVO Special Edition), or X (Special edition). Further differentiation within models are made with an additional letter, e.g., VRSCDX denotes the Night Rod Special.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The VRXSE V-Rod Destroyer is Harley-Davidson's production drag racing motorcycle, constructed to run the quarter mile in less than ten seconds. It is based on the same revolution engine that powers the VRSC line, but the VRXSE uses the Screamin' Eagle 1,300 cc \"stroked\" incarnation, featuring a 75 mm crankshaft, 105 mm Pistons, and 58 mm throttle bodies.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The V-Rod Destroyer is not a street-legal motorcycle. As such, it uses \"X\" instead of \"SC\" to denote a non-street bike. \"SE\" denotes a CVO Special Edition.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Street, Harley-Davidson's newest platform and their first all new platform in thirteen years, was designed to appeal to younger riders looking for a lighter bike at a cheaper price. The Street 750 model was launched in India at the 2014 Indian Auto Expo, Delhi-NCR on February 5, 2014. The Street 750 weighs 218 kg and has a ground clearance of 144 mm giving it the lowest weight and the highest ground clearance of Harley-Davidson motorcycles currently available.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The Street 750 uses an all-new, liquid-cooled, 60° V-twin engine called the Revolution X. In the Street 750, the engine displaces 749 cc (45.7 cu in) and produces 65 Nm at 4,000 rpm. A six speed transmission is used.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The Street 750 and the smaller-displacement Street 500 have been available since late 2014. Street series motorcycles for the North American market will be built in Harley-Davidson's Kansas City, Missouri plant, while those for other markets around the world will be built completely in their plant in Bawal, India.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Harley-Davidson's LiveWire, released in 2019, is their first electric vehicle. The high-voltage battery provides a minimum city range of 98 miles (158 km). The LiveWire targets a different type of customer than their classic V-twin powered motorcycles.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "In March 2020, a Harley-Davidson LiveWire was used to break the 24-hour distance record for an electric motorcycle. The bike traveled a reported 1,723 km (1,079 miles) in 23 hours and 48 minutes. The LiveWire offers a Level 1 slow recharge, which uses a regular wall outlet to refill an empty battery overnight, or a quick Level 3 DC Fast Charge. The Fast Charge fills the battery most of the way in about 40 minutes. Swiss rider Michel von Tell used the Level 3 charging to make the 24-hour ride.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "In December 2021, the company announced that that LiveWire was to be spun-off from parent Harley Davidson, set to go public in the first half of 2022 as a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with the value estimated to be $1.77 billion.",
"title": "Model families"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Custom Vehicle Operations (CVO) is a team within Harley-Davidson that produces limited-edition customizations of Harley's stock models. Every year since 1999, the team has selected two to five of the company's base models and added higher-displacement engines, performance upgrades, special-edition paint jobs, more chromed or accented components, audio system upgrades, and electronic accessories to create high-dollar, premium-quality customizations for the factory custom market. The models most commonly upgraded in such a fashion are the Ultra Classic Electra Glide, which has been selected for CVO treatment every year from 2006 to the present, and the Road King, which was selected in 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2008. The Dyna, Softail, and VRSC families have also been selected for CVO customization.",
"title": "Custom Vehicle Operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The Environmental Protection Agency conducted emissions-certification and representative emissions test in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2005. Subsequently, Harley-Davidson produced an \"environmental warranty\". The warranty ensures each owner that the vehicle is designed and built free of any defects in materials and workmanship that would cause the vehicle to not meet EPA standards. In 2005, the EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) confirmed Harley-Davidson to be the first corporation to voluntarily enroll in the One Clean-Up Program. This program is designed for the clean-up of the affected soil and groundwater at the former York Naval Ordnance Plant. The program is backed by the state and local government along with participating organizations and corporations.",
"title": "Environmental record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Paul Gotthold, Director of Operations for the EPA, congratulated the motor company:",
"title": "Environmental record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Harley-Davidson has taken their environmental responsibilities very seriously and has already made substantial progress in the investigation and cleanup of past contamination. Proof of Harley's efforts can be found in the recent EPA determination that designates the Harley property as 'under control' for cleanup purposes. This determination means that there are no serious contamination problems at the facility. Under the new One Cleanup Program, Harley, EPA, and PADEP will expedite the completion of the property investigation and reach a final solution that will permanently protect human health and the environment.",
"title": "Environmental record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Harley-Davidson also purchased most of Castalloy, a South Australian producer of cast motorcycle wheels and hubs. The South Australian government has set forth \"protection to the purchaser (Harley-Davidson) against environmental risks\".",
"title": "Environmental record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In August 2016, Harley-Davidson settled with the EPA for $12 million, without admitting wrongdoing, over the sale of after-market \"super tuners\". Super tuners were devices, marketed for competition, which enabled increased performance of Harley-Davidson products. However, the devices also modified the emission control systems, producing increased hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide. Harley-Davidson is required to buy back and destroy any super tuners which do not meet Clean Air Act requirements and spend $3 million on air pollution mitigation.",
"title": "Environmental record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "According to a recent Harley-Davidson study, in 1987 half of all Harley riders were under age 35. However, by 2006, only 15 percent of Harley buyers were under 35, and as of 2005, the median age had risen to 46.7. In 2008, Harley-Davidson stopped disclosing the average age of riders; at this point it was 48 years old.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In 1987, the median household income of a Harley-Davidson rider was $38,000. By 1997, the median household income for those riders had more than doubled, to $83,000.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Many Harley-Davidson Clubs exist nowadays around the world; the oldest one, founded in 1928, is in Prague.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Harley-Davidson attracts a loyal brand community, with licensing of the Harley-Davidson logo accounting for almost 5 percent of the company's net revenue ($41 million in 2004). Harley-Davidson supplies many American police forces with their motorcycle fleets.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "From its founding, Harley-Davidson had worked to brand its motorcycles as respectable and refined products, with ads that showed what motorcycling writer Fred Rau called \"refined-looking ladies with parasols, and men in conservative suits as the target market\". The 1906 Harley-Davidson's effective, and polite, muffler was emphasized in advertisements with the nickname \"The Silent Gray Fellow\". That began to shift in the 1960s, partially in response to the clean-cut motorcyclist portrayed in Honda's \"You meet the nicest people on a Honda\" campaign, when Harley-Davidson sought to draw a contrast with Honda by underscoring the more working-class, macho, and even a little anti-social attitude associated with motorcycling's dark side. With the 1971 FX Super Glide, the company embraced, rather than distanced itself from, chopper style and the counterculture custom Harley scene. Their marketing cultivated the \"bad boy\" image of biker and motorcycle clubs, and to a point, even outlaw or one-percenter motorcycle clubs.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Beginning in 1920, a team of farm boys, including Ray Weishaar, who became known as the \"hog boys\", consistently won races. The group had a live hog as their mascot. Following a win, they would put the hog on their Harley and take a victory lap. In 1983, the Motor Company formed a club for owners of its product, taking advantage of the long-standing nickname by turning \"hog\" into the acronym HOG, for Harley Owners Group. Harley-Davidson attempted to trademark \"hog\", but lost a case against an independent Harley-Davidson specialist, The Hog Farm of West Seneca, New York, in 1999, when the appellate panel ruled that \"hog\" had become a generic term for large motorcycles and was therefore unprotectable as a trademark.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "On August 15, 2006, Harley-Davidson Inc. had its NYSE ticker symbol changed from HDI to HOG.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Harley-Davidson FL \"big twins\" normally had heavy steel fenders, chrome trim, and other ornate and heavy accessories. After World War II, riders wanting more speed would often shorten the fenders or take them off completely to reduce the weight of the motorcycle. These bikes were called \"bobbers\" or sometimes \"choppers\", because parts considered unnecessary were chopped off. Those who made or rode choppers and bobbers, especially members of motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels, referred to stock FLs as \"garbage wagons\".",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Harley-Davidson established the Harley Owners Group (HOG) in 1983 to build on the loyalty of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts as a means to promote a lifestyle alongside its products. The HOG also opened new revenue streams for the company, with the production of tie-in merchandise offered to club members, numbering more than one million. Other motorcycle brands, and other and consumer brands outside motorcycling, have also tried to create factory-sponsored community marketing clubs of their own. HOG members typically spend 30 percent more than other Harley owners on such items as clothing and Harley-Davidson-sponsored events.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "In 1991, HOG went international, with the first official European HOG Rally in Cheltenham, England. Today, more than one million members and more than 1400 chapters worldwide make HOG the largest factory-sponsored motorcycle organization in the world.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "HOG benefits include organized group rides, exclusive products and product discounts, insurance discounts, and the Hog Tales newsletter. A one-year full membership is included with the purchase of a new, unregistered Harley-Davidson.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In 2008, HOG celebrated its 25th anniversary in conjunction with the Harley 105th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "3rd Southern HOG Rally set to bring together largest gathering of Harley-Davidson owners in South India. More than 600 Harley-Davidson Owners expected to ride to Hyderabad from across 13 HOG Chapters.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Harley-Davidson offers factory tours at four of its manufacturing sites, and the Harley-Davidson Museum, which opened in 2008, exhibits Harley-Davidson's history, culture, and vehicles, including the motor company's corporate archives.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Due to the consolidation of operations, the Capitol Drive Tour Center in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was closed in 2009.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Some of the company's buildings have been listed on state and national historic registers, including:",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Beginning with Harley-Davidson's 90th anniversary in 1993, Harley-Davidson has had celebratory rides to Milwaukee called the \"Ride Home\". This new tradition has continued every five years, and is referred to unofficially as \"Harleyfest\", in line with Milwaukee's other festivals (Summerfest, German fest, Festa Italiana, etc.). This event brings Harley riders from all around the world. The 105th anniversary celebration was held on August 28–31, 2008, and included events in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine, and Kenosha counties, in Southeast Wisconsin. The 110th-anniversary celebration was held on August 29–31, 2013. The 115th anniversary was held in Prague, Czech Republic, the home country of the oldest existing Harley Davidson Club, on July 5–8, 2018 and attracted more than 100,000 visitors and 60,000 bikes. The 120th anniversary was held in Budapest, Hungary, with the parade on June 24.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "William S. Harley, Arthur Davidson, William A. Davidson and Walter Davidson Sr were, in 2004, inducted into the Labor Hall of Fame for their accomplishments for the H-D company and its workforce.",
"title": "Brand culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "The company's origins were dramatized in a 2016 miniseries entitled Harley and the Davidsons, starring Robert Aramayo as William Harley, Bug Hall as Arthur Davidson and Michiel Huisman as Walter Davidson, and premiered on the Discovery Channel as a \"three-night event series\" on September 5, 2016.",
"title": "Brand culture"
}
]
| Harley-Davidson, Inc. is an American motorcycle manufacturer headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1903, it is one of two major American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression along with its historical rival, Indian Motorcycles. The company has survived numerous ownership arrangements, subsidiary arrangements, periods of poor economic health and product quality, and intense global competition to become one of the world's largest motorcycle manufacturers and an iconic brand widely known for its loyal following. There are owner clubs and events worldwide, as well as a company-sponsored, brand-focused museum. Harley-Davidson is noted for a style of customization that gave rise to the chopper motorcycle style. The company traditionally marketed heavyweight, air-cooled cruiser motorcycles with engine displacements greater than 700 cc, but it has broadened its offerings to include more contemporary VRSC (2002) and middle-weight Street (2015) platforms. Harley-Davidson manufactures its motorcycles at factories in York, Pennsylvania; Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin; Tomahawk, Wisconsin; Manaus, Brazil; and Rayong, Thailand. The company markets its products worldwide, and also licenses and markets merchandise under the Harley-Davidson brand, among them apparel, home décor and ornaments, accessories, toys, scale models of its motorcycles, and video games based on its motorcycle line and the community. | 2001-11-15T04:59:57Z | 2023-12-26T20:48:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson |
14,144 | Hiberno-English | Hiberno-English (/haɪˈbɜːrnoʊ -, hɪ-/; from Latin Hibernia: "Ireland") or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland).
In the Republic of Ireland, English is one of two official languages, along with the Irish language, and is the country's de facto working language. Irish English's writing standards, such as its spelling, align with British English. However, Irish English's diverse accents and some of its grammatical structures and vocabulary are unique, with some influences deriving from the Irish language and some notably conservative phonological features: features no longer common in the accents of England or North America.
Phonologists today often divide Irish English into four or five overarching dialects or accents: Ulster accents, West and South-West Irish accents (like Cork accents), various Dublin accents, and a non-regional standard accent expanding since only the last quarter of the twentieth century (outside of Northern Ireland).
Old English, as well as Anglo-Norman, was brought to Ireland as a result of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland of the late 12th century; this became the Yola language, which is not mutually comprehensible with Modern English. A second wave of the English language was brought to Ireland in the 16th-century (Elizabethan) Early Modern period, making that variety of English spoken in Ireland the oldest outside of Great Britain, and it remains phonologically more conservative today than many other dialects of English.
Initially, Norman English was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with largely the Irish language spoken throughout the rest of the country. Some small pockets remained of speakers who predominantly continued to use the English of that time; because of their sheer isolation, these dialects developed into later (now-extinct) English-related varieties known as Yola in Wexford and Fingallian in Fingal, Dublin. These were no longer mutually intelligible with other English varieties. By the Tudor period, Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory lost to the invaders: even in the Pale, "all the common folk… for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit, and of Irish language".
However, the Tudor conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century led to the second wave of immigration by English speakers along with the forced suppression and decline in the status and use of the Irish language. By the mid-19th century English had become the majority language spoken in the country. It has retained this status to the present day, with even those whose first language is Irish being fluent in English as well. Today, there is little more than one percent of the population who speaks the Irish language natively, though it is required to be taught in all state-funded schools. Of the 40% of the population who self-identified as speaking some Irish in 2016, 4% speak Irish daily outside the education system.
Ulster English (or Northern Irish English) here refers collectively to the varieties of the Ulster province, including Northern Ireland and neighbouring counties outside of Northern Ireland, which has been influenced by Ulster Irish as well as the Scots language, brought over by Scottish settlers during the Plantation of Ulster. Its main subdivisions are Mid-Ulster English, South Ulster English and Ulster Scots, the latter of which is arguably a separate language. Ulster varieties distinctly pronounce:
West and South-West Irish English here refers to broad varieties of Ireland's West and South-West Regions. Accents of both regions are known for:
South-West Irish English (often known, by specific county, as Cork English, Kerry English, or Limerick English) also features two major defining characteristics of its own. One is the pin–pen merger: the raising of dress to [ɪ] when before /n/ or /m/ (as in again or pen). The other is the intonation pattern of a slightly higher pitch followed by a significant drop in pitch on stressed long-vowel syllables (across multiple syllables or even within a single one), which is popularly heard in rapid conversation, by speakers of other English dialects, as a noticeable kind of undulating "sing-song" pattern.
Dublin English is highly internally diverse and refers collectively to the Irish English varieties immediately surrounding and within the metropolitan area of Dublin. Modern-day Dublin English largely lies on a phonological continuum, ranging from a more traditional, lower-prestige, local urban accent on the one end to a more recently developing, higher-prestige, non-local (regional and even supraregional) accent on the other end, whose most advanced characteristics only first emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. The accent that most strongly uses the traditional working-class features has been labelled by linguists as local Dublin English. Most speakers from Dublin and its suburbs, however, have accent features falling variously along the entire middle as well as the newer end of the spectrum, which together form what is called non-local Dublin English, spoken by middle- and upper-class natives of Dublin and the greater eastern Irish region surrounding the city. A subset of this variety, whose middle-class speakers mostly range in the middle section of the continuum, is called mainstream Dublin English. Mainstream Dublin English has become the basis of an accent that has otherwise become supraregional (see more below) everywhere except in the north of the country. The majority of Dubliners born since the 1980s (led particularly by women) has shifted towards the most innovative non-local accent, here called new Dublin English, which has gained ground over mainstream Dublin English and which is the most extreme variety in rejecting the local accent's traditional features. The varieties at either extreme of the spectrum, local and new Dublin English, are both discussed in further detail below. In the most general terms, all varieties of Dublin English have the following identifying sounds that are often distinct from the rest of Ireland, pronouncing:
Local Dublin English (or popular Dublin English) here refers to a traditional, broad, working-class variety spoken in the Republic of Ireland's capital city of Dublin. It is the only Irish English variety that in earlier history was non-rhotic; however, it is today weakly rhotic. Known for diphthongisation of the goat and face vowels, the local Dublin accent is also known for a phenomenon called "vowel breaking", in which mouth, price, goose and fleece in closed syllables are "broken" into two syllables, approximating [ɛwə], [əjə], [uwə], and [ijə], respectively.
Evolving as a fashionable outgrowth of the mainstream non-local Dublin English, new Dublin English (also, advanced Dublin English and, formerly, fashionable Dublin English) is a youthful variety that originally began in the early 1990s among the "avant-garde" and now those aspiring to a non-local "urban sophistication". New Dublin English itself, first associated with affluent and middle-class inhabitants of southside Dublin, is probably now spoken by a majority of Dubliners born since the 1980s. It has replaced (yet was largely influenced by) moribund D4 English (often known as "Dublin 4" or "DART speak" or, mockingly, "Dortspeak"), which originated around the 1970s from Dubliners who rejected traditional notions of Irishness, regarding themselves as more trendy and sophisticated; however, particular aspects of the D4 accent became quickly noticed and ridiculed as sounding affected, causing these features to fall out of fashion by the 1990s. New Dublin English can have a fur–fair merger, horse–hoarse, and witch–which mergers, while resisting the traditionally Irish English cot–caught merger. This accent has since spread south to parts of east County Wicklow, west to parts of north County Kildare and parts of south County Meath. The accent can be also heard among the middle to upper classes in most major cities in the Republic today.
Supraregional Southern Irish English (sometimes, simply Supraregional Irish English or Standard Irish English) refers to a variety spoken particularly by educated and middle- or higher-class Irish people, crossing regional boundaries throughout all of the Republic of Ireland, except the north. As mentioned earlier, mainstream Dublin English of the early- to mid-twentieth century is the direct influence and catalyst for this variety, coming about by the suppression of certain markedly Irish features (and retention of other Irish features) as well as the adoption of certain standard British (i.e., non-Irish) features. The result is a configuration of features that is still unique; in other words, this accent is not simply a wholesale shift towards British English. Most speakers born in the 1980s or later are showing fewer features of this late-twentieth-century mainstream supraregional form and more characteristics aligning to a rapidly spreading new Dublin accent (see more above, under "Non-local Dublin English").
Ireland's supraregional dialect pronounces:
The following charts list the vowels typical of each Irish English dialect as well as the several distinctive consonants of Irish English. Phonological characteristics of overall Irish English are given as well as categorisations into five major divisions of Hiberno-English: Ulster; West & South-West Ireland; local Dublin; new Dublin; and supraregional (southern) Ireland. Features of mainstream non-local Dublin English fall on a range between "local Dublin" and "new Dublin".
The following monophthongs are defining characteristics of Irish English:
Footnotes:
^1 In southside Dublin's once-briefly fashionable "Dublin 4" (or "Dortspeak") accent, the "/ɑː/ and broad /æ/" set becomes rounded as [ɒː].
^2 In South-West Ireland, /ɛ/ before /n/ or /m/ is raised to [ɪ].
^3 Due to the phenomenon of "vowel breaking" in local Dublin accents, /iː/ and /uː/ may be realised as [ijə] and [ʊuwə] in closed syllables.
Other notes:
The following diphthongs are defining characteristics of Irish English:
Footnotes: ^1 Due to the phenomenon of "vowel breaking" local Dublin accents, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ may be realised as [əjə] and [ɛwə] in closed syllables.
The consonants of Hiberno-English mostly align with the typical English consonant sounds. However, a few Irish English consonants have distinctive, varying qualities. The following consonant features are defining characteristics of Hiberno-English:
Footnotes:
^1 In traditional, conservative Ulster English, /k/ and /ɡ/ are palatalised before an open front vowel.
^2 Local Dublin features consonant cluster reduction, so that plosives occurring after fricatives or sonorants may be left unpronounced, resulting, for example, in "poun(d)" and "las(t)".
^3 In extremely traditional and conservative accents (e.g. Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Jackie Healy-Rae), prevocalic /r/ can also be an alveolar flap, [ɾ]. /r/ may be guttural (uvular, [ʁ]) in north-east Leinster.
^4 ⟨θ̠⟩ is used here to represent the voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, sometimes known as a "slit fricative", which is apico-alveolar.
^5 Overall, /hw/ and /w/ are being increasingly merged in supraregional Irish English, for example, making wine and whine homophones, as in most varieties of English around the world.
The following vowels + ⟨r⟩ combinations are defining characteristics of Hiberno-English:
Footnotes:
^1 In southside Dublin's "Dublin 4" (or "Dortspeak") accent, /ɑːr/ is realised as [ɒːɹ].
^2 In non-local Dublin's more recently emerging (or "new Dublin") accent, /ɛər/ and /ɜr/ may both be realised more rounded as [øːɻ].
^3 The nurse mergers have not occurred in local Dublin, West/South-West, and other very conservative and traditional Irish English which retain a two-way distinction, /ɛr/ versus /ʊr/, unlike most English dialects which have merged historical /ɛr/, /ɪr/ and /ʊr/ to /ɜr/, [ɚː] in the case of non-local Dublin, supraregional, and younger Irish accents. The distribution of /ɛr/ and /ʊr/ is as follows: /ʊr/ occurs when spelled ⟨ur⟩ and ⟨or⟩ (e.g. urn and word), ⟨ir⟩ after alveolar stops (e.g. dirt), and after labial consonants (e.g. fern); /ɛr/ is occurs in all other situations. There are apparent exceptions to these rules; John C. Wells describes prefer and per as /ɛr/, despite the vowel in question following a labial. The distribution of /ɛr/ versus /ʊr/ is listed below in some example words:
^4 In a rare few local Dublin varieties that are non-rhotic, /ər/ is either lowered to [ɐ] or backed and raised to [ɤ].
^5 The distinction between /ɔːr/ and /oʊr/ is widely preserved in Ireland, so that, for example, horse and hoarse are not merged in most Irish English dialects; however, they are usually merged in Belfast and new Dublin.
^6 In local Dublin /(j)uːr/ may be realised as [(j)uʷə(ɹ)]. For some speakers /(j)uːr/ may merge with /ɔːr/.
A number of Irish language loan words are used in Hiberno-English, particularly in an official state capacity. For example, the head of government is the Taoiseach, the deputy head is the Tánaiste, the parliament is the Oireachtas and its lower house is Dáil Éireann. Less formally, people also use loan words in day-to-day speech, although this has been on the wane in recent decades and among the young.
Another group of Hiberno-English words are those derived from the Irish language. Some are words in English that have entered into general use, while others are unique to Ireland. These words and phrases are often Anglicised versions of words in Irish or direct translations into English. In the latter case, they often give meaning to a word or phrase that is generally not found in wider English use.
Another class of vocabulary found in Hiberno-English are words and phrases common in Old and Middle English, but which have since become obscure or obsolete in the modern English language generally. Hiberno-English has also developed particular meanings for words that are still in common use in English generally.
In addition to the three groups above, there are also additional words and phrases whose origin is disputed or unknown. While this group may not be unique to Ireland, their usage is not widespread, and could be seen as characteristic of the language in Ireland.
The syntax of the Irish language is quite different from that of English. Various aspects of Irish syntax have influenced Hiberno-English, though many of these idiosyncrasies are disappearing in suburban areas and among the younger population.
Another feature of Hiberno-English that sets it apart is the retention of words and phrases from Old and Middle English that are not retained otherwise in Modern English.
Reduplication is an alleged trait of Hiberno-English strongly associated with Stage Irish and Hollywood films.
Irish has no words that directly translate as 'yes' or 'no', and instead repeats the verb used in the question, negated if necessary, to answer. Hiberno-English uses "yes" and "no" less frequently than other English dialects as speakers can repeat the verb, positively or negatively, instead of (or in redundant addition to) using "yes" or "no".
This is not limited only to the verb to be: it is also used with to have when used as an auxiliary; and, with other verbs, the verb to do is used. This is most commonly used for intensification, especially in Ulster English.
Irish indicates recency of an action by adding "after" to the present continuous (a verb ending in "-ing"), a construction known as the "hot news perfect" or "after perfect". The idiom for "I had done X when I did Y" is "I was after doing X when I did Y", modelled on the Irish usage of the compound prepositions i ndiaidh, tar éis, and in éis: bhí mé tar éis / i ndiaidh / in éis X a dhéanamh, nuair a rinne mé Y.
A similar construction is seen where exclamation is used in describing a recent event:
When describing less astonishing or significant events, a structure resembling the German perfect can be seen:
This correlates with an analysis of "H1 Irish" proposed by Adger & Mitrovic, in a deliberate parallel to the status of German as a V2 language.
Recent past construction has been directly adopted into Newfoundland English, where it is common in both formal and casual register. In rural areas of the Avalon peninsula, where Newfoundland Irish was spoken until the early 20th century, it is the grammatical standard for describing whether or not an action has occurred.
The reflexive version of pronouns is often used for emphasis or to refer indirectly to a particular person, etc., according to context. Herself, for example, might refer to the speaker's boss or to the woman of the house. Use of herself or himself in this way can imply status or even some arrogance of the person in question. Note also the indirectness of this construction relative to, for example, She's coming now. This reflexive pronoun can also be used in a more neutral sense to describe a person's spouse or partner – "I was with himself last night" or "How's herself doing?"
There are some language forms that stem from the fact that there is no verb to have in Irish. Instead, possession is indicated in Irish by using the preposition "at", (in Irish, ag). To be more precise, Irish uses a prepositional pronoun that combines ag 'at' and mé 'me' to create agam. In English, the verb "to have" is used, along with a "with me" or "on me" that derives from Tá ... agam. This gives rise to the frequent
Somebody who can speak a language "has" a language, in which Hiberno-English has borrowed the grammatical form used in Irish.
When describing something, many Hiberno-English speakers use the term "in it" where "there" would usually be used. This is due to the Irish word ann (pronounced "oun" or "on") fulfilling both meanings.
Another idiom is this thing or that thing described as "this man here" or "that man there", which also features in Newfoundland English in Canada.
Conditionals have a greater presence in Hiberno-English due to the tendency to replace the simple present tense with the conditional (would) and the simple past tense with the conditional perfect (would have).
Bring and take: Irish use of these words differs from that of British English because it follows the Irish grammar for beir and tóg. English usage is determined by direction; a person determines Irish usage. So, in English, one takes "from here to there", and brings it "to here from there". In Irish, a person takes only when accepting a transfer of possession of the object from someone else – and a person brings at all other times, irrespective of direction (to or from).
The Irish equivalent of the verb "to be" has two present tenses, one (the present tense proper or "aimsir láithreach") for cases which are generally true or are true at the time of speaking and the other (the habitual present or "aimsir ghnáthláithreach") for repeated actions. Thus, "you are [now, or generally]" is tá tú, but "you are [repeatedly]" is bíonn tú. Both forms are used with the verbal noun (equivalent to the English present participle) to create compound tenses. This is similar to the distinction between ser and estar in Spanish or the use of the "habitual be" in African-American Vernacular English.
The corresponding usage in English is frequently found in rural areas, especially County Mayo and County Sligo in the west of Ireland and County Wexford in the south-east, inner-city Dublin and Cork city along with border areas of the North and Republic. In this form, the verb "to be" in English is similar to its use in Irish, with a "does be/do be" (or "bees", although less frequently) construction to indicate the continuous, or habitual, present:
In old-fashioned usage, "it is" can be freely abbreviated 'tis, even as a standalone sentence. This also allows the double contraction 'tisn't, for "it is not".
Irish has separate forms for the second person singular (tú) and the second person plural (sibh). Mirroring Irish, and almost every other Indo-European language, the plural you is also distinguished from the singular in Hiberno-English, normally by use of the otherwise archaic English word ye [jiː]; the word yous (sometimes written as youse) also occurs, but primarily only in Dublin and across Ulster. In addition, in some areas in Leinster, north Connacht and parts of Ulster, the hybrid word ye-s, pronounced "yiz", may be used. The pronunciation differs with that of the northwestern being [jiːz] and the Leinster pronunciation being [jɪz].
The word ye, yis or yous, otherwise archaic, is still used in place of "you" for the second-person plural, e.g. "Where are yous going?" Ye'r, Yisser or Yousser are the possessive forms.
The verb mitch is very common in Ireland, indicating being truant from school. This word appears in Shakespeare (though he wrote in Early Modern English rather than Middle English), but is seldom heard these days in British English, although pockets of usage persist in some areas (notably South Wales, Devon, and Cornwall). In parts of Connacht and Ulster the mitch is often replaced by the verb scheme, while in Dublin it is often replaced by "on the hop/bounce".
Another usage familiar from Shakespeare is the inclusion of the second person pronoun after the imperative form of a verb, as in "Wife, go you to her ere you go to bed" (Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene IV). This is still common in Ulster: "Get youse your homework done or you're no goin' out!" In Munster, you will still hear children being told, "Up to bed, let ye" [lɛˈtʃi].
For influence from Scotland, see Ulster Scots and Ulster English.
Now is often used at the end of sentences or phrases as a semantically empty word, completing an utterance without contributing any apparent meaning. Examples include "Bye now" (= "Goodbye"), "There you go now" (when giving someone something), "Ah now!" (expressing dismay), "Hold on now" (= "wait a minute"), "Now then" as a mild attention-getter, etc. This usage is universal among English dialects, but occurs more frequently in Hiberno-English. It is also used in the manner of the Italian 'prego' or German 'bitte', for example, a barman might say "Now, Sir." when delivering drinks.
So is often used for emphasis ("I can speak Irish, so I can"), or it may be tacked onto the end of a sentence to indicate agreement, where "then" would often be used in Standard English ("Bye so", "Let's go so", "That's fine so", "We'll do that so"). The word is also used to contradict a negative statement ("You're not pushing hard enough" – "I am so!"). (This contradiction of a negative is also seen in American English, though not as often as "I am too", or "Yes, I am".) The practice of indicating emphasis with so and including reduplicating the sentence's subject pronoun and auxiliary verb (is, are, have, has, can, etc.) such as in the initial example, is particularly prevalent in more northern dialects such as those of Sligo, Mayo and the counties of Ulster.
Sure/Surely is often used as a tag word, emphasising the obviousness of the statement, roughly translating as but/and/well/indeed. It can be used as "to be sure" (but the other stereotype of "Sure and …" is not actually used in Ireland.) Or "Sure, I can just go on Wednesday", "I will not, to be sure." The word is also used at the end of sentences (primarily in Munster), for instance, "I was only here five minutes ago, sure!" and can express emphasis or indignation. In Ulster, the reply "Aye, surely" may be given to show strong agreement.
To is often omitted from sentences where it would exist in British English. For example, "I'm not allowed go out tonight", instead of "I'm not allowed to go out tonight".
Will is often used where British English would use "shall" or American English "should" (as in "Will I make us a cup of tea?"). The distinction between "shall" (for first-person simple future, and second- and third-person emphatic future) and "will" (second- and third-person simple future, first-person emphatic future), maintained by many in England, does not exist in Hiberno-English, with "will" generally used in all cases.
Once is sometimes used in a different way from how it is used in other dialects; in this usage, it indicates a combination of logical and causal conditionality: "I have no problem laughing at myself once the joke is funny." Other dialects of English would probably use "if" in this situation. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hiberno-English (/haɪˈbɜːrnoʊ -, hɪ-/; from Latin Hibernia: \"Ireland\") or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the Republic of Ireland, English is one of two official languages, along with the Irish language, and is the country's de facto working language. Irish English's writing standards, such as its spelling, align with British English. However, Irish English's diverse accents and some of its grammatical structures and vocabulary are unique, with some influences deriving from the Irish language and some notably conservative phonological features: features no longer common in the accents of England or North America.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Phonologists today often divide Irish English into four or five overarching dialects or accents: Ulster accents, West and South-West Irish accents (like Cork accents), various Dublin accents, and a non-regional standard accent expanding since only the last quarter of the twentieth century (outside of Northern Ireland).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Old English, as well as Anglo-Norman, was brought to Ireland as a result of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland of the late 12th century; this became the Yola language, which is not mutually comprehensible with Modern English. A second wave of the English language was brought to Ireland in the 16th-century (Elizabethan) Early Modern period, making that variety of English spoken in Ireland the oldest outside of Great Britain, and it remains phonologically more conservative today than many other dialects of English.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Initially, Norman English was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with largely the Irish language spoken throughout the rest of the country. Some small pockets remained of speakers who predominantly continued to use the English of that time; because of their sheer isolation, these dialects developed into later (now-extinct) English-related varieties known as Yola in Wexford and Fingallian in Fingal, Dublin. These were no longer mutually intelligible with other English varieties. By the Tudor period, Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory lost to the invaders: even in the Pale, \"all the common folk… for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit, and of Irish language\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "However, the Tudor conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century led to the second wave of immigration by English speakers along with the forced suppression and decline in the status and use of the Irish language. By the mid-19th century English had become the majority language spoken in the country. It has retained this status to the present day, with even those whose first language is Irish being fluent in English as well. Today, there is little more than one percent of the population who speaks the Irish language natively, though it is required to be taught in all state-funded schools. Of the 40% of the population who self-identified as speaking some Irish in 2016, 4% speak Irish daily outside the education system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ulster English (or Northern Irish English) here refers collectively to the varieties of the Ulster province, including Northern Ireland and neighbouring counties outside of Northern Ireland, which has been influenced by Ulster Irish as well as the Scots language, brought over by Scottish settlers during the Plantation of Ulster. Its main subdivisions are Mid-Ulster English, South Ulster English and Ulster Scots, the latter of which is arguably a separate language. Ulster varieties distinctly pronounce:",
"title": "Ulster English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "West and South-West Irish English here refers to broad varieties of Ireland's West and South-West Regions. Accents of both regions are known for:",
"title": "West and South-West Irish English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "South-West Irish English (often known, by specific county, as Cork English, Kerry English, or Limerick English) also features two major defining characteristics of its own. One is the pin–pen merger: the raising of dress to [ɪ] when before /n/ or /m/ (as in again or pen). The other is the intonation pattern of a slightly higher pitch followed by a significant drop in pitch on stressed long-vowel syllables (across multiple syllables or even within a single one), which is popularly heard in rapid conversation, by speakers of other English dialects, as a noticeable kind of undulating \"sing-song\" pattern.",
"title": "West and South-West Irish English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Dublin English is highly internally diverse and refers collectively to the Irish English varieties immediately surrounding and within the metropolitan area of Dublin. Modern-day Dublin English largely lies on a phonological continuum, ranging from a more traditional, lower-prestige, local urban accent on the one end to a more recently developing, higher-prestige, non-local (regional and even supraregional) accent on the other end, whose most advanced characteristics only first emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. The accent that most strongly uses the traditional working-class features has been labelled by linguists as local Dublin English. Most speakers from Dublin and its suburbs, however, have accent features falling variously along the entire middle as well as the newer end of the spectrum, which together form what is called non-local Dublin English, spoken by middle- and upper-class natives of Dublin and the greater eastern Irish region surrounding the city. A subset of this variety, whose middle-class speakers mostly range in the middle section of the continuum, is called mainstream Dublin English. Mainstream Dublin English has become the basis of an accent that has otherwise become supraregional (see more below) everywhere except in the north of the country. The majority of Dubliners born since the 1980s (led particularly by women) has shifted towards the most innovative non-local accent, here called new Dublin English, which has gained ground over mainstream Dublin English and which is the most extreme variety in rejecting the local accent's traditional features. The varieties at either extreme of the spectrum, local and new Dublin English, are both discussed in further detail below. In the most general terms, all varieties of Dublin English have the following identifying sounds that are often distinct from the rest of Ireland, pronouncing:",
"title": "Dublin English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Local Dublin English (or popular Dublin English) here refers to a traditional, broad, working-class variety spoken in the Republic of Ireland's capital city of Dublin. It is the only Irish English variety that in earlier history was non-rhotic; however, it is today weakly rhotic. Known for diphthongisation of the goat and face vowels, the local Dublin accent is also known for a phenomenon called \"vowel breaking\", in which mouth, price, goose and fleece in closed syllables are \"broken\" into two syllables, approximating [ɛwə], [əjə], [uwə], and [ijə], respectively.",
"title": "Dublin English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Evolving as a fashionable outgrowth of the mainstream non-local Dublin English, new Dublin English (also, advanced Dublin English and, formerly, fashionable Dublin English) is a youthful variety that originally began in the early 1990s among the \"avant-garde\" and now those aspiring to a non-local \"urban sophistication\". New Dublin English itself, first associated with affluent and middle-class inhabitants of southside Dublin, is probably now spoken by a majority of Dubliners born since the 1980s. It has replaced (yet was largely influenced by) moribund D4 English (often known as \"Dublin 4\" or \"DART speak\" or, mockingly, \"Dortspeak\"), which originated around the 1970s from Dubliners who rejected traditional notions of Irishness, regarding themselves as more trendy and sophisticated; however, particular aspects of the D4 accent became quickly noticed and ridiculed as sounding affected, causing these features to fall out of fashion by the 1990s. New Dublin English can have a fur–fair merger, horse–hoarse, and witch–which mergers, while resisting the traditionally Irish English cot–caught merger. This accent has since spread south to parts of east County Wicklow, west to parts of north County Kildare and parts of south County Meath. The accent can be also heard among the middle to upper classes in most major cities in the Republic today.",
"title": "Dublin English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Supraregional Southern Irish English (sometimes, simply Supraregional Irish English or Standard Irish English) refers to a variety spoken particularly by educated and middle- or higher-class Irish people, crossing regional boundaries throughout all of the Republic of Ireland, except the north. As mentioned earlier, mainstream Dublin English of the early- to mid-twentieth century is the direct influence and catalyst for this variety, coming about by the suppression of certain markedly Irish features (and retention of other Irish features) as well as the adoption of certain standard British (i.e., non-Irish) features. The result is a configuration of features that is still unique; in other words, this accent is not simply a wholesale shift towards British English. Most speakers born in the 1980s or later are showing fewer features of this late-twentieth-century mainstream supraregional form and more characteristics aligning to a rapidly spreading new Dublin accent (see more above, under \"Non-local Dublin English\").",
"title": "Standard Irish English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Ireland's supraregional dialect pronounces:",
"title": "Standard Irish English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The following charts list the vowels typical of each Irish English dialect as well as the several distinctive consonants of Irish English. Phonological characteristics of overall Irish English are given as well as categorisations into five major divisions of Hiberno-English: Ulster; West & South-West Ireland; local Dublin; new Dublin; and supraregional (southern) Ireland. Features of mainstream non-local Dublin English fall on a range between \"local Dublin\" and \"new Dublin\".",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The following monophthongs are defining characteristics of Irish English:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Footnotes:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "^1 In southside Dublin's once-briefly fashionable \"Dublin 4\" (or \"Dortspeak\") accent, the \"/ɑː/ and broad /æ/\" set becomes rounded as [ɒː].",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "^2 In South-West Ireland, /ɛ/ before /n/ or /m/ is raised to [ɪ].",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "^3 Due to the phenomenon of \"vowel breaking\" in local Dublin accents, /iː/ and /uː/ may be realised as [ijə] and [ʊuwə] in closed syllables.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Other notes:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The following diphthongs are defining characteristics of Irish English:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Footnotes: ^1 Due to the phenomenon of \"vowel breaking\" local Dublin accents, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ may be realised as [əjə] and [ɛwə] in closed syllables.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The consonants of Hiberno-English mostly align with the typical English consonant sounds. However, a few Irish English consonants have distinctive, varying qualities. The following consonant features are defining characteristics of Hiberno-English:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Footnotes:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "^1 In traditional, conservative Ulster English, /k/ and /ɡ/ are palatalised before an open front vowel.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "^2 Local Dublin features consonant cluster reduction, so that plosives occurring after fricatives or sonorants may be left unpronounced, resulting, for example, in \"poun(d)\" and \"las(t)\".",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "^3 In extremely traditional and conservative accents (e.g. Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Jackie Healy-Rae), prevocalic /r/ can also be an alveolar flap, [ɾ]. /r/ may be guttural (uvular, [ʁ]) in north-east Leinster.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "^4 ⟨θ̠⟩ is used here to represent the voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, sometimes known as a \"slit fricative\", which is apico-alveolar.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "^5 Overall, /hw/ and /w/ are being increasingly merged in supraregional Irish English, for example, making wine and whine homophones, as in most varieties of English around the world.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The following vowels + ⟨r⟩ combinations are defining characteristics of Hiberno-English:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Footnotes:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "^1 In southside Dublin's \"Dublin 4\" (or \"Dortspeak\") accent, /ɑːr/ is realised as [ɒːɹ].",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "^2 In non-local Dublin's more recently emerging (or \"new Dublin\") accent, /ɛər/ and /ɜr/ may both be realised more rounded as [øːɻ].",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "^3 The nurse mergers have not occurred in local Dublin, West/South-West, and other very conservative and traditional Irish English which retain a two-way distinction, /ɛr/ versus /ʊr/, unlike most English dialects which have merged historical /ɛr/, /ɪr/ and /ʊr/ to /ɜr/, [ɚː] in the case of non-local Dublin, supraregional, and younger Irish accents. The distribution of /ɛr/ and /ʊr/ is as follows: /ʊr/ occurs when spelled ⟨ur⟩ and ⟨or⟩ (e.g. urn and word), ⟨ir⟩ after alveolar stops (e.g. dirt), and after labial consonants (e.g. fern); /ɛr/ is occurs in all other situations. There are apparent exceptions to these rules; John C. Wells describes prefer and per as /ɛr/, despite the vowel in question following a labial. The distribution of /ɛr/ versus /ʊr/ is listed below in some example words:",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "^4 In a rare few local Dublin varieties that are non-rhotic, /ər/ is either lowered to [ɐ] or backed and raised to [ɤ].",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "^5 The distinction between /ɔːr/ and /oʊr/ is widely preserved in Ireland, so that, for example, horse and hoarse are not merged in most Irish English dialects; however, they are usually merged in Belfast and new Dublin.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "^6 In local Dublin /(j)uːr/ may be realised as [(j)uʷə(ɹ)]. For some speakers /(j)uːr/ may merge with /ɔːr/.",
"title": "Overview of pronunciation and phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A number of Irish language loan words are used in Hiberno-English, particularly in an official state capacity. For example, the head of government is the Taoiseach, the deputy head is the Tánaiste, the parliament is the Oireachtas and its lower house is Dáil Éireann. Less formally, people also use loan words in day-to-day speech, although this has been on the wane in recent decades and among the young.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Another group of Hiberno-English words are those derived from the Irish language. Some are words in English that have entered into general use, while others are unique to Ireland. These words and phrases are often Anglicised versions of words in Irish or direct translations into English. In the latter case, they often give meaning to a word or phrase that is generally not found in wider English use.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Another class of vocabulary found in Hiberno-English are words and phrases common in Old and Middle English, but which have since become obscure or obsolete in the modern English language generally. Hiberno-English has also developed particular meanings for words that are still in common use in English generally.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In addition to the three groups above, there are also additional words and phrases whose origin is disputed or unknown. While this group may not be unique to Ireland, their usage is not widespread, and could be seen as characteristic of the language in Ireland.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The syntax of the Irish language is quite different from that of English. Various aspects of Irish syntax have influenced Hiberno-English, though many of these idiosyncrasies are disappearing in suburban areas and among the younger population.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Another feature of Hiberno-English that sets it apart is the retention of words and phrases from Old and Middle English that are not retained otherwise in Modern English.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Reduplication is an alleged trait of Hiberno-English strongly associated with Stage Irish and Hollywood films.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Irish has no words that directly translate as 'yes' or 'no', and instead repeats the verb used in the question, negated if necessary, to answer. Hiberno-English uses \"yes\" and \"no\" less frequently than other English dialects as speakers can repeat the verb, positively or negatively, instead of (or in redundant addition to) using \"yes\" or \"no\".",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "This is not limited only to the verb to be: it is also used with to have when used as an auxiliary; and, with other verbs, the verb to do is used. This is most commonly used for intensification, especially in Ulster English.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Irish indicates recency of an action by adding \"after\" to the present continuous (a verb ending in \"-ing\"), a construction known as the \"hot news perfect\" or \"after perfect\". The idiom for \"I had done X when I did Y\" is \"I was after doing X when I did Y\", modelled on the Irish usage of the compound prepositions i ndiaidh, tar éis, and in éis: bhí mé tar éis / i ndiaidh / in éis X a dhéanamh, nuair a rinne mé Y.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A similar construction is seen where exclamation is used in describing a recent event:",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "When describing less astonishing or significant events, a structure resembling the German perfect can be seen:",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "This correlates with an analysis of \"H1 Irish\" proposed by Adger & Mitrovic, in a deliberate parallel to the status of German as a V2 language.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Recent past construction has been directly adopted into Newfoundland English, where it is common in both formal and casual register. In rural areas of the Avalon peninsula, where Newfoundland Irish was spoken until the early 20th century, it is the grammatical standard for describing whether or not an action has occurred.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The reflexive version of pronouns is often used for emphasis or to refer indirectly to a particular person, etc., according to context. Herself, for example, might refer to the speaker's boss or to the woman of the house. Use of herself or himself in this way can imply status or even some arrogance of the person in question. Note also the indirectness of this construction relative to, for example, She's coming now. This reflexive pronoun can also be used in a more neutral sense to describe a person's spouse or partner – \"I was with himself last night\" or \"How's herself doing?\"",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "There are some language forms that stem from the fact that there is no verb to have in Irish. Instead, possession is indicated in Irish by using the preposition \"at\", (in Irish, ag). To be more precise, Irish uses a prepositional pronoun that combines ag 'at' and mé 'me' to create agam. In English, the verb \"to have\" is used, along with a \"with me\" or \"on me\" that derives from Tá ... agam. This gives rise to the frequent",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Somebody who can speak a language \"has\" a language, in which Hiberno-English has borrowed the grammatical form used in Irish.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "When describing something, many Hiberno-English speakers use the term \"in it\" where \"there\" would usually be used. This is due to the Irish word ann (pronounced \"oun\" or \"on\") fulfilling both meanings.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Another idiom is this thing or that thing described as \"this man here\" or \"that man there\", which also features in Newfoundland English in Canada.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Conditionals have a greater presence in Hiberno-English due to the tendency to replace the simple present tense with the conditional (would) and the simple past tense with the conditional perfect (would have).",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Bring and take: Irish use of these words differs from that of British English because it follows the Irish grammar for beir and tóg. English usage is determined by direction; a person determines Irish usage. So, in English, one takes \"from here to there\", and brings it \"to here from there\". In Irish, a person takes only when accepting a transfer of possession of the object from someone else – and a person brings at all other times, irrespective of direction (to or from).",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Irish equivalent of the verb \"to be\" has two present tenses, one (the present tense proper or \"aimsir láithreach\") for cases which are generally true or are true at the time of speaking and the other (the habitual present or \"aimsir ghnáthláithreach\") for repeated actions. Thus, \"you are [now, or generally]\" is tá tú, but \"you are [repeatedly]\" is bíonn tú. Both forms are used with the verbal noun (equivalent to the English present participle) to create compound tenses. This is similar to the distinction between ser and estar in Spanish or the use of the \"habitual be\" in African-American Vernacular English.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The corresponding usage in English is frequently found in rural areas, especially County Mayo and County Sligo in the west of Ireland and County Wexford in the south-east, inner-city Dublin and Cork city along with border areas of the North and Republic. In this form, the verb \"to be\" in English is similar to its use in Irish, with a \"does be/do be\" (or \"bees\", although less frequently) construction to indicate the continuous, or habitual, present:",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In old-fashioned usage, \"it is\" can be freely abbreviated 'tis, even as a standalone sentence. This also allows the double contraction 'tisn't, for \"it is not\".",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Irish has separate forms for the second person singular (tú) and the second person plural (sibh). Mirroring Irish, and almost every other Indo-European language, the plural you is also distinguished from the singular in Hiberno-English, normally by use of the otherwise archaic English word ye [jiː]; the word yous (sometimes written as youse) also occurs, but primarily only in Dublin and across Ulster. In addition, in some areas in Leinster, north Connacht and parts of Ulster, the hybrid word ye-s, pronounced \"yiz\", may be used. The pronunciation differs with that of the northwestern being [jiːz] and the Leinster pronunciation being [jɪz].",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The word ye, yis or yous, otherwise archaic, is still used in place of \"you\" for the second-person plural, e.g. \"Where are yous going?\" Ye'r, Yisser or Yousser are the possessive forms.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The verb mitch is very common in Ireland, indicating being truant from school. This word appears in Shakespeare (though he wrote in Early Modern English rather than Middle English), but is seldom heard these days in British English, although pockets of usage persist in some areas (notably South Wales, Devon, and Cornwall). In parts of Connacht and Ulster the mitch is often replaced by the verb scheme, while in Dublin it is often replaced by \"on the hop/bounce\".",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Another usage familiar from Shakespeare is the inclusion of the second person pronoun after the imperative form of a verb, as in \"Wife, go you to her ere you go to bed\" (Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene IV). This is still common in Ulster: \"Get youse your homework done or you're no goin' out!\" In Munster, you will still hear children being told, \"Up to bed, let ye\" [lɛˈtʃi].",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "For influence from Scotland, see Ulster Scots and Ulster English.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Now is often used at the end of sentences or phrases as a semantically empty word, completing an utterance without contributing any apparent meaning. Examples include \"Bye now\" (= \"Goodbye\"), \"There you go now\" (when giving someone something), \"Ah now!\" (expressing dismay), \"Hold on now\" (= \"wait a minute\"), \"Now then\" as a mild attention-getter, etc. This usage is universal among English dialects, but occurs more frequently in Hiberno-English. It is also used in the manner of the Italian 'prego' or German 'bitte', for example, a barman might say \"Now, Sir.\" when delivering drinks.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "So is often used for emphasis (\"I can speak Irish, so I can\"), or it may be tacked onto the end of a sentence to indicate agreement, where \"then\" would often be used in Standard English (\"Bye so\", \"Let's go so\", \"That's fine so\", \"We'll do that so\"). The word is also used to contradict a negative statement (\"You're not pushing hard enough\" – \"I am so!\"). (This contradiction of a negative is also seen in American English, though not as often as \"I am too\", or \"Yes, I am\".) The practice of indicating emphasis with so and including reduplicating the sentence's subject pronoun and auxiliary verb (is, are, have, has, can, etc.) such as in the initial example, is particularly prevalent in more northern dialects such as those of Sligo, Mayo and the counties of Ulster.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Sure/Surely is often used as a tag word, emphasising the obviousness of the statement, roughly translating as but/and/well/indeed. It can be used as \"to be sure\" (but the other stereotype of \"Sure and …\" is not actually used in Ireland.) Or \"Sure, I can just go on Wednesday\", \"I will not, to be sure.\" The word is also used at the end of sentences (primarily in Munster), for instance, \"I was only here five minutes ago, sure!\" and can express emphasis or indignation. In Ulster, the reply \"Aye, surely\" may be given to show strong agreement.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "To is often omitted from sentences where it would exist in British English. For example, \"I'm not allowed go out tonight\", instead of \"I'm not allowed to go out tonight\".",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Will is often used where British English would use \"shall\" or American English \"should\" (as in \"Will I make us a cup of tea?\"). The distinction between \"shall\" (for first-person simple future, and second- and third-person emphatic future) and \"will\" (second- and third-person simple future, first-person emphatic future), maintained by many in England, does not exist in Hiberno-English, with \"will\" generally used in all cases.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Once is sometimes used in a different way from how it is used in other dialects; in this usage, it indicates a combination of logical and causal conditionality: \"I have no problem laughing at myself once the joke is funny.\" Other dialects of English would probably use \"if\" in this situation.",
"title": "Grammar and syntax"
}
]
| Hiberno-English or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, English is one of two official languages, along with the Irish language, and is the country's de facto working language. Irish English's writing standards, such as its spelling, align with British English. However, Irish English's diverse accents and some of its grammatical structures and vocabulary are unique, with some influences deriving from the Irish language and some notably conservative phonological features: features no longer common in the accents of England or North America. Phonologists today often divide Irish English into four or five overarching dialects or accents: Ulster accents, West and South-West Irish accents, various Dublin accents, and a non-regional standard accent expanding since only the last quarter of the twentieth century. | 2001-11-16T01:54:59Z | 2023-11-25T15:49:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English |
14,147 | Harmonic analysis | Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with investigating the connections between a function and its representation in frequency. The frequency representation is found by using the Fourier transform for functions on the real line, or by Fourier series for periodic functions. Generalizing these transforms to other domains is generally called Fourier analysis, although the term is sometimes used interchangeably with harmonic analysis. Harmonic Analysis has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as number theory, representation theory, signal processing, quantum mechanics, tidal analysis and neuroscience.
The term "harmonics" originated as the Ancient Greek word harmonikos, meaning "skilled in music". In physical eigenvalue problems, it began to mean waves whose frequencies are integer multiples of one another, as are the frequencies of the harmonics of music notes, but the term has been generalized beyond its original meaning.
The classical Fourier transform on R is still an area of ongoing research, particularly concerning Fourier transformation on more general objects such as tempered distributions. For instance, if we impose some requirements on a distribution f, we can attempt to translate these requirements in terms of the Fourier transform of f. The Paley–Wiener theorem is an example of this. The Paley–Wiener theorem immediately implies that if f is a nonzero distribution of compact support (these include functions of compact support), then its Fourier transform is never compactly supported (i.e. if a signal is limited in one domain, it is unlimited in the other). This is a very elementary form of an uncertainty principle in a harmonic-analysis setting.
Fourier series can be conveniently studied in the context of Hilbert spaces, which provides a connection between harmonic analysis and functional analysis. There are four versions of the Fourier transform, dependent on the spaces that are mapped by the transformation:
One of the most modern branches of harmonic analysis, having its roots in the mid-20th century, is analysis on topological groups. The core motivating ideas are the various Fourier transforms, which can be generalized to a transform of functions defined on Hausdorff locally compact topological groups.
The theory for abelian locally compact groups is called Pontryagin duality.
Harmonic analysis studies the properties of that duality and Fourier transform and attempts to extend those features to different settings, for instance, to the case of non-abelian Lie groups.
For general non-abelian locally compact groups, harmonic analysis is closely related to the theory of unitary group representations. For compact groups, the Peter–Weyl theorem explains how one may get harmonics by choosing one irreducible representation out of each equivalence class of representations. This choice of harmonics enjoys some of the useful properties of the classical Fourier transform in terms of carrying convolutions to pointwise products, or otherwise showing a certain understanding of the underlying group structure. See also: Non-commutative harmonic analysis.
If the group is neither abelian nor compact, no general satisfactory theory is currently known ("satisfactory" means at least as strong as the Plancherel theorem). However, many specific cases have been analyzed, for example SLn. In this case, representations in infinite dimensions play a crucial role.
Many applications of harmonic analysis in science and engineering begin with the idea or hypothesis that a phenomenon or signal is composed of a sum of individual oscillatory components. Ocean tides and vibrating strings are common and simple examples. The theoretical approach is often to try to describe the system by a differential equation or system of equations to predict the essential features, including the amplitude, frequency, and phases of the oscillatory components. The specific equations depend on the field, but theories generally try to select equations that represent major principles that are applicable.
The experimental approach is usually to acquire data that accurately quantifies the phenomenon. For example, in a study of tides, the experimentalist would acquire samples of water depth as a function of time at closely enough spaced intervals to see each oscillation and over a long enough duration that multiple oscillatory periods are likely included. In a study on vibrating strings, it is common for the experimentalist to acquire a sound waveform sampled at a rate at least twice that of the highest frequency expected and for a duration many times the period of the lowest frequency expected.
For example, the top signal at the right is a sound waveform of a bass guitar playing an open string corresponding to an A note with a fundamental frequency of 55 Hz. The waveform appears oscillatory, but it is more complex than a simple sine wave, indicating the presence of additional waves. The different wave components contributing to the sound can be revealed by applying a mathematical analysis technique known as the Fourier transform, the result of which is shown in the lower figure. There is a prominent peak at 55 Hz, but that there are other peaks at 110 Hz, 165 Hz, and at other frequencies corresponding to integer multiples of 55 Hz. In this case, 55 Hz is identified as the fundamental frequency of the string vibration, and the integer multiples are known as harmonics. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with investigating the connections between a function and its representation in frequency. The frequency representation is found by using the Fourier transform for functions on the real line, or by Fourier series for periodic functions. Generalizing these transforms to other domains is generally called Fourier analysis, although the term is sometimes used interchangeably with harmonic analysis. Harmonic Analysis has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as number theory, representation theory, signal processing, quantum mechanics, tidal analysis and neuroscience.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The term \"harmonics\" originated as the Ancient Greek word harmonikos, meaning \"skilled in music\". In physical eigenvalue problems, it began to mean waves whose frequencies are integer multiples of one another, as are the frequencies of the harmonics of music notes, but the term has been generalized beyond its original meaning.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The classical Fourier transform on R is still an area of ongoing research, particularly concerning Fourier transformation on more general objects such as tempered distributions. For instance, if we impose some requirements on a distribution f, we can attempt to translate these requirements in terms of the Fourier transform of f. The Paley–Wiener theorem is an example of this. The Paley–Wiener theorem immediately implies that if f is a nonzero distribution of compact support (these include functions of compact support), then its Fourier transform is never compactly supported (i.e. if a signal is limited in one domain, it is unlimited in the other). This is a very elementary form of an uncertainty principle in a harmonic-analysis setting.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Fourier series can be conveniently studied in the context of Hilbert spaces, which provides a connection between harmonic analysis and functional analysis. There are four versions of the Fourier transform, dependent on the spaces that are mapped by the transformation:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "One of the most modern branches of harmonic analysis, having its roots in the mid-20th century, is analysis on topological groups. The core motivating ideas are the various Fourier transforms, which can be generalized to a transform of functions defined on Hausdorff locally compact topological groups.",
"title": "Abstract harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The theory for abelian locally compact groups is called Pontryagin duality.",
"title": "Abstract harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Harmonic analysis studies the properties of that duality and Fourier transform and attempts to extend those features to different settings, for instance, to the case of non-abelian Lie groups.",
"title": "Abstract harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "For general non-abelian locally compact groups, harmonic analysis is closely related to the theory of unitary group representations. For compact groups, the Peter–Weyl theorem explains how one may get harmonics by choosing one irreducible representation out of each equivalence class of representations. This choice of harmonics enjoys some of the useful properties of the classical Fourier transform in terms of carrying convolutions to pointwise products, or otherwise showing a certain understanding of the underlying group structure. See also: Non-commutative harmonic analysis.",
"title": "Abstract harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "If the group is neither abelian nor compact, no general satisfactory theory is currently known (\"satisfactory\" means at least as strong as the Plancherel theorem). However, many specific cases have been analyzed, for example SLn. In this case, representations in infinite dimensions play a crucial role.",
"title": "Abstract harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Many applications of harmonic analysis in science and engineering begin with the idea or hypothesis that a phenomenon or signal is composed of a sum of individual oscillatory components. Ocean tides and vibrating strings are common and simple examples. The theoretical approach is often to try to describe the system by a differential equation or system of equations to predict the essential features, including the amplitude, frequency, and phases of the oscillatory components. The specific equations depend on the field, but theories generally try to select equations that represent major principles that are applicable.",
"title": "Applied harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The experimental approach is usually to acquire data that accurately quantifies the phenomenon. For example, in a study of tides, the experimentalist would acquire samples of water depth as a function of time at closely enough spaced intervals to see each oscillation and over a long enough duration that multiple oscillatory periods are likely included. In a study on vibrating strings, it is common for the experimentalist to acquire a sound waveform sampled at a rate at least twice that of the highest frequency expected and for a duration many times the period of the lowest frequency expected.",
"title": "Applied harmonic analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "For example, the top signal at the right is a sound waveform of a bass guitar playing an open string corresponding to an A note with a fundamental frequency of 55 Hz. The waveform appears oscillatory, but it is more complex than a simple sine wave, indicating the presence of additional waves. The different wave components contributing to the sound can be revealed by applying a mathematical analysis technique known as the Fourier transform, the result of which is shown in the lower figure. There is a prominent peak at 55 Hz, but that there are other peaks at 110 Hz, 165 Hz, and at other frequencies corresponding to integer multiples of 55 Hz. In this case, 55 Hz is identified as the fundamental frequency of the string vibration, and the integer multiples are known as harmonics.",
"title": "Applied harmonic analysis"
}
]
| Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with investigating the connections between a function and its representation in frequency. The frequency representation is found by using the Fourier transform for functions on the real line, or by Fourier series for periodic functions. Generalizing these transforms to other domains is generally called Fourier analysis, although the term is sometimes used interchangeably with harmonic analysis. Harmonic Analysis has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as number theory, representation theory, signal processing, quantum mechanics, tidal analysis and neuroscience. The term "harmonics" originated as the Ancient Greek word harmonikos, meaning "skilled in music". In physical eigenvalue problems, it began to mean waves whose frequencies are integer multiples of one another, as are the frequencies of the harmonics of music notes, but the term has been generalized beyond its original meaning. The classical Fourier transform on Rn is still an area of ongoing research, particularly concerning Fourier transformation on more general objects such as tempered distributions. For instance, if we impose some requirements on a distribution f, we can attempt to translate these requirements in terms of the Fourier transform of f. The Paley–Wiener theorem is an example of this. The Paley–Wiener theorem immediately implies that if f is a nonzero distribution of compact support, then its Fourier transform is never compactly supported. This is a very elementary form of an uncertainty principle in a harmonic-analysis setting. Fourier series can be conveniently studied in the context of Hilbert spaces, which provides a connection between harmonic analysis and functional analysis. There are four versions of the Fourier transform, dependent on the spaces that are mapped by the transformation: discrete/periodic–discrete/periodic: discrete Fourier transform,
continuous/periodic–discrete/aperiodic: Fourier series,
discrete/aperiodic–continuous/periodic: discrete-time Fourier transform,
continuous/aperiodic–continuous/aperiodic: Fourier transform. | 2002-02-16T12:06:16Z | 2023-10-21T09:51:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_analysis |
14,148 | Home run | In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run is usually achieved by hitting the ball over the outfield fence between the foul poles (or hitting either foul pole) without the ball touching the field.
Inside-the-park home runs where the batter reaches home safely while the baseball is in play on the field are infrequent. In very rare cases, a fielder attempting to catch a ball in flight may misplay it and knock it over the outfield fence, resulting in a home run.
An official scorer will credit the batter with a hit, a run scored, and a run batted in (RBI), as well as an RBI for each runner on base. The pitcher is recorded as having given up a hit and a run, with additional runs charged for each base-runner that scores.
Home runs are among the most popular aspects of baseball and, as a result, prolific home run hitters are usually the most popular among fans and consequently the highest paid by teams—hence the old saying, "Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, and singles hitters drive Fords" (coined, circa 1948, by veteran pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, by way of mentoring his young teammate, Ralph Kiner).
Nicknames for a home run include "homer", "round tripper", "four-bagger", "big fly", "dinger", "long ball", "jack", "shot"/"moon shot", "bomb", "tater", and "blast", while a player hitting a home run may be said to have "gone deep" or "gone yard".
A home run is most often scored when the ball is hit over the outfield wall between the foul poles (in fair territory) before it touches the ground (in flight), and without being caught or deflected back onto the field by a fielder. A batted ball is also a home run if it touches either a foul pole or its attached screen before touching the ground, as the foul poles are by definition in fair territory. Additionally, many major-league ballparks have ground rules stating that a batted ball in flight that strikes a specified location or fixed object is a home run; this usually applies to objects that are beyond the outfield wall but are located such that it may be difficult for the umpire to judge.
In professional baseball, a batted ball that goes over the outfield wall after touching the ground (i.e. a ball that bounces over the outfield wall) becomes an automatic double. This is colloquially referred to as a "ground rule double" even though it is uniform across all of Major League Baseball, per MLB rules 5.05(a)(6) through 5.05(a)(9).
A fielder is allowed to reach over the wall to try to catch the ball as long as his feet are on or over the field during the attempt, and if the fielder successfully catches the ball while it is in flight the batter is out, even if the ball had already passed the vertical plane of the wall. However, since the fielder is not part of the field, a ball that bounces off a fielder (including his glove) and over the wall without touching the ground is still a home run. A fielder may not deliberately throw his glove, cap, or any other equipment or apparel to stop or deflect a fair ball, and an umpire may award a home run to the batter if a fielder does so on a ball that, in the umpire's judgment, would have otherwise been a home run (this is rare in modern professional baseball).
A home run accomplished in any of the above manners is an automatic home run. The ball is dead, even if it rebounds back onto the field (e.g., from striking a foul pole), and the batter and any preceding runners cannot be put out at any time while running the bases. However, if one or more runners fail to touch a base or one runner passes another before reaching home plate, that runner or runners can be called out on appeal, though in the case of not touching a base a runner can go back and touch it if doing so will not cause them to be passed by another preceding runner and they have not yet touched the next base (or home plate in the case of missing third base). This stipulation is in Approved Ruling (2) of Rule 7.10(b).
An inside-the-park home run is a rare play in which a batter rounds all four bases for a home run without the baseball leaving the field of play. Unlike with an outside-the-park home run, the batter-runner and all preceding runners are liable to be put out by the defensive team at any time while running the bases. This can only happen if the ball does not leave the ballfield.
In the early days of baseball, outfields were much more spacious, reducing the likelihood of an over-the-fence home run, while increasing the likelihood of an inside-the-park home run, as a ball getting past an outfielder had more distance that it could roll before a fielder could track it down.
Modern outfields are much less spacious and more uniformly designed than in the game's early days. Therefore, inside-the-park home runs are now rare. They usually occur when a fast runner hits the ball deep into the outfield and the ball bounces in an unexpected direction away from the nearest outfielder (e.g., off a divot in the field or off the outfield wall), the nearest outfielder is injured on the play and cannot get to the ball, or an outfielder misjudges the flight of the ball in a way that he cannot quickly recover from the mistake (e.g., by diving and missing). The speed of the runner is crucial as even triples are relatively rare in most modern ballparks.
If any defensive play on an inside-the-park home run is labeled an error by the official scorer, a home run is not scored. Instead, it is scored as a single, double, or triple, and the batter-runner and any applicable preceding runners are said to have taken all additional bases on error. All runs scored on such a play, however, still count.
An example of an unexpected bounce occurred during the 2007 Major League Baseball All-Star Game at AT&T Park in San Francisco on July 10, 2007. Ichiro Suzuki of the American League team hit a fly ball that caromed off the right-center field wall in the opposite direction from where National League right fielder Ken Griffey Jr. was expecting it to go. By the time the ball was relayed, Ichiro had already crossed the plate standing up. This was the first inside-the-park home run in All-Star Game history, and led to Suzuki being named the game's Most Valuable Player.
Home runs are often characterized by the number of runners on base at the time. A home run hit with the bases empty is never called a "one-run homer", but rather a solo home run, solo homer, or "solo shot". With one runner on base, two runs score (the base-runner and the batter) and thus the home run is often called a two-run homer or two-run shot. Similarly, a home run with two runners on base is a three-run homer or three-run shot.
The term "four-run homer" is never used. Instead, it's called a "grand slam". Hitting a grand slam is the best possible result for the batter's turn at bat and the worst possible result for the pitcher and his team.
A grand slam occurs when the bases are "loaded" (that is, there are base runners standing at first, second, and third base) and the batter hits a home run. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the term originated in the card game of contract bridge. An inside-the-park grand slam is a grand slam that is also an inside-the-park home run, a home run without the ball leaving the field, and it is very rare, due to the relative rarity of loading the bases along with the significant rarity (nowadays) of inside-the-park home runs.
On July 25, 1956, Roberto Clemente became the only MLB player to have ever scored a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam in a 9–8 Pittsburgh Pirates win over the Chicago Cubs, at Forbes Field.
On April 23, 1999, Fernando Tatís made history by hitting two grand slams in one inning, both against Chan Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodgers. With this feat, Tatís also set a Major League record with 8 RBI in one inning.
On July 29, 2003, against the Texas Rangers, Bill Mueller of the Boston Red Sox became the only player in major league history to hit two grand slams in one game from opposite sides of the plate; he hit three home runs in that game, and his two grand slams were in consecutive at-bats.
On August 25, 2011, the New York Yankees became the first team to hit three grand slams in one game vs the Oakland A's. The Yankees eventually won the game 22–9, after trailing 7–1.
These types of home runs are characterized by the specific game situation in which they occur, and can theoretically occur on either an outside-the-park or inside-the-park home run.
A walk-off home run is a home run hit by the home team in the bottom of the ninth inning, any extra inning, or other scheduled final inning, which gives the home team the lead and thereby ends the game. The term is attributed to Hall of Fame relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley, so named because after the run is scored, the losing team has to "walk off" the field.
Two World Series have ended via the "walk-off" home run. The first was the 1960 World Series when Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit a ninth inning solo home run in the seventh game of the series off New York Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry to give the Pirates the World Championship. The second time was the 1993 World Series when Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit a ninth inning three-run home run off Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Mitch Williams in Game 6 of the series, to help the Toronto Blue Jays capture their second World Series Championship in a row.
Such a home run can also be called a "sudden death" or "sudden victory" home run. That usage has lessened as "walk-off home run" has gained favor. Along with Mazeroski's 1960 shot, the most famous walk-off or sudden-death home run would most likely be the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" hit by Bobby Thomson to win the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants, along with many other game-ending home runs that famously ended some of the most important and suspenseful baseball games.
A walk-off home run over the fence is an exception to baseball's one-run rule. Normally if the home team is tied or behind in the ninth or extra innings, the game ends as soon as the home team scores enough run to achieve a lead. If the home team has two outs in the inning, and the game is tied, the game will officially end either the moment the batter successfully reaches first base or the moment the runner touches home plate—whichever happens last. However, this is superseded by the "ground rule", which provides automatic doubles (when a ball-in-play hits the ground first then leaves the playing field) and home runs (when a ball-in-play leaves the playing field without ever touching the ground). In the latter case, all base runners including the batter are allowed to cross the plate.
A leadoff home run is a home run hit by the first batter of a team, the leadoff hitter of the first inning of the game. In MLB (major league Baseball), Rickey Henderson holds the career record with 81 lead-off home runs. Craig Biggio holds the National League career record with 53, fourth overall to Henderson, George Springer with 55, and Alfonso Soriano with 54. As of 2023, George Springer holds the career record among active players, with 55 leadoff home runs, which also ranks him second all-time.
In 1996, Brady Anderson set a Major League record by hitting a lead-off home run in four consecutive games.
When consecutive batters hit home runs, it's referred to as back-to-back home runs. The home runs are still considered back-to-back even if the batters hit their home runs off different pitchers. A third batter hitting a home run is commonly referred to as back-to-back-to-back.
Four home runs in a row has only occurred eleven times in Major League Baseball history. Following convention, this is called back-to-back-to-back-to-back. The most recent occurrence was on July 2, 2022, when the St. Louis Cardinals hit four in a row against the Philadelphia Phillies. Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman, Juan Yepez, and Dylan Carlson hit consecutive home runs during the first inning off starting pitcher Kyle Gibson.
On June 9, 2019, the Washington Nationals hit four in a row against the San Diego Padres in Petco Park as Howie Kendrick, Trea Turner, Adam Eaton and Anthony Rendon homered off pitcher Craig Stammen. Stammen became the fifth pitcher to surrender back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs, following Paul Foytack on July 31, 1963, Chase Wright on April 22, 2007, Dave Bush on August 10, 2010, and Michael Blazek on July 27, 2017.
On August 14, 2008, the Chicago White Sox defeated the Kansas City Royals 9–2. In this game, Jim Thome, Paul Konerko, Alexei Ramírez, and Juan Uribe hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs in that order. Thome, Konerko, and Ramirez hit their home runs against Joel Peralta, while Uribe did it off Rob Tejeda.
On April 22, 2007, the Boston Red Sox were trailing the New York Yankees 3–0 when Manny Ramirez, J. D. Drew, Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek hit consecutive home runs to put them up 4–3. They eventually went on to win the game 7–6 after a three-run home run by Mike Lowell in the bottom of the seventh inning. On September 18, 2006, trailing 9–5 to the San Diego Padres in the ninth inning, Jeff Kent, J. D. Drew, Russell Martin, and Marlon Anderson of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs to tie the game. After giving up a run in the top of the tenth, the Dodgers won the game in the bottom of the tenth, on a walk-off two-run home run by Nomar Garciaparra. J. D. Drew has been part of two different sets of back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs. In both occurrences, his home run was the second of the four.
On September 30, 1997, in the sixth inning of Game One of the American League Division Series between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians, Tim Raines, Derek Jeter and Paul O'Neill hit back-to-back-to-back home runs for the Yankees. Raines' home run tied the game. New York went on to win 8–6. This was the first occurrence of three home runs in a row ever in postseason play. The Boston Red Sox repeated the feat in Game Four of the 2007 American League Championship Series, also against the Indians. The Indians returned the favor in Game One of the 2016 American League Division Series.
Twice in MLB history have two brothers hit back-to-back home runs. On April 23, 2013, brothers Melvin Upton Jr. (formerly B.J. Upton) and Justin Upton hit back-to-back home runs. The first time was on September 15, 1938, when Lloyd Waner and Paul Waner performed the feat.
Simple back-to-back home runs are a relatively frequent occurrence. If a pitcher gives up a home run, he might have his concentration broken and might alter his normal approach in an attempt to "make up for it" by striking out the next batter with some fastballs. Sometimes the next batter will be expecting that and will capitalize on it. A notable back-to-back home run of that type in World Series play involved "Babe Ruth's called shot" in 1932, which was accompanied by various Ruthian theatrics, yet the pitcher, Charlie Root, was allowed to stay in the game. He delivered just one more pitch, which Lou Gehrig drilled out of the park for a back-to-back shot, after which Root was removed from the game.
In Game 3 of the 1976 NLCS, George Foster and Johnny Bench hit back-to-back home runs in the last of the ninth off Ron Reed to tie the game. The Series-winning run was scored later in the inning.
Another notable pair of back-to-back home runs occurred on September 14, 1990, when Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr. hit back-to-back home runs, off Kirk McCaskill, the only father-and-son duo to do so in Major League history.
On May 2, 2002, Bret Boone and Mike Cameron of the Seattle Mariners hit back-to-back home runs off starter Jon Rauch in the first inning of a game against the Chicago White Sox. The Mariners batted around in the inning, and Boone and Cameron came up to bat against reliever Jim Parque with two outs, again hitting back-to-back home runs and becoming the only pair of teammates to hit back-to-back home runs twice in the same inning.
On June 19, 2012, José Bautista and Colby Rasmus hit back-to-back home runs and back-to-back-to-back home runs with Edwin Encarnación for a lead change in each instance.
On July 23, 2017, Whit Merrifield, Jorge Bonifacio, and Eric Hosmer of the Kansas City Royals hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the fourth inning against the Chicago White Sox. The Royals went on to win the game 5–4.
On June 20, 2018, George Springer, Alex Bregman, and José Altuve of the Houston Astros hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the sixth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays. The Astros went on to win the game 5–1.
On April 3, 2018, the St. Louis Cardinals began the game against the Milwaukee Brewers with back-to-back home runs from Dexter Fowler and Tommy Pham. Then in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the Cardinals leading 4–3, Christian Yelich homered to tie the game; and Ryan Braun hit the next pitch for a walk-off home run. This is the only major league game to begin and end with back-to-back home runs.
On May 5, 2019, Eugenio Suarez, Jesse Winker and Derek Dietrich of the Cincinnati Reds, hit back-to-back-to-back home runs on three straight pitches against Jeff Samardzija of the San Francisco Giants in the bottom of the first inning.
On October 30, 2021, Dansby Swanson and Jorge Soler hit back-to-back home runs for the Atlanta Braves off Houston Astros pitcher Cristian Javier to give the Braves a 3–2 lead in the bottom of the seventh in Game 4 of the World Series.
The record for consecutive home runs by a batter under any circumstances is four. Of the sixteen players (through 2012) who have hit four in one game, six have hit them consecutively. Twenty-eight other batters have hit four consecutive across two games.
Bases on balls do not count as at-bats, and Ted Williams holds the record for consecutive home runs across the most games, four in four games played, during September 17–22, 1957, for the Red Sox. Williams hit a pinch-hit home run on the 17th; walked as a pinch-hitter on the 18th; there was no game on the 19th; hit another pinch-homer on the 20th; homered and then was lifted for a pinch-runner after at least one walk, on the 21st; and homered after at least one walk on the 22nd. All in all, he had four walks interspersed among his four homers.
In World Series play, Reggie Jackson hit a record three in one Series game, the final game (Game 6) in 1977. But those three were a part of a much more impressive feat. He walked on four pitches in the second inning of game 6. Then he hit his three home runs on the first pitch of his next three at bats, off three different pitchers (4th inning: Hooten; 5th inning: Sosa; 8th inning: Hough). He had also hit one in his last at bat of the previous game, giving him four home runs on four consecutive swings. The four in a row set the record for consecutive homers across two Series games.
In Game 3 of the World Series in 2011, Albert Pujols hit three home runs to tie the record with Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. The St. Louis Cardinals went on to win the World Series in Game 7 at Busch Stadium. In Game 1 of the World Series in 2012, Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants hit three home runs on his first three at-bats of the Series.
Nomar Garciaparra holds the record for consecutive home runs in the shortest time in terms of innings: three home runs in two innings, on July 23, 2002, for the Boston Red Sox.
An offshoot of hitting for the cycle, a "home run cycle" is when a player hits a solo home run, two-run home run, three-run home run, and grand slam all in one game. This is an extremely rare feat, as it requires the batter not only to hit four home runs in the game, but also to hit the home runs with a specific number of runners already on base. This is largely dependent on circumstances outside of the player's control, such as teammates' ability to get on base, and the order in which the player comes to bat in any particular inning. A further variant of the home run cycle would be the "natural home run cycle", should a batter hit the home runs in the specific order listed above.
A home run cycle has never occurred in MLB, which has only had 18 instances of a player hitting four home runs in a game. Though multiple home run cycles have been recorded in collegiate baseball, there have been two known home run cycles in a professional baseball game: one belongs to Tyrone Horne, playing for the Arkansas Travelers in a Double-A level Minor League Baseball game against the San Antonio Missions on July 27, 1998, and the other was accomplished by Chandler Redmond of the Springfield Cardinals, of the Texas League in a game against the Amarillo Sod Poodles on August 10, 2022.
Major league players have come close to hitting a home run cycle, a notable example being Scooter Gennett of the Cincinnati Reds on June 6, 2017, when he hit four home runs against the St. Louis Cardinals. He hit a grand slam in the third inning, a two-run home run in the fourth inning, a solo home run in the sixth inning, and a two-run home run in the eighth inning. He had an opportunity for a three-run home run in the first inning, but drove in one run with a single in that at bat.
In the early days of the game, when the ball was less lively and the ballparks generally had very large outfields, most home runs were of the inside-the-park variety. The first home run ever hit in the National League was by Ross Barnes of the Chicago White Stockings (now known as the Chicago Cubs), in 1876. The home "run" was literally descriptive. Home runs over the fence were rare, and only in ballparks where a fence was fairly close. Hitters were discouraged from trying to hit home runs, with the conventional wisdom being that if they tried to do so they would simply fly out. This was a serious concern in the 19th century, because in baseball's early days a ball caught after one bounce was still an out. The emphasis was on place-hitting and what is now called "manufacturing runs" or "small ball".
The home run's place in baseball changed dramatically when the live-ball era began after World War I. First, the materials and manufacturing processes improved significantly, making the now-mass-produced, cork-centered ball somewhat more lively. Batters such as Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby took full advantage of rules changes that were instituted during the 1920s, particularly prohibition of the spitball, and the requirement that balls be replaced when worn or dirty. These changes resulted in the baseball being easier to see and hit, and easier to hit out of the park. Meanwhile, as the game's popularity boomed, more outfield seating was built, shrinking the size of the outfield and increasing the chances of a long fly ball resulting in a home run. The teams with the sluggers, typified by the New York Yankees, became the championship teams, and other teams had to change their focus from the "inside game" to the "power game" in order to keep up.
Before 1931, Major League Baseball considered a fair ball that bounced over an outfield fence to be a home run. The rule was changed to require the ball to clear the fence on the fly, and balls that reached the seats on a bounce became automatic doubles (often referred to as a ground rule double). The last "bounce" home run in MLB was hit by Al López of the Brooklyn Robins on September 12, 1930, at Ebbets Field. A carryover of the old rule is that if a player deflects a ball over the outfield fence in fair territory without it touching the ground, it is a home run, per MLB rule 5.05(a)(9). Additionally, MLB rule 5.05(a)(5) still stipulates that a ball hit over a fence in fair territory that is less than 250 feet (76 m) from home plate "shall entitle the batter to advance to second base only", as some early ballparks had short dimensions.
Also until circa 1931, the ball had to go not only over the fence in fair territory, but it had to land in the bleachers in fair territory or still be visibly fair when disappearing from view. The rule stipulated "fair when last seen" by the umpires. Photos from that era in ballparks, such as the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, show ropes strung from the foul poles to the back of the bleachers, or a second "foul pole" at the back of the bleachers, in a straight line with the foul line, as a visual aid for the umpire. Ballparks still use a visual aid much like the ropes; a net or screen attached to the foul poles on the fair side has replaced ropes. As with American football, where a touchdown once required a literal "touch down" of the ball in the end zone but now only requires the "breaking of the [vertical] plane" of the goal line, in baseball the ball need only "break the plane" of the fence in fair territory (unless the ball is caught by a player who is in play, in which case the batter is called out).
Babe Ruth's 60th home run in 1927 was somewhat controversial, because it landed barely in fair territory in the stands down the right field line. Ruth lost a number of home runs in his career due to the when-last-seen rule. Bill Jenkinson, in The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs, estimates that Ruth lost at least 50 and as many as 78 in his career due to this rule.
Further, the rules once stipulated that an over-the-fence home run in a sudden-victory situation would only count for as many bases as was necessary to "force" the winning run home. For example, if a team trailed by two runs with the bases loaded, and the batter hit a fair ball over the fence, it only counted as a triple, because the runner immediately ahead of him had technically already scored the game-winning run. That rule was changed in the 1920s as home runs became increasingly frequent and popular. Babe Ruth's career total of 714 would have been one higher had that rule not been in effect in the early part of his career.
In the 2020s, it has become increasingly popular for Major League teams to celebrate home runs using some sort of prop. For example, allowing the player to wear or hold an item, such as a hat, helmet, jacket, sword, or trident.
Major League Baseball keeps running totals of all-time home runs by the team, including teams no longer active (before 1900) as well as by individual players. Gary Sheffield hit the 250,000th home run in all of MLB history with a grand slam on September 8, 2008. Sheffield had hit the MLB's 249,999th home run against Gio González in his previous at-bat.
The all-time, verified professional baseball record for career home runs for one player, excluding the U.S. Negro leagues during the era of segregation, is held by Sadaharu Oh. Oh spent his entire career playing for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball, later managing the Giants, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and the 2006 World Baseball Classic Japanese team. Oh holds the all-time home run world record, having hit 868 home runs in his career.
In Major League Baseball, the career record is 762, held by Barry Bonds, who broke Hank Aaron's record on August 7, 2007, when he hit his 756th home run at AT&T Park off pitcher Mike Bacsik. Only eight other major league players have hit as many as 600: Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714), Albert Pujols (703), Alex Rodriguez (696), Willie Mays (660), Ken Griffey Jr. (630), Jim Thome (612), and Sammy Sosa (609). Miguel Cabrera holds the record for currently active MLB players with 507.
The single season record is 73, set by Barry Bonds in 2001. Other notable single season records were achieved by Babe Ruth who hit 60 in 1927, Roger Maris, with 61 home runs in 1961, Aaron Judge, with 62 home runs in 2022, and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, who hit 66 and 70 respectively, in 1998.
Negro league slugger Josh Gibson's Baseball Hall of Fame plaque says he hit "almost 800" home runs in his career. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Gibson's lifetime home run total at 800. Ken Burns' award-winning series, Baseball, states that his actual total may have been as high as 950. Gibson's true total is not known, in part due to inconsistent record keeping in the Negro leagues. The 1993 edition of the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia attempted to compile a set of Negro league records, and subsequent work has expanded on that effort. Those records demonstrate that Gibson and Ruth were of comparable power. The 1993 book had Gibson hitting 146 home runs in the 501 "official" Negro league games they were able to account for in his 17-year career, about one home run every 3.4 games. Babe Ruth, in 22 seasons (several of them in the dead-ball era), hit 714 in 2503 games, or one home run every 3.5 games. The large gap in the numbers for Gibson reflect the fact that Negro league clubs played relatively far fewer league games and many more "barnstorming" or exhibition games during the course of a season, than did the major league clubs of that era.
Other legendary home run hitters include Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle (who on September 10, 1960, mythically hit "the longest home run ever" at an estimated distance of 643 feet (196 m), although this was measured after the ball stopped rolling), Reggie Jackson, Harmon Killebrew, Ernie Banks, Mike Schmidt, Dave Kingman, Sammy Sosa (who hit 60 or more home runs in a season three times), Ken Griffey Jr. and Eddie Mathews. In 1987, Joey Meyer of the minor league Denver Zephyrs hit the longest verifiable home run in professional baseball history. The home run was measured at a distance of 582 feet (177 m) and was hit inside Denver's Mile High Stadium. On May 6, 1964, Chicago White Sox outfielder Dave Nicholson hit a home run officially measured at 573 feet that either bounced atop the left-field roof of Comiskey Park or entirely cleared it. Major League Baseball's longest verifiable home run distance is about 575 feet (175 m), by Babe Ruth, to straightaway center field at Tiger Stadium (then called Navin Field and before the double-deck), which landed nearly across the intersection of Trumbull and Cherry.
The location of where Hank Aaron's record 755th home run landed has been monumented in Milwaukee. The spot sits outside American Family Field, where the Milwaukee Brewers currently play. Similarly, the point where Aaron's 715th home run landed, upon breaking Ruth's career record in 1974, is marked in the Turner Field parking lot. A red-painted seat in Fenway Park marks the landing place of the 502-ft home run Ted Williams hit in 1946, the longest measured home run in Fenway's history; a red stadium seat mounted on the wall of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, marks the landing spot of Harmon Killebrew's record 520-foot shot in old Metropolitan Stadium.
May 2019 saw 1,135 MLB home runs, the highest ever number of home runs in a single month in Major League Baseball history. During this month, 44.5% of all runs scored were the result of a home run, breaking the previous record of 42.3%.
In postseason play, the most home runs hit by a player for a career is Manny Ramirez, who hit 29. Jose Altuve (23), Bernie Williams (22), Derek Jeter (20), and Kyle Schwarber (20) are the only other players to hit twenty postseason home runs. Rounding out the top ten as of the end of the 2021 season is Albert Pujols (19), George Springer (19), Carlos Correa (18), Reggie Jackson (18), Mickey Mantle (18, all in the World Series), and Nelson Cruz (18). As for most home runs in one postseason, Randy Arozarena holds the record with ten, done in the 2020 postseason.
Replays "to get the call right" have been used extremely sporadically in the past, but the use of instant replay to determine "boundary calls"—home runs and foul balls—was not officially allowed until 2008.
In a game on May 31, 1999, involving the St. Louis Cardinals and Florida Marlins, a hit by Cliff Floyd of the Marlins was initially ruled a double, then a home run, then was changed back to a double when umpire Frank Pulli decided to review video of the play. The Marlins protested that video replay was not allowed, but while the National League office agreed that replay was not to be used in future games, it declined the protest on the grounds it was a judgment call, and the play stood.
In November 2007, the general managers of Major League Baseball voted in favor of implementing instant replay reviews on boundary home run calls. The proposal limited the use of instant replay to determining whether a boundary/home run call is:
On August 28, 2008, instant replay review became available in MLB for reviewing calls in accordance with the above proposal. It was first utilized on September 3, 2008, in a game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees hit what appeared to be a home run, but the ball hit a catwalk behind the foul pole. It was at first called a home run, until Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon argued the call, and the umpires decided to review the play. After 2 minutes and 15 seconds, the umpires came back and ruled it a home run.
About two weeks later, on September 19, also at Tropicana Field, a boundary call was overturned for the first time. In this case, Carlos Peña of the Rays was given a ground rule double in a game against the Minnesota Twins after an umpire believed a fan reached into the field of play to catch a fly ball in right field. The umpires reviewed the play, determined the fan did not reach over the fence, and reversed the call, awarding Peña a home run.
Aside from the two aforementioned reviews at Tampa Bay, the replay was used four more times in the 2008 MLB regular season: twice at Houston, once at Seattle, and once at San Francisco. The San Francisco incident is perhaps the most unusual. Bengie Molina, the Giants' catcher, hit what was first called a single. Molina then was replaced in the game by Emmanuel Burriss, a pinch-runner, before the umpires re-evaluated the call and ruled it a home run. In this instance though, Molina was not allowed to return to the game to complete the run, as he had already been replaced. Molina was credited with the home run, and two RBIs, but not for the run scored which went to Burriss instead.
On October 31, 2009, in the fourth inning of Game 3 of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez hit a long fly ball that hit a camera protruding over the wall and into the field of play in deep right field. The ball ricocheted off the camera and re-entered the field, initially ruled a double. However, after the umpires consulted with each other after watching the instant replay, the hit was ruled a home run, marking the first time an instant replay home run was hit in a playoff game. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run is usually achieved by hitting the ball over the outfield fence between the foul poles (or hitting either foul pole) without the ball touching the field.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Inside-the-park home runs where the batter reaches home safely while the baseball is in play on the field are infrequent. In very rare cases, a fielder attempting to catch a ball in flight may misplay it and knock it over the outfield fence, resulting in a home run.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "An official scorer will credit the batter with a hit, a run scored, and a run batted in (RBI), as well as an RBI for each runner on base. The pitcher is recorded as having given up a hit and a run, with additional runs charged for each base-runner that scores.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Home runs are among the most popular aspects of baseball and, as a result, prolific home run hitters are usually the most popular among fans and consequently the highest paid by teams—hence the old saying, \"Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, and singles hitters drive Fords\" (coined, circa 1948, by veteran pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, by way of mentoring his young teammate, Ralph Kiner).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Nicknames for a home run include \"homer\", \"round tripper\", \"four-bagger\", \"big fly\", \"dinger\", \"long ball\", \"jack\", \"shot\"/\"moon shot\", \"bomb\", \"tater\", and \"blast\", while a player hitting a home run may be said to have \"gone deep\" or \"gone yard\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A home run is most often scored when the ball is hit over the outfield wall between the foul poles (in fair territory) before it touches the ground (in flight), and without being caught or deflected back onto the field by a fielder. A batted ball is also a home run if it touches either a foul pole or its attached screen before touching the ground, as the foul poles are by definition in fair territory. Additionally, many major-league ballparks have ground rules stating that a batted ball in flight that strikes a specified location or fixed object is a home run; this usually applies to objects that are beyond the outfield wall but are located such that it may be difficult for the umpire to judge.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In professional baseball, a batted ball that goes over the outfield wall after touching the ground (i.e. a ball that bounces over the outfield wall) becomes an automatic double. This is colloquially referred to as a \"ground rule double\" even though it is uniform across all of Major League Baseball, per MLB rules 5.05(a)(6) through 5.05(a)(9).",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A fielder is allowed to reach over the wall to try to catch the ball as long as his feet are on or over the field during the attempt, and if the fielder successfully catches the ball while it is in flight the batter is out, even if the ball had already passed the vertical plane of the wall. However, since the fielder is not part of the field, a ball that bounces off a fielder (including his glove) and over the wall without touching the ground is still a home run. A fielder may not deliberately throw his glove, cap, or any other equipment or apparel to stop or deflect a fair ball, and an umpire may award a home run to the batter if a fielder does so on a ball that, in the umpire's judgment, would have otherwise been a home run (this is rare in modern professional baseball).",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A home run accomplished in any of the above manners is an automatic home run. The ball is dead, even if it rebounds back onto the field (e.g., from striking a foul pole), and the batter and any preceding runners cannot be put out at any time while running the bases. However, if one or more runners fail to touch a base or one runner passes another before reaching home plate, that runner or runners can be called out on appeal, though in the case of not touching a base a runner can go back and touch it if doing so will not cause them to be passed by another preceding runner and they have not yet touched the next base (or home plate in the case of missing third base). This stipulation is in Approved Ruling (2) of Rule 7.10(b).",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "An inside-the-park home run is a rare play in which a batter rounds all four bases for a home run without the baseball leaving the field of play. Unlike with an outside-the-park home run, the batter-runner and all preceding runners are liable to be put out by the defensive team at any time while running the bases. This can only happen if the ball does not leave the ballfield.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the early days of baseball, outfields were much more spacious, reducing the likelihood of an over-the-fence home run, while increasing the likelihood of an inside-the-park home run, as a ball getting past an outfielder had more distance that it could roll before a fielder could track it down.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Modern outfields are much less spacious and more uniformly designed than in the game's early days. Therefore, inside-the-park home runs are now rare. They usually occur when a fast runner hits the ball deep into the outfield and the ball bounces in an unexpected direction away from the nearest outfielder (e.g., off a divot in the field or off the outfield wall), the nearest outfielder is injured on the play and cannot get to the ball, or an outfielder misjudges the flight of the ball in a way that he cannot quickly recover from the mistake (e.g., by diving and missing). The speed of the runner is crucial as even triples are relatively rare in most modern ballparks.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "If any defensive play on an inside-the-park home run is labeled an error by the official scorer, a home run is not scored. Instead, it is scored as a single, double, or triple, and the batter-runner and any applicable preceding runners are said to have taken all additional bases on error. All runs scored on such a play, however, still count.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "An example of an unexpected bounce occurred during the 2007 Major League Baseball All-Star Game at AT&T Park in San Francisco on July 10, 2007. Ichiro Suzuki of the American League team hit a fly ball that caromed off the right-center field wall in the opposite direction from where National League right fielder Ken Griffey Jr. was expecting it to go. By the time the ball was relayed, Ichiro had already crossed the plate standing up. This was the first inside-the-park home run in All-Star Game history, and led to Suzuki being named the game's Most Valuable Player.",
"title": "Types of home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Home runs are often characterized by the number of runners on base at the time. A home run hit with the bases empty is never called a \"one-run homer\", but rather a solo home run, solo homer, or \"solo shot\". With one runner on base, two runs score (the base-runner and the batter) and thus the home run is often called a two-run homer or two-run shot. Similarly, a home run with two runners on base is a three-run homer or three-run shot.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The term \"four-run homer\" is never used. Instead, it's called a \"grand slam\". Hitting a grand slam is the best possible result for the batter's turn at bat and the worst possible result for the pitcher and his team.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A grand slam occurs when the bases are \"loaded\" (that is, there are base runners standing at first, second, and third base) and the batter hits a home run. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the term originated in the card game of contract bridge. An inside-the-park grand slam is a grand slam that is also an inside-the-park home run, a home run without the ball leaving the field, and it is very rare, due to the relative rarity of loading the bases along with the significant rarity (nowadays) of inside-the-park home runs.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On July 25, 1956, Roberto Clemente became the only MLB player to have ever scored a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam in a 9–8 Pittsburgh Pirates win over the Chicago Cubs, at Forbes Field.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On April 23, 1999, Fernando Tatís made history by hitting two grand slams in one inning, both against Chan Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodgers. With this feat, Tatís also set a Major League record with 8 RBI in one inning.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On July 29, 2003, against the Texas Rangers, Bill Mueller of the Boston Red Sox became the only player in major league history to hit two grand slams in one game from opposite sides of the plate; he hit three home runs in that game, and his two grand slams were in consecutive at-bats.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On August 25, 2011, the New York Yankees became the first team to hit three grand slams in one game vs the Oakland A's. The Yankees eventually won the game 22–9, after trailing 7–1.",
"title": "Number of runs batted in"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "These types of home runs are characterized by the specific game situation in which they occur, and can theoretically occur on either an outside-the-park or inside-the-park home run.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A walk-off home run is a home run hit by the home team in the bottom of the ninth inning, any extra inning, or other scheduled final inning, which gives the home team the lead and thereby ends the game. The term is attributed to Hall of Fame relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley, so named because after the run is scored, the losing team has to \"walk off\" the field.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Two World Series have ended via the \"walk-off\" home run. The first was the 1960 World Series when Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit a ninth inning solo home run in the seventh game of the series off New York Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry to give the Pirates the World Championship. The second time was the 1993 World Series when Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit a ninth inning three-run home run off Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Mitch Williams in Game 6 of the series, to help the Toronto Blue Jays capture their second World Series Championship in a row.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Such a home run can also be called a \"sudden death\" or \"sudden victory\" home run. That usage has lessened as \"walk-off home run\" has gained favor. Along with Mazeroski's 1960 shot, the most famous walk-off or sudden-death home run would most likely be the \"Shot Heard 'Round the World\" hit by Bobby Thomson to win the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants, along with many other game-ending home runs that famously ended some of the most important and suspenseful baseball games.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A walk-off home run over the fence is an exception to baseball's one-run rule. Normally if the home team is tied or behind in the ninth or extra innings, the game ends as soon as the home team scores enough run to achieve a lead. If the home team has two outs in the inning, and the game is tied, the game will officially end either the moment the batter successfully reaches first base or the moment the runner touches home plate—whichever happens last. However, this is superseded by the \"ground rule\", which provides automatic doubles (when a ball-in-play hits the ground first then leaves the playing field) and home runs (when a ball-in-play leaves the playing field without ever touching the ground). In the latter case, all base runners including the batter are allowed to cross the plate.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A leadoff home run is a home run hit by the first batter of a team, the leadoff hitter of the first inning of the game. In MLB (major league Baseball), Rickey Henderson holds the career record with 81 lead-off home runs. Craig Biggio holds the National League career record with 53, fourth overall to Henderson, George Springer with 55, and Alfonso Soriano with 54. As of 2023, George Springer holds the career record among active players, with 55 leadoff home runs, which also ranks him second all-time.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1996, Brady Anderson set a Major League record by hitting a lead-off home run in four consecutive games.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "When consecutive batters hit home runs, it's referred to as back-to-back home runs. The home runs are still considered back-to-back even if the batters hit their home runs off different pitchers. A third batter hitting a home run is commonly referred to as back-to-back-to-back.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Four home runs in a row has only occurred eleven times in Major League Baseball history. Following convention, this is called back-to-back-to-back-to-back. The most recent occurrence was on July 2, 2022, when the St. Louis Cardinals hit four in a row against the Philadelphia Phillies. Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman, Juan Yepez, and Dylan Carlson hit consecutive home runs during the first inning off starting pitcher Kyle Gibson.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On June 9, 2019, the Washington Nationals hit four in a row against the San Diego Padres in Petco Park as Howie Kendrick, Trea Turner, Adam Eaton and Anthony Rendon homered off pitcher Craig Stammen. Stammen became the fifth pitcher to surrender back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs, following Paul Foytack on July 31, 1963, Chase Wright on April 22, 2007, Dave Bush on August 10, 2010, and Michael Blazek on July 27, 2017.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On August 14, 2008, the Chicago White Sox defeated the Kansas City Royals 9–2. In this game, Jim Thome, Paul Konerko, Alexei Ramírez, and Juan Uribe hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs in that order. Thome, Konerko, and Ramirez hit their home runs against Joel Peralta, while Uribe did it off Rob Tejeda.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On April 22, 2007, the Boston Red Sox were trailing the New York Yankees 3–0 when Manny Ramirez, J. D. Drew, Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek hit consecutive home runs to put them up 4–3. They eventually went on to win the game 7–6 after a three-run home run by Mike Lowell in the bottom of the seventh inning. On September 18, 2006, trailing 9–5 to the San Diego Padres in the ninth inning, Jeff Kent, J. D. Drew, Russell Martin, and Marlon Anderson of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs to tie the game. After giving up a run in the top of the tenth, the Dodgers won the game in the bottom of the tenth, on a walk-off two-run home run by Nomar Garciaparra. J. D. Drew has been part of two different sets of back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs. In both occurrences, his home run was the second of the four.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On September 30, 1997, in the sixth inning of Game One of the American League Division Series between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians, Tim Raines, Derek Jeter and Paul O'Neill hit back-to-back-to-back home runs for the Yankees. Raines' home run tied the game. New York went on to win 8–6. This was the first occurrence of three home runs in a row ever in postseason play. The Boston Red Sox repeated the feat in Game Four of the 2007 American League Championship Series, also against the Indians. The Indians returned the favor in Game One of the 2016 American League Division Series.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Twice in MLB history have two brothers hit back-to-back home runs. On April 23, 2013, brothers Melvin Upton Jr. (formerly B.J. Upton) and Justin Upton hit back-to-back home runs. The first time was on September 15, 1938, when Lloyd Waner and Paul Waner performed the feat.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Simple back-to-back home runs are a relatively frequent occurrence. If a pitcher gives up a home run, he might have his concentration broken and might alter his normal approach in an attempt to \"make up for it\" by striking out the next batter with some fastballs. Sometimes the next batter will be expecting that and will capitalize on it. A notable back-to-back home run of that type in World Series play involved \"Babe Ruth's called shot\" in 1932, which was accompanied by various Ruthian theatrics, yet the pitcher, Charlie Root, was allowed to stay in the game. He delivered just one more pitch, which Lou Gehrig drilled out of the park for a back-to-back shot, after which Root was removed from the game.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In Game 3 of the 1976 NLCS, George Foster and Johnny Bench hit back-to-back home runs in the last of the ninth off Ron Reed to tie the game. The Series-winning run was scored later in the inning.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Another notable pair of back-to-back home runs occurred on September 14, 1990, when Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr. hit back-to-back home runs, off Kirk McCaskill, the only father-and-son duo to do so in Major League history.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On May 2, 2002, Bret Boone and Mike Cameron of the Seattle Mariners hit back-to-back home runs off starter Jon Rauch in the first inning of a game against the Chicago White Sox. The Mariners batted around in the inning, and Boone and Cameron came up to bat against reliever Jim Parque with two outs, again hitting back-to-back home runs and becoming the only pair of teammates to hit back-to-back home runs twice in the same inning.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On June 19, 2012, José Bautista and Colby Rasmus hit back-to-back home runs and back-to-back-to-back home runs with Edwin Encarnación for a lead change in each instance.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "On July 23, 2017, Whit Merrifield, Jorge Bonifacio, and Eric Hosmer of the Kansas City Royals hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the fourth inning against the Chicago White Sox. The Royals went on to win the game 5–4.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On June 20, 2018, George Springer, Alex Bregman, and José Altuve of the Houston Astros hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the sixth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays. The Astros went on to win the game 5–1.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On April 3, 2018, the St. Louis Cardinals began the game against the Milwaukee Brewers with back-to-back home runs from Dexter Fowler and Tommy Pham. Then in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the Cardinals leading 4–3, Christian Yelich homered to tie the game; and Ryan Braun hit the next pitch for a walk-off home run. This is the only major league game to begin and end with back-to-back home runs.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On May 5, 2019, Eugenio Suarez, Jesse Winker and Derek Dietrich of the Cincinnati Reds, hit back-to-back-to-back home runs on three straight pitches against Jeff Samardzija of the San Francisco Giants in the bottom of the first inning.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On October 30, 2021, Dansby Swanson and Jorge Soler hit back-to-back home runs for the Atlanta Braves off Houston Astros pitcher Cristian Javier to give the Braves a 3–2 lead in the bottom of the seventh in Game 4 of the World Series.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The record for consecutive home runs by a batter under any circumstances is four. Of the sixteen players (through 2012) who have hit four in one game, six have hit them consecutively. Twenty-eight other batters have hit four consecutive across two games.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Bases on balls do not count as at-bats, and Ted Williams holds the record for consecutive home runs across the most games, four in four games played, during September 17–22, 1957, for the Red Sox. Williams hit a pinch-hit home run on the 17th; walked as a pinch-hitter on the 18th; there was no game on the 19th; hit another pinch-homer on the 20th; homered and then was lifted for a pinch-runner after at least one walk, on the 21st; and homered after at least one walk on the 22nd. All in all, he had four walks interspersed among his four homers.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In World Series play, Reggie Jackson hit a record three in one Series game, the final game (Game 6) in 1977. But those three were a part of a much more impressive feat. He walked on four pitches in the second inning of game 6. Then he hit his three home runs on the first pitch of his next three at bats, off three different pitchers (4th inning: Hooten; 5th inning: Sosa; 8th inning: Hough). He had also hit one in his last at bat of the previous game, giving him four home runs on four consecutive swings. The four in a row set the record for consecutive homers across two Series games.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In Game 3 of the World Series in 2011, Albert Pujols hit three home runs to tie the record with Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. The St. Louis Cardinals went on to win the World Series in Game 7 at Busch Stadium. In Game 1 of the World Series in 2012, Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants hit three home runs on his first three at-bats of the Series.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Nomar Garciaparra holds the record for consecutive home runs in the shortest time in terms of innings: three home runs in two innings, on July 23, 2002, for the Boston Red Sox.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "An offshoot of hitting for the cycle, a \"home run cycle\" is when a player hits a solo home run, two-run home run, three-run home run, and grand slam all in one game. This is an extremely rare feat, as it requires the batter not only to hit four home runs in the game, but also to hit the home runs with a specific number of runners already on base. This is largely dependent on circumstances outside of the player's control, such as teammates' ability to get on base, and the order in which the player comes to bat in any particular inning. A further variant of the home run cycle would be the \"natural home run cycle\", should a batter hit the home runs in the specific order listed above.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "A home run cycle has never occurred in MLB, which has only had 18 instances of a player hitting four home runs in a game. Though multiple home run cycles have been recorded in collegiate baseball, there have been two known home run cycles in a professional baseball game: one belongs to Tyrone Horne, playing for the Arkansas Travelers in a Double-A level Minor League Baseball game against the San Antonio Missions on July 27, 1998, and the other was accomplished by Chandler Redmond of the Springfield Cardinals, of the Texas League in a game against the Amarillo Sod Poodles on August 10, 2022.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Major league players have come close to hitting a home run cycle, a notable example being Scooter Gennett of the Cincinnati Reds on June 6, 2017, when he hit four home runs against the St. Louis Cardinals. He hit a grand slam in the third inning, a two-run home run in the fourth inning, a solo home run in the sixth inning, and a two-run home run in the eighth inning. He had an opportunity for a three-run home run in the first inning, but drove in one run with a single in that at bat.",
"title": "Specific situation home runs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In the early days of the game, when the ball was less lively and the ballparks generally had very large outfields, most home runs were of the inside-the-park variety. The first home run ever hit in the National League was by Ross Barnes of the Chicago White Stockings (now known as the Chicago Cubs), in 1876. The home \"run\" was literally descriptive. Home runs over the fence were rare, and only in ballparks where a fence was fairly close. Hitters were discouraged from trying to hit home runs, with the conventional wisdom being that if they tried to do so they would simply fly out. This was a serious concern in the 19th century, because in baseball's early days a ball caught after one bounce was still an out. The emphasis was on place-hitting and what is now called \"manufacturing runs\" or \"small ball\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The home run's place in baseball changed dramatically when the live-ball era began after World War I. First, the materials and manufacturing processes improved significantly, making the now-mass-produced, cork-centered ball somewhat more lively. Batters such as Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby took full advantage of rules changes that were instituted during the 1920s, particularly prohibition of the spitball, and the requirement that balls be replaced when worn or dirty. These changes resulted in the baseball being easier to see and hit, and easier to hit out of the park. Meanwhile, as the game's popularity boomed, more outfield seating was built, shrinking the size of the outfield and increasing the chances of a long fly ball resulting in a home run. The teams with the sluggers, typified by the New York Yankees, became the championship teams, and other teams had to change their focus from the \"inside game\" to the \"power game\" in order to keep up.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Before 1931, Major League Baseball considered a fair ball that bounced over an outfield fence to be a home run. The rule was changed to require the ball to clear the fence on the fly, and balls that reached the seats on a bounce became automatic doubles (often referred to as a ground rule double). The last \"bounce\" home run in MLB was hit by Al López of the Brooklyn Robins on September 12, 1930, at Ebbets Field. A carryover of the old rule is that if a player deflects a ball over the outfield fence in fair territory without it touching the ground, it is a home run, per MLB rule 5.05(a)(9). Additionally, MLB rule 5.05(a)(5) still stipulates that a ball hit over a fence in fair territory that is less than 250 feet (76 m) from home plate \"shall entitle the batter to advance to second base only\", as some early ballparks had short dimensions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Also until circa 1931, the ball had to go not only over the fence in fair territory, but it had to land in the bleachers in fair territory or still be visibly fair when disappearing from view. The rule stipulated \"fair when last seen\" by the umpires. Photos from that era in ballparks, such as the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, show ropes strung from the foul poles to the back of the bleachers, or a second \"foul pole\" at the back of the bleachers, in a straight line with the foul line, as a visual aid for the umpire. Ballparks still use a visual aid much like the ropes; a net or screen attached to the foul poles on the fair side has replaced ropes. As with American football, where a touchdown once required a literal \"touch down\" of the ball in the end zone but now only requires the \"breaking of the [vertical] plane\" of the goal line, in baseball the ball need only \"break the plane\" of the fence in fair territory (unless the ball is caught by a player who is in play, in which case the batter is called out).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Babe Ruth's 60th home run in 1927 was somewhat controversial, because it landed barely in fair territory in the stands down the right field line. Ruth lost a number of home runs in his career due to the when-last-seen rule. Bill Jenkinson, in The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs, estimates that Ruth lost at least 50 and as many as 78 in his career due to this rule.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Further, the rules once stipulated that an over-the-fence home run in a sudden-victory situation would only count for as many bases as was necessary to \"force\" the winning run home. For example, if a team trailed by two runs with the bases loaded, and the batter hit a fair ball over the fence, it only counted as a triple, because the runner immediately ahead of him had technically already scored the game-winning run. That rule was changed in the 1920s as home runs became increasingly frequent and popular. Babe Ruth's career total of 714 would have been one higher had that rule not been in effect in the early part of his career.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the 2020s, it has become increasingly popular for Major League teams to celebrate home runs using some sort of prop. For example, allowing the player to wear or hold an item, such as a hat, helmet, jacket, sword, or trident.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Major League Baseball keeps running totals of all-time home runs by the team, including teams no longer active (before 1900) as well as by individual players. Gary Sheffield hit the 250,000th home run in all of MLB history with a grand slam on September 8, 2008. Sheffield had hit the MLB's 249,999th home run against Gio González in his previous at-bat.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The all-time, verified professional baseball record for career home runs for one player, excluding the U.S. Negro leagues during the era of segregation, is held by Sadaharu Oh. Oh spent his entire career playing for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball, later managing the Giants, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and the 2006 World Baseball Classic Japanese team. Oh holds the all-time home run world record, having hit 868 home runs in his career.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In Major League Baseball, the career record is 762, held by Barry Bonds, who broke Hank Aaron's record on August 7, 2007, when he hit his 756th home run at AT&T Park off pitcher Mike Bacsik. Only eight other major league players have hit as many as 600: Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714), Albert Pujols (703), Alex Rodriguez (696), Willie Mays (660), Ken Griffey Jr. (630), Jim Thome (612), and Sammy Sosa (609). Miguel Cabrera holds the record for currently active MLB players with 507.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The single season record is 73, set by Barry Bonds in 2001. Other notable single season records were achieved by Babe Ruth who hit 60 in 1927, Roger Maris, with 61 home runs in 1961, Aaron Judge, with 62 home runs in 2022, and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, who hit 66 and 70 respectively, in 1998.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Negro league slugger Josh Gibson's Baseball Hall of Fame plaque says he hit \"almost 800\" home runs in his career. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Gibson's lifetime home run total at 800. Ken Burns' award-winning series, Baseball, states that his actual total may have been as high as 950. Gibson's true total is not known, in part due to inconsistent record keeping in the Negro leagues. The 1993 edition of the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia attempted to compile a set of Negro league records, and subsequent work has expanded on that effort. Those records demonstrate that Gibson and Ruth were of comparable power. The 1993 book had Gibson hitting 146 home runs in the 501 \"official\" Negro league games they were able to account for in his 17-year career, about one home run every 3.4 games. Babe Ruth, in 22 seasons (several of them in the dead-ball era), hit 714 in 2503 games, or one home run every 3.5 games. The large gap in the numbers for Gibson reflect the fact that Negro league clubs played relatively far fewer league games and many more \"barnstorming\" or exhibition games during the course of a season, than did the major league clubs of that era.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Other legendary home run hitters include Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle (who on September 10, 1960, mythically hit \"the longest home run ever\" at an estimated distance of 643 feet (196 m), although this was measured after the ball stopped rolling), Reggie Jackson, Harmon Killebrew, Ernie Banks, Mike Schmidt, Dave Kingman, Sammy Sosa (who hit 60 or more home runs in a season three times), Ken Griffey Jr. and Eddie Mathews. In 1987, Joey Meyer of the minor league Denver Zephyrs hit the longest verifiable home run in professional baseball history. The home run was measured at a distance of 582 feet (177 m) and was hit inside Denver's Mile High Stadium. On May 6, 1964, Chicago White Sox outfielder Dave Nicholson hit a home run officially measured at 573 feet that either bounced atop the left-field roof of Comiskey Park or entirely cleared it. Major League Baseball's longest verifiable home run distance is about 575 feet (175 m), by Babe Ruth, to straightaway center field at Tiger Stadium (then called Navin Field and before the double-deck), which landed nearly across the intersection of Trumbull and Cherry.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The location of where Hank Aaron's record 755th home run landed has been monumented in Milwaukee. The spot sits outside American Family Field, where the Milwaukee Brewers currently play. Similarly, the point where Aaron's 715th home run landed, upon breaking Ruth's career record in 1974, is marked in the Turner Field parking lot. A red-painted seat in Fenway Park marks the landing place of the 502-ft home run Ted Williams hit in 1946, the longest measured home run in Fenway's history; a red stadium seat mounted on the wall of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, marks the landing spot of Harmon Killebrew's record 520-foot shot in old Metropolitan Stadium.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "May 2019 saw 1,135 MLB home runs, the highest ever number of home runs in a single month in Major League Baseball history. During this month, 44.5% of all runs scored were the result of a home run, breaking the previous record of 42.3%.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In postseason play, the most home runs hit by a player for a career is Manny Ramirez, who hit 29. Jose Altuve (23), Bernie Williams (22), Derek Jeter (20), and Kyle Schwarber (20) are the only other players to hit twenty postseason home runs. Rounding out the top ten as of the end of the 2021 season is Albert Pujols (19), George Springer (19), Carlos Correa (18), Reggie Jackson (18), Mickey Mantle (18, all in the World Series), and Nelson Cruz (18). As for most home runs in one postseason, Randy Arozarena holds the record with ten, done in the 2020 postseason.",
"title": "Records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Replays \"to get the call right\" have been used extremely sporadically in the past, but the use of instant replay to determine \"boundary calls\"—home runs and foul balls—was not officially allowed until 2008.",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In a game on May 31, 1999, involving the St. Louis Cardinals and Florida Marlins, a hit by Cliff Floyd of the Marlins was initially ruled a double, then a home run, then was changed back to a double when umpire Frank Pulli decided to review video of the play. The Marlins protested that video replay was not allowed, but while the National League office agreed that replay was not to be used in future games, it declined the protest on the grounds it was a judgment call, and the play stood.",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In November 2007, the general managers of Major League Baseball voted in favor of implementing instant replay reviews on boundary home run calls. The proposal limited the use of instant replay to determining whether a boundary/home run call is:",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "On August 28, 2008, instant replay review became available in MLB for reviewing calls in accordance with the above proposal. It was first utilized on September 3, 2008, in a game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees hit what appeared to be a home run, but the ball hit a catwalk behind the foul pole. It was at first called a home run, until Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon argued the call, and the umpires decided to review the play. After 2 minutes and 15 seconds, the umpires came back and ruled it a home run.",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "About two weeks later, on September 19, also at Tropicana Field, a boundary call was overturned for the first time. In this case, Carlos Peña of the Rays was given a ground rule double in a game against the Minnesota Twins after an umpire believed a fan reached into the field of play to catch a fly ball in right field. The umpires reviewed the play, determined the fan did not reach over the fence, and reversed the call, awarding Peña a home run.",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Aside from the two aforementioned reviews at Tampa Bay, the replay was used four more times in the 2008 MLB regular season: twice at Houston, once at Seattle, and once at San Francisco. The San Francisco incident is perhaps the most unusual. Bengie Molina, the Giants' catcher, hit what was first called a single. Molina then was replaced in the game by Emmanuel Burriss, a pinch-runner, before the umpires re-evaluated the call and ruled it a home run. In this instance though, Molina was not allowed to return to the game to complete the run, as he had already been replaced. Molina was credited with the home run, and two RBIs, but not for the run scored which went to Burriss instead.",
"title": "Instant replay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "On October 31, 2009, in the fourth inning of Game 3 of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez hit a long fly ball that hit a camera protruding over the wall and into the field of play in deep right field. The ball ricocheted off the camera and re-entered the field, initially ruled a double. However, after the umpires consulted with each other after watching the instant replay, the hit was ruled a home run, marking the first time an instant replay home run was hit in a playoff game.",
"title": "Instant replay"
}
]
| In baseball, a home run is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run is usually achieved by hitting the ball over the outfield fence between the foul poles without the ball touching the field. Inside-the-park home runs where the batter reaches home safely while the baseball is in play on the field are infrequent. In very rare cases, a fielder attempting to catch a ball in flight may misplay it and knock it over the outfield fence, resulting in a home run. An official scorer will credit the batter with a hit, a run scored, and a run batted in (RBI), as well as an RBI for each runner on base. The pitcher is recorded as having given up a hit and a run, with additional runs charged for each base-runner that scores. Home runs are among the most popular aspects of baseball and, as a result, prolific home run hitters are usually the most popular among fans and consequently the highest paid by teams—hence the old saying, "Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, and singles hitters drive Fords". Nicknames for a home run include "homer", "round tripper", "four-bagger", "big fly", "dinger", "long ball", "jack", "shot"/"moon shot", "bomb", "tater", and "blast", while a player hitting a home run may be said to have "gone deep" or "gone yard". | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-30T21:05:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_run |
14,149 | Harappa | Harappa (Punjabi pronunciation: [ɦəɽəppaː]; Urdu/Punjabi: ہڑپّہ) is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about 24 km (15 mi) west of Sahiwal. The Bronze Age Harappan civilisation, now more often called the Indus Valley Civilisation, is named after the site, which takes its name from a modern village near the former course of the Ravi River, which now runs 8 km (5.0 mi) to the north. The core of the Harappan civilisation extended over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Balochistan, not far from Iran.
The site of the ancient city contains the ruins of a Bronze Age fortified city, which was part of the Harappan civilisation centred in Sindh and the Punjab, and then the Cemetery H culture. The city is believed to have had as many as 23,500 residents and occupied about 150 hectares (370 acres) with clay brick houses at its greatest extent during the Mature Harappan phase (2600 BC – 1900 BC), which is considered large for its time. Per archaeological convention of naming a previously unknown civilisation by its first excavated site, the Indus Valley Civilisation is also called the Harappan Civilisation.
The ancient city of Harappa was heavily damaged under British and French rule, when bricks from the ruins were used as track ballast in the construction of the Lahore–Multan Railway . The current village of Harappa is less than 1 km (0.62 mi) from the ancient site. Although modern Harappa has a legacy railway station from the British Raj period, it is a small crossroads town of 15,000 people today. In 2005, a controversial amusement park scheme at the site was abandoned when builders unearthed many archaeological artefacts during the early stages of building work.
The Harappan Civilization has its earliest roots in cultures such as that of Mehrgarh, approximately 6000 BC. The two greatest cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, emerged c. 2600 BC along the Indus River valley in Punjab and Sindh. The civilization, with a possible writing system, urban centres, drainage infrastructure and diversified social and economic system, was rediscovered in the 1920s also after excavations at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh near Larkana, and Harappa, in west Punjab south of Lahore. A number of other sites stretching from the Himalayan foothills in the east Punjab, India in the west, to Gujarat in the south and east, and to Pakistani Balochistan in the west have also been discovered and studied. Although the archaeological site at Harappa was damaged in 1857 when engineers constructing the Lahore-Multan railroad used brick from the Harappa ruins for track ballast, an abundance of artefacts have nevertheless been found. Because of the reducing sea-levels certain regions in late Harappan period were abandoned . Towards the end Harappan civilization lost features such as writing and hydraulic engineering. As a result the Ganges Valley settlement gained prominence and Ganges cities developed.
The earliest recognisably Harappan sites date to 3500 BC. This early phase lasts till around 2600 BC. We then enter the Mature phase from 2600 BC to 2000 BC. This is when the great cities were at their height. Then, from around 2000 BC we have a steady disintegration that lasts till 1400 BC – what is usually called Late Harappan. There is no sign that the Harappan cities were laid waste by invaders. The evidence strongly points to natural causes. A number of studies show that the area which is today the Thar desert was once far wetter and that the climate gradually became drier.
The Indus Valley civilization was basically an urban culture sustained by surplus agricultural production and commerce, the latter including trade with Elam and Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. Both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are generally characterised as having "differentiated living quarters, flat-roofed brick houses, and fortified administrative or religious centers." Although such similarities have given rise to arguments for the existence of a standardised system of urban layout and planning, the similarities are largely due to the presence of a semi-orthogonal type of civic layout, and a comparison of the layouts of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa shows that they are in fact, arranged in a quite dissimilar fashion.
The weights and measures of the Indus Valley Civilisation, on the other hand, were highly standardised, and conform to a set scale of gradations. Distinctive seals were used, among other applications, perhaps for the identification of property and shipment of goods. Although copper and bronze were in use, iron was not yet employed. "Cotton was woven and dyed for clothing; wheat, rice, and a variety of vegetables and fruits were cultivated; and a number of animals, including the humped bull, was domesticated," as well as "fowl for fighting". Wheel-made pottery—some of it adorned with animal and geometric motifs—has been found in profusion at all the major Indus sites. A centralised administration for each city, though not the whole civilisation, has been inferred from the revealed cultural uniformity; however, it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a commercial oligarchy. Harappans had many trade routes along the Indus River that went as far as the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Some of the most valuable things traded were carnelian and lapis lazuli.
What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory. Examinations of Harappan skeletons have often found wounds that are likely to have been inflicted in battle. Paleopathological analysis demonstrated that leprosy and tuberculosis were present at Harappa, with the highest prevalence of both disease and trauma present in the skeletons from Area G (an ossuary located south-east of the city walls). Furthermore, rates of craniofacial trauma and infection increased through time demonstrating that the civilisation collapsed amid illness and injury. The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety.
The Harappans had traded with ancient Mesopotamia, especially Elam, among other areas. Cotton textiles and agricultural products were the primary trading objects. The Harappan merchants also had procurement colonies in Mesopotamia as well, which served as trading centres. They also traded extensively with people living in southern India, near modern-day Karnataka, to procure gold and copper from them.
The excavators of the site have proposed the following chronology of Harappa's occupation:
Period 1 occupation was thought to be around 7 to 10 hectares, but following excavations and findings of pottery in Mound E, along with previously found Mound AB pottery, suggest Ravi/Hakra phase would have been extended, together in both mounds, to 25 hectares.
Period 2, Kot Diji phase, was extended in the same two mounds, AB and E, covering over 27 hectares.
In Period 3, Harappa phase, the settlement reached 150 hectares.
By far the most exquisite and obscure artefacts unearthed to date are the small, square steatite (soapstone) seals engraved with human or animal motifs. A large number of seals have been found at such sites as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Many bear pictographic inscriptions generally thought to be a form of writing or script. Despite the efforts of philologists from all parts of the world, and despite the use of modern cryptographic analysis, the signs remain undeciphered. It is also unknown if they reflect proto-Dravidian or other non-Vedic language(s). The ascribing of Indus Valley Civilisation iconography and epigraphy to historically known cultures is extremely problematic, in part due to the rather tenuous archaeological evidence for such claims, as well as the projection of modern South Asian political concerns onto the archaeological record of the area. This is especially evident in the radically varying interpretations of Harappan material culture as seen from both Pakistan- and India-based scholars.
In February 2006 a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu discovered a stone celt (tool) with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old. Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan postulated that the four signs were in the Indus script and called the find "the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu". Based on this evidence he goes on to suggest that the language used in the Indus Valley was of Dravidian origin. However, the absence of a Bronze Age in South India, contrasted with the knowledge of bronze making techniques in the Indus Valley cultures, calls into question the validity of this hypothesis.
The area of the late Harappan period consisted of areas of Daimabad, Maharashtra, and Badakshan regions of Afghanistan. The area covered by this civilisation would have been very large with a distance of around 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi).
Clay and stone tablets unearthed at Harappa, which were carbon-dated 3300–3200 BC., contain trident-shaped and plant-like markings. "It is a big question as to if we can call what we have found true writing, but we have found symbols that have similarities to what became Indus script" said Dr. Richard Meadow of Harvard University, Director of the Harappa Archeological Research Project. These primitive symbols are placed slightly earlier than the primitive writing of the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, dated c.3100 BC. These markings have similarities to what later became Indus Script which has not been completely deciphered yet. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harappa (Punjabi pronunciation: [ɦəɽəppaː]; Urdu/Punjabi: ہڑپّہ) is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about 24 km (15 mi) west of Sahiwal. The Bronze Age Harappan civilisation, now more often called the Indus Valley Civilisation, is named after the site, which takes its name from a modern village near the former course of the Ravi River, which now runs 8 km (5.0 mi) to the north. The core of the Harappan civilisation extended over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Balochistan, not far from Iran.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The site of the ancient city contains the ruins of a Bronze Age fortified city, which was part of the Harappan civilisation centred in Sindh and the Punjab, and then the Cemetery H culture. The city is believed to have had as many as 23,500 residents and occupied about 150 hectares (370 acres) with clay brick houses at its greatest extent during the Mature Harappan phase (2600 BC – 1900 BC), which is considered large for its time. Per archaeological convention of naming a previously unknown civilisation by its first excavated site, the Indus Valley Civilisation is also called the Harappan Civilisation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The ancient city of Harappa was heavily damaged under British and French rule, when bricks from the ruins were used as track ballast in the construction of the Lahore–Multan Railway . The current village of Harappa is less than 1 km (0.62 mi) from the ancient site. Although modern Harappa has a legacy railway station from the British Raj period, it is a small crossroads town of 15,000 people today. In 2005, a controversial amusement park scheme at the site was abandoned when builders unearthed many archaeological artefacts during the early stages of building work.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Harappan Civilization has its earliest roots in cultures such as that of Mehrgarh, approximately 6000 BC. The two greatest cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, emerged c. 2600 BC along the Indus River valley in Punjab and Sindh. The civilization, with a possible writing system, urban centres, drainage infrastructure and diversified social and economic system, was rediscovered in the 1920s also after excavations at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh near Larkana, and Harappa, in west Punjab south of Lahore. A number of other sites stretching from the Himalayan foothills in the east Punjab, India in the west, to Gujarat in the south and east, and to Pakistani Balochistan in the west have also been discovered and studied. Although the archaeological site at Harappa was damaged in 1857 when engineers constructing the Lahore-Multan railroad used brick from the Harappa ruins for track ballast, an abundance of artefacts have nevertheless been found. Because of the reducing sea-levels certain regions in late Harappan period were abandoned . Towards the end Harappan civilization lost features such as writing and hydraulic engineering. As a result the Ganges Valley settlement gained prominence and Ganges cities developed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The earliest recognisably Harappan sites date to 3500 BC. This early phase lasts till around 2600 BC. We then enter the Mature phase from 2600 BC to 2000 BC. This is when the great cities were at their height. Then, from around 2000 BC we have a steady disintegration that lasts till 1400 BC – what is usually called Late Harappan. There is no sign that the Harappan cities were laid waste by invaders. The evidence strongly points to natural causes. A number of studies show that the area which is today the Thar desert was once far wetter and that the climate gradually became drier.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Indus Valley civilization was basically an urban culture sustained by surplus agricultural production and commerce, the latter including trade with Elam and Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. Both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are generally characterised as having \"differentiated living quarters, flat-roofed brick houses, and fortified administrative or religious centers.\" Although such similarities have given rise to arguments for the existence of a standardised system of urban layout and planning, the similarities are largely due to the presence of a semi-orthogonal type of civic layout, and a comparison of the layouts of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa shows that they are in fact, arranged in a quite dissimilar fashion.",
"title": "Culture and economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The weights and measures of the Indus Valley Civilisation, on the other hand, were highly standardised, and conform to a set scale of gradations. Distinctive seals were used, among other applications, perhaps for the identification of property and shipment of goods. Although copper and bronze were in use, iron was not yet employed. \"Cotton was woven and dyed for clothing; wheat, rice, and a variety of vegetables and fruits were cultivated; and a number of animals, including the humped bull, was domesticated,\" as well as \"fowl for fighting\". Wheel-made pottery—some of it adorned with animal and geometric motifs—has been found in profusion at all the major Indus sites. A centralised administration for each city, though not the whole civilisation, has been inferred from the revealed cultural uniformity; however, it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a commercial oligarchy. Harappans had many trade routes along the Indus River that went as far as the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Some of the most valuable things traded were carnelian and lapis lazuli.",
"title": "Culture and economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory. Examinations of Harappan skeletons have often found wounds that are likely to have been inflicted in battle. Paleopathological analysis demonstrated that leprosy and tuberculosis were present at Harappa, with the highest prevalence of both disease and trauma present in the skeletons from Area G (an ossuary located south-east of the city walls). Furthermore, rates of craniofacial trauma and infection increased through time demonstrating that the civilisation collapsed amid illness and injury. The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety.",
"title": "Culture and economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Harappans had traded with ancient Mesopotamia, especially Elam, among other areas. Cotton textiles and agricultural products were the primary trading objects. The Harappan merchants also had procurement colonies in Mesopotamia as well, which served as trading centres. They also traded extensively with people living in southern India, near modern-day Karnataka, to procure gold and copper from them.",
"title": "Trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The excavators of the site have proposed the following chronology of Harappa's occupation:",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Period 1 occupation was thought to be around 7 to 10 hectares, but following excavations and findings of pottery in Mound E, along with previously found Mound AB pottery, suggest Ravi/Hakra phase would have been extended, together in both mounds, to 25 hectares.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Period 2, Kot Diji phase, was extended in the same two mounds, AB and E, covering over 27 hectares.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In Period 3, Harappa phase, the settlement reached 150 hectares.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "By far the most exquisite and obscure artefacts unearthed to date are the small, square steatite (soapstone) seals engraved with human or animal motifs. A large number of seals have been found at such sites as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Many bear pictographic inscriptions generally thought to be a form of writing or script. Despite the efforts of philologists from all parts of the world, and despite the use of modern cryptographic analysis, the signs remain undeciphered. It is also unknown if they reflect proto-Dravidian or other non-Vedic language(s). The ascribing of Indus Valley Civilisation iconography and epigraphy to historically known cultures is extremely problematic, in part due to the rather tenuous archaeological evidence for such claims, as well as the projection of modern South Asian political concerns onto the archaeological record of the area. This is especially evident in the radically varying interpretations of Harappan material culture as seen from both Pakistan- and India-based scholars.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In February 2006 a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu discovered a stone celt (tool) with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old. Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan postulated that the four signs were in the Indus script and called the find \"the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu\". Based on this evidence he goes on to suggest that the language used in the Indus Valley was of Dravidian origin. However, the absence of a Bronze Age in South India, contrasted with the knowledge of bronze making techniques in the Indus Valley cultures, calls into question the validity of this hypothesis.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The area of the late Harappan period consisted of areas of Daimabad, Maharashtra, and Badakshan regions of Afghanistan. The area covered by this civilisation would have been very large with a distance of around 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi).",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Clay and stone tablets unearthed at Harappa, which were carbon-dated 3300–3200 BC., contain trident-shaped and plant-like markings. \"It is a big question as to if we can call what we have found true writing, but we have found symbols that have similarities to what became Indus script\" said Dr. Richard Meadow of Harvard University, Director of the Harappa Archeological Research Project. These primitive symbols are placed slightly earlier than the primitive writing of the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, dated c.3100 BC. These markings have similarities to what later became Indus Script which has not been completely deciphered yet.",
"title": "Early symbols similar to Indus script"
}
]
| Harappa is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about 24 km (15 mi) west of Sahiwal. The Bronze Age Harappan civilisation, now more often called the Indus Valley Civilisation, is named after the site, which takes its name from a modern village near the former course of the Ravi River, which now runs 8 km (5.0 mi) to the north. The core of the Harappan civilisation extended over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Balochistan, not far from Iran. The site of the ancient city contains the ruins of a Bronze Age fortified city, which was part of the Harappan civilisation centred in Sindh and the Punjab, and then the Cemetery H culture. The city is believed to have had as many as 23,500 residents and occupied about 150 hectares with clay brick houses at its greatest extent during the Mature Harappan phase, which is considered large for its time. Per archaeological convention of naming a previously unknown civilisation by its first excavated site, the Indus Valley Civilisation is also called the Harappan Civilisation. The ancient city of Harappa was heavily damaged under British and French rule, when bricks from the ruins were used as track ballast in the construction of the Lahore–Multan Railway. The current village of Harappa is less than 1 km (0.62 mi) from the ancient site. Although modern Harappa has a legacy railway station from the British Raj period, it is a small crossroads town of 15,000 people today. In 2005, a controversial amusement park scheme at the site was abandoned when builders unearthed many archaeological artefacts during the early stages of building work. | 2001-11-17T02:03:27Z | 2023-12-27T15:34:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappa |
14,153 | Hendecasyllable | In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.
In classical poetry, "hendecasyllable" or "hendecasyllabic" may refer to any of three distinct 11-syllable Aeolic meters, used first in Ancient Greece and later, with little modification, by Roman poets.
Aeolic meters are characterized by an Aeolic base × × followed by a choriamb – u u –; where – = a long syllable, u = a short syllable, and × = an anceps, that is, a syllable either long or short. The three Aeolic hendecasyllables (with base and choriamb in bold) are:
Phalaecian (Latin: hendecasyllabus phalaecius):
This is a line used only occasionally in Greek choral odes and scolia, but a favorite of Catullus who realized the Aeolic base as – – or – u or u – but not as u u; for example, in the first poem in his collection (with formal equivalent, substituting English stress for Latin length):
The base with – – is by far the most common in Catullus, and in later poets such as Statius and Martial was the only one used. There is usually a caesura in the line after the 5th or 6th syllable.
Alcaic (Latin: hendecasyllabus alcaicus):
Here the Aeolic base is truncated to a single anceps. This meter typically appears as the first two lines of an Alcaic stanza. (For an English example, see §English, below.)
Sapphic (Latin: hendecasyllabus sapphicus):
Again, the Aeolic base is truncated. This meter typically appears as the first three lines of a Sapphic stanza, though it has served in stichic verse, for example by Seneca and Boethius. Sappho wrote many of the stanzas subsequently named after her, for example (with formal equivalent, substituting English stress for Greek length):
The hendecasyllable (Italian: endecasillabo) is the principal metre in Italian poetry. Its defining feature is a constant stress on the tenth syllable, so that the number of syllables in the verse may vary, equaling eleven in the usual case where the final word is stressed on the penultimate syllable. The verse also has a stress preceding the caesura, on either the fourth or sixth syllable. The first case is called endecasillabo a minore, or lesser hendecasyllable, and has the first hemistich equivalent to a quinario; the second is called endecasillabo a maiore, or greater hendecasyllable, and has a settenario as the first hemistich.
There is a strong tendency for hendecasyllabic lines to end with feminine rhymes (causing the total number of syllables to be eleven, hence the name), but ten-syllable lines ("Ciò che 'n grembo a Benaco star non può") and twelve-syllable lines ("Ergasto mio, perché solingo e tacito") are encountered as well. Lines of ten or twelve syllables are more common in rhymed verse; versi sciolti, which rely more heavily on a pleasant rhythm for effect, tend toward a stricter eleven-syllable format. As a novelty, lines longer than twelve syllables can be created by the use of certain verb forms and affixed enclitic pronouns ("Ottima è l'acqua; ma le piante abbeverinosene.").
Additional accents beyond the two mandatory ones provide rhythmic variation and allow the poet to express thematic effects. A line in which accents fall consistently on even-numbered syllables ("Al còr gentìl rempàira sèmpre amóre") is called iambic (giambico) and may be a greater or lesser hendecasyllable. This line is the simplest, commonest and most musical but may become repetitive, especially in longer works. Lesser hendecasyllables often have an accent on the seventh syllable ("fàtta di giòco in figùra d'amóre"). Such a line is called dactylic (dattilico) and its less pronounced rhythm is considered particularly appropriate for representing dialogue. Another kind of greater hendecasyllable has an accent on the third syllable ("Se Mercé fosse amìca a' miei disìri") and is known as anapestic (anapestico). This sort of line has a crescendo effect and gives the poem a sense of speed and fluidity.
It is considered improper for the lesser hendecasyllable to use a word accented on its antepenultimate syllable (parola sdrucciola) for its mid-line stress. A line like "Più non sfavìllano quegli òcchi néri", which delays the caesura until after the sixth syllable, is not considered a valid hendecasyllable.
Most classical Italian poems are composed in hendecasyllables, including the major works of Dante, Francesco Petrarca, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. The rhyme systems used include terza rima, ottava, sonnet and canzone, and some verse forms use a mixture of hendecasyllables and shorter lines. From the early 16th century onward, hendecasyllables are often used without a strict system, with few or no rhymes, both in poetry and in drama. This is known as verso sciolto. An early example is Le Api ("the bees") by Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, written around 1517 and published in 1525 (with formal equivalent paraphrase which mirrors the original's syllabic counts, varied caesurae, and line- and hemistich-final stress profiles):
Like other early Italian-language tragedies, the Sophonisba of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1515) is in blank hendecasyllables. Later examples can be found in the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi, where hendecasyllables are alternated with settenari.
The hendecasyllabic metre (Polish: jedenastozgłoskowiec) was very popular in Polish poetry, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to strong Italian literary influence. It was used by Jan Kochanowski, Piotr Kochanowski (who translated Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso), Sebastian Grabowiecki, Wespazjan Kochowski and Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski. The greatest Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, set his poem Grażyna in this measure. The Polish hendecasyllable is widely used when translating English blank verse.
The eleven-syllable line is normally a line of 5+6 syllables with medial caesura, primary stresses on the fourth and tenth syllables, and feminine endings on both half-lines. Although the form can accommodate a fully iambic line, there is no such tendency in practice, word stresses falling variously on any of the initial syllables of each half-line.
A popular form of Polish literature that employs the hendecasyllable is the Sapphic stanza: 11/11/11/5.
The Polish hendecasyllable is often combined with an 8-syllable line: 11a/8b/11a/8b. Such a stanza was used by Mickiewicz in his ballads, as in the following example (with formal equivalent paraphrase):
The hendecasyllable (Portuguese: hendecassílabo) is a common meter in Portuguese poetry. The best-known Portuguese poem composed in hendecasyllables is Luís de Camões' Lusiads, which begins as follows:
In Portuguese, the hendecasyllable meter is often called "decasyllable" (decassílabo), even when the work in question uses overwhelmingly feminine rhymes (as is the case with the Lusiads). This is due to Portuguese prosody considering verses to end at the last stressed syllable, thus the aforementioned verses are effectively decasyllabic according to Portuguese scansion.
The hendecasyllable (Spanish: endecasílabo) is less pervasive in Spanish poetry than in Italian or Portuguese, but it is commonly used with Italianate verse forms like sonnets and ottava rima (as found, for example, in Alonso de Ercilla's epic La Araucana).
Spanish dramatists often use hendecasyllables in tandem with shorter lines like heptasyllables, as can be seen in Rosaura's opening speech from Calderón's La vida es sueño:
The term "hendecasyllable" most often refers to an imitation of Greek or Latin metrical lines, notably by Alfred Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Frost ("For Once Then Something"). Contemporary American poets Annie Finch ("Lucid Waking") and Patricia Smith ("The Reemergence of the Noose") have published recent examples. In English, which lacks phonemic length, poets typically substitute stressed syllables for long, and unstressed syllables for short. Tennyson, however, attempted to maintain the quantitative features of the meter (while supporting them with concurrent stress) in his Alcaic stanzas, the first two lines of which are Alcaic hendecasyllables:
O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Occasionally "hendecasyllable" is used to denote a line of iambic pentameter with a feminine ending, as in the first line of John Keats's Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In classical poetry, \"hendecasyllable\" or \"hendecasyllabic\" may refer to any of three distinct 11-syllable Aeolic meters, used first in Ancient Greece and later, with little modification, by Roman poets.",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Aeolic meters are characterized by an Aeolic base × × followed by a choriamb – u u –; where – = a long syllable, u = a short syllable, and × = an anceps, that is, a syllable either long or short. The three Aeolic hendecasyllables (with base and choriamb in bold) are:",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Phalaecian (Latin: hendecasyllabus phalaecius):",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "This is a line used only occasionally in Greek choral odes and scolia, but a favorite of Catullus who realized the Aeolic base as – – or – u or u – but not as u u; for example, in the first poem in his collection (with formal equivalent, substituting English stress for Latin length):",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The base with – – is by far the most common in Catullus, and in later poets such as Statius and Martial was the only one used. There is usually a caesura in the line after the 5th or 6th syllable.",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Alcaic (Latin: hendecasyllabus alcaicus):",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Here the Aeolic base is truncated to a single anceps. This meter typically appears as the first two lines of an Alcaic stanza. (For an English example, see §English, below.)",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Sapphic (Latin: hendecasyllabus sapphicus):",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Again, the Aeolic base is truncated. This meter typically appears as the first three lines of a Sapphic stanza, though it has served in stichic verse, for example by Seneca and Boethius. Sappho wrote many of the stanzas subsequently named after her, for example (with formal equivalent, substituting English stress for Greek length):",
"title": "Classical"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The hendecasyllable (Italian: endecasillabo) is the principal metre in Italian poetry. Its defining feature is a constant stress on the tenth syllable, so that the number of syllables in the verse may vary, equaling eleven in the usual case where the final word is stressed on the penultimate syllable. The verse also has a stress preceding the caesura, on either the fourth or sixth syllable. The first case is called endecasillabo a minore, or lesser hendecasyllable, and has the first hemistich equivalent to a quinario; the second is called endecasillabo a maiore, or greater hendecasyllable, and has a settenario as the first hemistich.",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "There is a strong tendency for hendecasyllabic lines to end with feminine rhymes (causing the total number of syllables to be eleven, hence the name), but ten-syllable lines (\"Ciò che 'n grembo a Benaco star non può\") and twelve-syllable lines (\"Ergasto mio, perché solingo e tacito\") are encountered as well. Lines of ten or twelve syllables are more common in rhymed verse; versi sciolti, which rely more heavily on a pleasant rhythm for effect, tend toward a stricter eleven-syllable format. As a novelty, lines longer than twelve syllables can be created by the use of certain verb forms and affixed enclitic pronouns (\"Ottima è l'acqua; ma le piante abbeverinosene.\").",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Additional accents beyond the two mandatory ones provide rhythmic variation and allow the poet to express thematic effects. A line in which accents fall consistently on even-numbered syllables (\"Al còr gentìl rempàira sèmpre amóre\") is called iambic (giambico) and may be a greater or lesser hendecasyllable. This line is the simplest, commonest and most musical but may become repetitive, especially in longer works. Lesser hendecasyllables often have an accent on the seventh syllable (\"fàtta di giòco in figùra d'amóre\"). Such a line is called dactylic (dattilico) and its less pronounced rhythm is considered particularly appropriate for representing dialogue. Another kind of greater hendecasyllable has an accent on the third syllable (\"Se Mercé fosse amìca a' miei disìri\") and is known as anapestic (anapestico). This sort of line has a crescendo effect and gives the poem a sense of speed and fluidity.",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "It is considered improper for the lesser hendecasyllable to use a word accented on its antepenultimate syllable (parola sdrucciola) for its mid-line stress. A line like \"Più non sfavìllano quegli òcchi néri\", which delays the caesura until after the sixth syllable, is not considered a valid hendecasyllable.",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Most classical Italian poems are composed in hendecasyllables, including the major works of Dante, Francesco Petrarca, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. The rhyme systems used include terza rima, ottava, sonnet and canzone, and some verse forms use a mixture of hendecasyllables and shorter lines. From the early 16th century onward, hendecasyllables are often used without a strict system, with few or no rhymes, both in poetry and in drama. This is known as verso sciolto. An early example is Le Api (\"the bees\") by Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, written around 1517 and published in 1525 (with formal equivalent paraphrase which mirrors the original's syllabic counts, varied caesurae, and line- and hemistich-final stress profiles):",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Like other early Italian-language tragedies, the Sophonisba of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1515) is in blank hendecasyllables. Later examples can be found in the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi, where hendecasyllables are alternated with settenari.",
"title": "Italian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The hendecasyllabic metre (Polish: jedenastozgłoskowiec) was very popular in Polish poetry, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to strong Italian literary influence. It was used by Jan Kochanowski, Piotr Kochanowski (who translated Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso), Sebastian Grabowiecki, Wespazjan Kochowski and Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski. The greatest Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, set his poem Grażyna in this measure. The Polish hendecasyllable is widely used when translating English blank verse.",
"title": "Polish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The eleven-syllable line is normally a line of 5+6 syllables with medial caesura, primary stresses on the fourth and tenth syllables, and feminine endings on both half-lines. Although the form can accommodate a fully iambic line, there is no such tendency in practice, word stresses falling variously on any of the initial syllables of each half-line.",
"title": "Polish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A popular form of Polish literature that employs the hendecasyllable is the Sapphic stanza: 11/11/11/5.",
"title": "Polish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Polish hendecasyllable is often combined with an 8-syllable line: 11a/8b/11a/8b. Such a stanza was used by Mickiewicz in his ballads, as in the following example (with formal equivalent paraphrase):",
"title": "Polish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The hendecasyllable (Portuguese: hendecassílabo) is a common meter in Portuguese poetry. The best-known Portuguese poem composed in hendecasyllables is Luís de Camões' Lusiads, which begins as follows:",
"title": "Portuguese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In Portuguese, the hendecasyllable meter is often called \"decasyllable\" (decassílabo), even when the work in question uses overwhelmingly feminine rhymes (as is the case with the Lusiads). This is due to Portuguese prosody considering verses to end at the last stressed syllable, thus the aforementioned verses are effectively decasyllabic according to Portuguese scansion.",
"title": "Portuguese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The hendecasyllable (Spanish: endecasílabo) is less pervasive in Spanish poetry than in Italian or Portuguese, but it is commonly used with Italianate verse forms like sonnets and ottava rima (as found, for example, in Alonso de Ercilla's epic La Araucana).",
"title": "Spanish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Spanish dramatists often use hendecasyllables in tandem with shorter lines like heptasyllables, as can be seen in Rosaura's opening speech from Calderón's La vida es sueño:",
"title": "Spanish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The term \"hendecasyllable\" most often refers to an imitation of Greek or Latin metrical lines, notably by Alfred Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Frost (\"For Once Then Something\"). Contemporary American poets Annie Finch (\"Lucid Waking\") and Patricia Smith (\"The Reemergence of the Noose\") have published recent examples. In English, which lacks phonemic length, poets typically substitute stressed syllables for long, and unstressed syllables for short. Tennyson, however, attempted to maintain the quantitative features of the meter (while supporting them with concurrent stress) in his Alcaic stanzas, the first two lines of which are Alcaic hendecasyllables:",
"title": "English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages;",
"title": "English"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Occasionally \"hendecasyllable\" is used to denote a line of iambic pentameter with a feminine ending, as in the first line of John Keats's Endymion: \"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever\".",
"title": "English"
}
]
| In poetry, a hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry. | 2001-11-17T18:42:18Z | 2023-12-16T18:35:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendecasyllable |
14,155 | Hebrides | The Hebrides (/ˈhɛbrɪdiːz/ HEB-rid-eez; Scottish Gaelic: Innse Gall, pronounced [ˈĩːʃə ˈkaul̪ˠ]; Old Norse: Suðreyjar, lit. 'Southern isles') are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner and Outer Hebrides.
These islands have a long history of occupation (dating back to the Mesolithic period), and the culture of the inhabitants has been successively influenced by the cultures of Celtic-speaking, Norse-speaking, and English-speaking peoples. This diversity is reflected in the various names given to the islands, which are derived from the different languages that have been spoken there at various points in their history.
The Hebrides are where much of Scottish Gaelic literature and Gaelic music has historically originated. Today, the economy of the islands is dependent on crofting, fishing, tourism, the oil industry, and renewable energy. The Hebrides have less biodiversity than mainland Scotland, but a significant number of seals and seabirds.
The islands have a combined area of 7,285 km (2,813 sq mi), and, as of 2011, a combined population of around 45,000.
The Hebrides have a diverse geology, ranging in age from Precambrian strata that are amongst the oldest rocks in Europe, to Paleogene igneous intrusions. Raised shore platforms in the Hebrides have been identified as strandflats, possibly formed during the Pliocene period and later modified by the Quaternary glaciations.
The Hebrides can be divided into two main groups, separated from one another by the Minch to the north and the Sea of the Hebrides to the south. The Inner Hebrides lie closer to mainland Scotland and include Islay, Jura, Skye, Mull, Raasay, Staffa and the Small Isles. There are 36 inhabited islands in this group. The Outer Hebrides form a chain of more than 100 islands and small skerries located about 70 km (45 mi) west of mainland Scotland. Among them, 15 are inhabited. The main inhabited islands include Lewis and Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra.
A complication is that there are various descriptions of the scope of the Hebrides. The Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland describes the Inner Hebrides as lying "east of the Minch". This definition would encompass all offshore islands, including those that lie in the sea lochs, such as Eilean Bàn and Eilean Donan, which might not ordinarily be described as "Hebridean". However, no formal definition exists.
In the past, the Outer Hebrides were often referred to as the Long Isle (Scottish Gaelic: An t-Eilean Fada). Today, they are also sometimes known as the Western Isles, although this phrase can also be used to refer to the Hebrides in general.
The Hebrides have a cool, temperate climate that is remarkably mild and steady for such a northerly latitude, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. In the Outer Hebrides, the average temperature is 6 °C (44 °F) in January and 14 °C (57 °F) in the summer. The average annual rainfall in Lewis is 1,100 mm (43 in), and there are between 1,100 and 1,200 hours of sunshine per annum (13%). The summer days are relatively long, and May through August is the driest period.
The earliest surviving written references to the islands were made circa 77 AD by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History: He states that there are 30 Hebudes, and makes a separate reference to Dumna, which Watson (1926) concluded refers unequivocally to the Outer Hebrides. About 80 years after Pliny the Elder, in 140–150 AD, Ptolemy (drawing on accounts of the naval expeditions of Agricola) writes that there are five Ebudes (possibly meaning the Inner Hebrides) and Dumna. Later texts in classical Latin, by writers such as Solinus, use the forms Hebudes and Hæbudes.
The name Ebudes (used by Ptolemy) may be pre-Celtic. Ptolemy calls Islay “Epidion”, and the use of the letter "p" suggests a Brythonic or Pictish tribal name, Epidii, because the root is not Gaelic. Woolf (2012) has suggested that Ebudes may be "an Irish attempt to reproduce the word Epidii phonetically, rather than by translating it", and that the tribe's name may come from the root epos, meaning "horse". Watson (1926) also notes a possible relationship between Ebudes, and the ancient Irish Ulaid tribal name Ibdaig, and also the personal name of a king Iubdán (recorded in the Silva Gadelica).
The names of other individual islands reflect their complex linguistic history. The majority are Norse or Gaelic, but the roots of several other names for Hebrides islands may have a pre-Celtic origin. Adomnán, a 7th-century abbot of Iona, records Colonsay as Colosus and Tiree as Ethica, and both of these may be pre-Celtic names. The etymology of Skye is complex and may also include a pre-Celtic root. Lewis is Ljoðhús in Old Norse. Various suggestions have been made as to possible meanings of the name in Norse (for example, "song house"), but the name is not of Gaelic origin, and the Norse provenance is questionable.
The earliest comprehensive written list of Hebridean island names was compiled by Donald Monro in 1549. This list also provides the earliest written reference to the names of some of the islands.
The derivations of all the inhabited islands of the Hebrides and some of the larger uninhabited ones are listed below.
Lewis and Harris is the largest island in Scotland and the third largest of the British Isles, after Great Britain and Ireland. It incorporates Lewis in the north and Harris in the south, both of which are frequently referred to as individual islands, although they are joined by a land border. The island does not have a single common name in either English or Gaelic and is referred to as "Lewis and Harris", "Lewis with Harris", "Harris with Lewis" etc. For this reason it is treated as two separate islands below. The derivation of Lewis may be pre-Celtic (see above) and the origin of Harris is no less problematic. In the Ravenna Cosmography, Erimon may refer to Harris (or possibly the Outer Hebrides as a whole). This word may derive from the Ancient Greek: ἐρῆμος (erimos "desert". The origin of Uist (Old Norse: Ívist) is similarly unclear.
There are various examples of earlier names for Inner Hebridean islands that were Gaelic, but these names have since been completely replaced. For example, Adomnán records Sainea, Elena, Ommon and Oideacha in the Inner Hebrides. These names presumably passed out of usage in the Norse era, and the locations of the islands they refer to are not clear. As an example of the complexity: Rona may originally have had a Celtic name, then later a similar-sounding Norse name, and then still later a name that was essentially Gaelic again, but with a Norse "øy" or "ey" ending. (See Rona, below.)
The names of uninhabited islands follow the same general patterns as the inhabited islands. (See the list, below, of the ten largest islands in the Hebrides and their outliers.)
The etymology of the name “St Kilda”, a small archipelago west of the Outer Hebrides, and the name of its main island, “Hirta,” is very complex. No saint is known by the name of Kilda, so various other theories have been proposed for the word's origin, which dates from the late 16th century. Haswell-Smith (2004) notes that the full name "St Kilda" first appears on a Dutch map dated 1666, and that it may derive from the Norse phrase sunt kelda ("sweet wellwater") or from a mistaken Dutch assumption that the spring Tobar Childa was dedicated to a saint. (Tobar Childa is a tautological placename, consisting of the Gaelic and Norse words for well, i.e., "well well"). Similarly unclear is the origin of the Gaelic for "Hirta", Hiort, Hirt, or Irt a name for the island that long pre-dates the name "St Kilda". Watson (1926) suggests that it may derive from the Old Irish word hirt ("death"), possibly a reference to the often lethally dangerous surrounding sea. Maclean (1977) notes that an Icelandic saga about an early 13th-century voyage to Ireland refers to “the islands of Hirtir”, which means "stags" in Norse, and suggests that the outline of the island of Hirta resembles the shape of a stag, speculating that therefore the name “Hirta” may be a reference to the island's shape.
The etymology of the names of small islands may be no less complex and elusive. In relation to Dubh Artach, Robert Louis Stevenson believed that "black and dismal" was one translation of the name, noting that "as usual, in Gaelic, it is not the only one."
The Hebrides were settled during the Mesolithic era around 6500 BC or earlier, after the climatic conditions improved enough to sustain human settlement. Occupation at a site on Rùm is dated to 8590 ±95 uncorrected radiocarbon years BP, which is amongst the oldest evidence of occupation in Scotland. There are many examples of structures from the Neolithic period, the finest example being the standing stones at Callanish, dating to the 3rd millennium BC. Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age settlement on South Uist is the only site in the UK where prehistoric mummies have been found.
In 55 BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that there was an island called Hyperborea (which means "beyond the North Wind"), where a round temple stood from which the moon appeared only a little distance above the earth every 19 years. This may have been a reference to the stone circle at Callanish.
A traveller called Demetrius of Tarsus related to Plutarch the tale of an expedition to the west coast of Scotland in or shortly before 83 AD. He stated it was a gloomy journey amongst uninhabited islands, but he had visited one which was the retreat of holy men. He mentioned neither the druids nor the name of the island.
The first written records of native life begin in the 6th century AD, when the founding of the kingdom of Dál Riata took place. This encompassed roughly what is now Argyll and Bute and Lochaber in Scotland and County Antrim in Ireland. The figure of Columba looms large in any history of Dál Riata, and his founding of a monastery on Iona ensured that the kingdom would be of great importance in the spread of Christianity in northern Britain. However, Iona was far from unique. Lismore in the territory of the Cenél Loairn, was sufficiently important for the death of its abbots to be recorded with some frequency and many smaller sites, such as on Eigg, Hinba, and Tiree, are known from the annals.
North of Dál Riata, the Inner and Outer Hebrides were nominally under Pictish control, although the historical record is sparse. Hunter (2000) states that in relation to King Bridei I of the Picts in the sixth century: "As for Shetland, Orkney, Skye and the Western Isles, their inhabitants, most of whom appear to have been Pictish in culture and speech at this time, are likely to have regarded Bridei as a fairly distant presence.”
Viking raids began on Scottish shores towards the end of the 8th century, and the Hebrides came under Norse control and settlement during the ensuing decades, especially following the success of Harald Fairhair at the Battle of Hafrsfjord in 872. In the Western Isles Ketill Flatnose may have been the dominant figure of the mid 9th century, by which time he had amassed a substantial island realm and made a variety of alliances with other Norse leaders. These princelings nominally owed allegiance to the Norwegian crown, although in practice the latter's control was fairly limited. Norse control of the Hebrides was formalised in 1098 when Edgar of Scotland formally signed the islands over to Magnus III of Norway. The Scottish acceptance of Magnus III as King of the Isles came after the Norwegian king had conquered Orkney, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man in a swift campaign earlier the same year, directed against the local Norwegian leaders of the various island petty kingdoms. By capturing the islands Magnus imposed a more direct royal control, although at a price. His skald Bjorn Cripplehand recorded that in Lewis "fire played high in the heaven" as "flame spouted from the houses" and that in the Uists "the king dyed his sword red in blood".
The Hebrides were now part of the Kingdom of the Isles, whose rulers were themselves vassals of the Kings of Norway. This situation lasted until the partitioning of the Western Isles in 1156, at which time the Outer Hebrides remained under Norwegian control while the Inner Hebrides broke out under Somerled, the Norse-Gael kinsman of the Manx royal house.
Following the ill-fated 1263 expedition of Haakon IV of Norway, the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man were yielded to the Kingdom of Scotland as a result of the 1266 Treaty of Perth. Although their contribution to the islands can still be found in personal and place names, the archaeological record of the Norse period is very limited. The best known find is the Lewis chessmen, which date from the mid 12th century.
As the Norse era drew to a close, the Norse-speaking princes were gradually replaced by Gaelic-speaking clan chiefs including the MacLeods of Lewis and Harris, Clan Donald and MacNeil of Barra. This transition did little to relieve the islands of internecine strife although by the early 14th century the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, based on Islay, were in theory these chiefs' feudal superiors and managed to exert some control.
The Lords of the Isles ruled the Inner Hebrides as well as part of the Western Highlands as subjects of the King of Scots until John MacDonald, fourth Lord of the Isles, squandered the family's powerful position. A rebellion by his nephew, Alexander of Lochalsh provoked an exasperated James IV to forfeit the family's lands in 1493.
In 1598, King James VI authorised some "Gentleman Adventurers" from Fife to civilise the "most barbarous Isle of Lewis". Initially successful, the colonists were driven out by local forces commanded by Murdoch and Neil MacLeod, who based their forces on Bearasaigh in Loch Ròg. The colonists tried again in 1605 with the same result, but a third attempt in 1607 was more successful and in due course Stornoway became a Burgh of Barony. By this time, Lewis was held by the Mackenzies of Kintail (later the Earls of Seaforth), who pursued a more enlightened approach, investing in fishing in particular. The Seaforths' royalist inclinations led to Lewis becoming garrisoned during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by Cromwell's troops, who destroyed the old castle in Stornoway.
With the implementation of the Treaty of Union in 1707, the Hebrides became part of the new Kingdom of Great Britain, but the clans' loyalties to a distant monarch were not strong. A considerable number of islesmen "came out" in support of the Jacobite Earl of Mar in the 1715 and again in the 1745 rising including Macleod of Dunvegan and MacLea of Lismore. The aftermath of the decisive Battle of Culloden, which effectively ended Jacobite hopes of a Stuart restoration, was widely felt. The British government's strategy was to estrange the clan chiefs from their kinsmen and turn their descendants into English-speaking landlords whose main concern was the revenues their estates brought rather than the welfare of those who lived on them. This may have brought peace to the islands, but in the following century it came at a terrible price. In the wake of the rebellion, the clan system was broken up and islands of the Hebrides became a series of landed estates.
The early 19th century was a time of improvement and population growth. Roads and quays were built; the slate industry became a significant employer on Easdale and surrounding islands; and the construction of the Crinan and Caledonian canals and other engineering works such as Clachan Bridge improved transport and access. However, in the mid-19th century, the inhabitants of many parts of the Hebrides were devastated by the Clearances, which destroyed communities throughout the Highlands and Islands as the human populations were evicted and replaced with sheep farms. The position was exacerbated by the failure of the islands' kelp industry that thrived from the 18th century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and large scale emigration became endemic.
As Iain Mac Fhearchair, a Gaelic poet from South Uist, wrote for his countrymen who were obliged to leave the Hebrides in the late 18th century, emigration was the only alternative to "sinking into slavery" as the Gaels had been unfairly dispossessed by rapacious landlords. In the 1880s, the "Battle of the Braes" involved a demonstration against unfair land regulation and eviction, stimulating the calling of the Napier Commission. Disturbances continued until the passing of the 1886 Crofters' Act.
The residents of the Hebrides have spoken a variety of different languages during the long period of human occupation.
It is assumed that Pictish must once have predominated in the northern Inner Hebrides and Outer Hebrides. The Scottish Gaelic language arrived from Ireland due to the growing influence of the kingdom of Dál Riata from the 6th century AD onwards, and became the dominant language of the southern Hebrides at that time. For a few centuries, the military might of the Gall-Ghàidheil meant that Old Norse was prevalent in the Hebrides. North of Ardnamurchan, the place names that existed prior to the 9th century have been all but obliterated. The Old Norse name for the Hebrides during the Viking occupation was Suðreyjar, which means "Southern Isles"; in contrast to the Norðreyjar, or "Northern Isles" of Orkney and Shetland.
South of Ardnamurchan, Gaelic place names are more common, and after the 13th century, Gaelic became the main language of the entire Hebridean archipelago. Due to Scots and English being favoured in government and the educational system, the Hebrides have been in a state of diglossia since at least the 17th century. The Highland Clearances of the 19th century accelerated the language shift away from Scottish Gaelic, as did increased migration and the continuing lower status of Gaelic speakers. Nevertheless, as late as the end of the 19th century, there were significant populations of monolingual Gaelic speakers, and the Hebrides still contain the highest percentages of Gaelic speakers in Scotland. This is especially true of the Outer Hebrides, where a slim majority speak the language. The Scottish Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, is based on Skye and Islay.
Ironically, given the status of the Western Isles as the last Gaelic-speaking stronghold in Scotland, the Gaelic language name for the islands – Innse Gall – means "isles of the foreigners"; from the time when they were under Norse colonisation.
For those who remained, new economic opportunities emerged through the export of cattle, commercial fishing and tourism. Nonetheless, emigration and military service became the choice of many and the archipelago's populations continued to dwindle throughout the late 19th century and for much of the 20th century. Lengthy periods of continuous occupation notwithstanding, many of the smaller islands were abandoned.
There were, however, continuing gradual economic improvements, among the most visible of which was the replacement of the traditional thatched blackhouse with accommodation of a more modern design and with the assistance of Highlands and Islands Enterprise many of the islands' populations have begun to increase after decades of decline. The discovery of substantial deposits of North Sea oil in 1965 and the renewables sector have contributed to a degree of economic stability in recent decades. For example, the Arnish yard has had a chequered history but has been a significant employer in both the oil and renewables industries.
The widespread immigration of mainlanders, particularly non-Gaelic speakers, has been a subject of controversy.
Agriculture practised by crofters remained popular in the 21st century in the Hebrides; crofters own a small property but often share a large common grazing area. Various types of funding are available to crofters to help supplement their incomes, including the "Basic Payment Scheme, the suckler beef support scheme, the upland sheep support scheme and the Less Favoured Area support scheme". One reliable source discussed the Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme (CAGS) in March 2020:
the scheme "pays up to £25,000 per claim in any two-year period, covering 80% of investment costs for those who are under 41 and have had their croft less than five years. Older, more established crofters can get 60% grants".
Many contemporary Gaelic musicians have roots in the Hebrides, including Julie Fowlis (North Uist), Catherine-Ann MacPhee (Barra), Kathleen MacInnes (South Uist), and Ishbel MacAskill (Lewis). All of these singers have repertoire based on the Hebridean tradition, such as puirt à beul and òrain luaidh (waulking songs). This tradition includes many songs composed by little-known or anonymous poets before 1800, such as "Fear a' bhàta", "Ailein duinn" and "Alasdair mhic Cholla Ghasda". Several of Runrig's songs are inspired by the archipelago; Calum and Ruaraidh Dòmhnallach were raised on North Uist and Donnie Munro on Skye.
The Gaelic poet Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair spent much of his life in the Hebrides and often referred to them in his poetry, including in An Airce and Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill. The best known Gaelic poet of her era, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Mary MacPherson, 1821–98), embodied the spirit of the land agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. This, and her powerful evocation of the Hebrides—she was from Skye—has made her among the most enduring Gaelic poets. Allan MacDonald (1859–1905), who spent his adult life on Eriskay and South Uist, composed hymns and verse in honour of the Blessed Virgin, the Christ Child, and the Eucharist. In his secular poetry, MacDonald praised the beauty of Eriskay and its people. In his verse drama, Parlamaid nan Cailleach (The Old Wives' Parliament), he lampooned the gossiping of his female parishioners and local marriage customs.
In the 20th century, Murdo Macfarlane of Lewis wrote Cànan nan Gàidheal, a well-known poem about the Gaelic revival in the Outer Hebrides. Sorley MacLean, the most respected 20th-century Gaelic writer, was born and raised on Raasay, where he set his best known poem, Hallaig, about the devastating effect of the Highland Clearances. Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, raised on South Uist and described by MacLean as "one of the few really significant living poets in Scotland, writing in any language" (West Highland Free Press, October 1992) wrote the Scottish Gaelic-language novel An Oidhche Mus do Sheòl Sinn which was voted in the Top Ten of the 100 Best-Ever Books from Scotland.
Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is set on the Isle of Skye, part of the Inner Hebrides.
In some respects the Hebrides lack biodiversity in comparison to mainland Britain; for example, there are only half as many mammalian species. However, these islands provide breeding grounds for many important seabird species including the world's largest colony of northern gannets. Avian life includes the corncrake, red-throated diver, rock dove, kittiwake, tystie, Atlantic puffin, goldeneye, golden eagle and white-tailed sea eagle. The latter was re-introduced to Rùm in 1975 and has successfully spread to various neighbouring islands, including Mull. There is a small population of red-billed chough concentrated on the islands of Islay and Colonsay.
Red deer are common on the hills and the grey seal and common seal are present around the coasts of Scotland. Colonies of seals are found on Oronsay and the Treshnish Isles. The rich freshwater streams contain brown trout, Atlantic salmon and water shrew. Offshore, minke whales, orcas, basking sharks, porpoises and dolphins are among the sealife that can be seen.
Heather moor containing ling, bell heather, cross-leaved heath, bog myrtle and fescues is abundant and there is a diversity of Arctic and alpine plants including Alpine pearlwort and mossy cyphal.
Loch Druidibeg on South Uist is a national nature reserve owned and managed by Scottish Natural Heritage. The reserve covers 1,677 hectares across the whole range of local habitats. Over 200 species of flowering plants have been recorded on the reserve, some of which are nationally scarce. South Uist is considered the best place in the UK for the aquatic plant slender naiad, which is a European Protected Species.
Hedgehogs are not native to the Outer Hebrides—they were introduced in the 1970s to reduce garden pests—and their spread poses a threat to the eggs of ground nesting wading birds. In 2003, Scottish Natural Heritage undertook culls of hedgehogs in the area although these were halted in 2007 due to protests. Trapped animals were relocated to the mainland.
57°00′N 07°00′W / 57.000°N 7.000°W / 57.000; -7.000 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Hebrides (/ˈhɛbrɪdiːz/ HEB-rid-eez; Scottish Gaelic: Innse Gall, pronounced [ˈĩːʃə ˈkaul̪ˠ]; Old Norse: Suðreyjar, lit. 'Southern isles') are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner and Outer Hebrides.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "These islands have a long history of occupation (dating back to the Mesolithic period), and the culture of the inhabitants has been successively influenced by the cultures of Celtic-speaking, Norse-speaking, and English-speaking peoples. This diversity is reflected in the various names given to the islands, which are derived from the different languages that have been spoken there at various points in their history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Hebrides are where much of Scottish Gaelic literature and Gaelic music has historically originated. Today, the economy of the islands is dependent on crofting, fishing, tourism, the oil industry, and renewable energy. The Hebrides have less biodiversity than mainland Scotland, but a significant number of seals and seabirds.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The islands have a combined area of 7,285 km (2,813 sq mi), and, as of 2011, a combined population of around 45,000.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hebrides have a diverse geology, ranging in age from Precambrian strata that are amongst the oldest rocks in Europe, to Paleogene igneous intrusions. Raised shore platforms in the Hebrides have been identified as strandflats, possibly formed during the Pliocene period and later modified by the Quaternary glaciations.",
"title": "Geology, geography and climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Hebrides can be divided into two main groups, separated from one another by the Minch to the north and the Sea of the Hebrides to the south. The Inner Hebrides lie closer to mainland Scotland and include Islay, Jura, Skye, Mull, Raasay, Staffa and the Small Isles. There are 36 inhabited islands in this group. The Outer Hebrides form a chain of more than 100 islands and small skerries located about 70 km (45 mi) west of mainland Scotland. Among them, 15 are inhabited. The main inhabited islands include Lewis and Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra.",
"title": "Geology, geography and climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A complication is that there are various descriptions of the scope of the Hebrides. The Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland describes the Inner Hebrides as lying \"east of the Minch\". This definition would encompass all offshore islands, including those that lie in the sea lochs, such as Eilean Bàn and Eilean Donan, which might not ordinarily be described as \"Hebridean\". However, no formal definition exists.",
"title": "Geology, geography and climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the past, the Outer Hebrides were often referred to as the Long Isle (Scottish Gaelic: An t-Eilean Fada). Today, they are also sometimes known as the Western Isles, although this phrase can also be used to refer to the Hebrides in general.",
"title": "Geology, geography and climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Hebrides have a cool, temperate climate that is remarkably mild and steady for such a northerly latitude, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. In the Outer Hebrides, the average temperature is 6 °C (44 °F) in January and 14 °C (57 °F) in the summer. The average annual rainfall in Lewis is 1,100 mm (43 in), and there are between 1,100 and 1,200 hours of sunshine per annum (13%). The summer days are relatively long, and May through August is the driest period.",
"title": "Geology, geography and climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The earliest surviving written references to the islands were made circa 77 AD by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History: He states that there are 30 Hebudes, and makes a separate reference to Dumna, which Watson (1926) concluded refers unequivocally to the Outer Hebrides. About 80 years after Pliny the Elder, in 140–150 AD, Ptolemy (drawing on accounts of the naval expeditions of Agricola) writes that there are five Ebudes (possibly meaning the Inner Hebrides) and Dumna. Later texts in classical Latin, by writers such as Solinus, use the forms Hebudes and Hæbudes.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The name Ebudes (used by Ptolemy) may be pre-Celtic. Ptolemy calls Islay “Epidion”, and the use of the letter \"p\" suggests a Brythonic or Pictish tribal name, Epidii, because the root is not Gaelic. Woolf (2012) has suggested that Ebudes may be \"an Irish attempt to reproduce the word Epidii phonetically, rather than by translating it\", and that the tribe's name may come from the root epos, meaning \"horse\". Watson (1926) also notes a possible relationship between Ebudes, and the ancient Irish Ulaid tribal name Ibdaig, and also the personal name of a king Iubdán (recorded in the Silva Gadelica).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The names of other individual islands reflect their complex linguistic history. The majority are Norse or Gaelic, but the roots of several other names for Hebrides islands may have a pre-Celtic origin. Adomnán, a 7th-century abbot of Iona, records Colonsay as Colosus and Tiree as Ethica, and both of these may be pre-Celtic names. The etymology of Skye is complex and may also include a pre-Celtic root. Lewis is Ljoðhús in Old Norse. Various suggestions have been made as to possible meanings of the name in Norse (for example, \"song house\"), but the name is not of Gaelic origin, and the Norse provenance is questionable.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The earliest comprehensive written list of Hebridean island names was compiled by Donald Monro in 1549. This list also provides the earliest written reference to the names of some of the islands.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The derivations of all the inhabited islands of the Hebrides and some of the larger uninhabited ones are listed below.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Lewis and Harris is the largest island in Scotland and the third largest of the British Isles, after Great Britain and Ireland. It incorporates Lewis in the north and Harris in the south, both of which are frequently referred to as individual islands, although they are joined by a land border. The island does not have a single common name in either English or Gaelic and is referred to as \"Lewis and Harris\", \"Lewis with Harris\", \"Harris with Lewis\" etc. For this reason it is treated as two separate islands below. The derivation of Lewis may be pre-Celtic (see above) and the origin of Harris is no less problematic. In the Ravenna Cosmography, Erimon may refer to Harris (or possibly the Outer Hebrides as a whole). This word may derive from the Ancient Greek: ἐρῆμος (erimos \"desert\". The origin of Uist (Old Norse: Ívist) is similarly unclear.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "There are various examples of earlier names for Inner Hebridean islands that were Gaelic, but these names have since been completely replaced. For example, Adomnán records Sainea, Elena, Ommon and Oideacha in the Inner Hebrides. These names presumably passed out of usage in the Norse era, and the locations of the islands they refer to are not clear. As an example of the complexity: Rona may originally have had a Celtic name, then later a similar-sounding Norse name, and then still later a name that was essentially Gaelic again, but with a Norse \"øy\" or \"ey\" ending. (See Rona, below.)",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The names of uninhabited islands follow the same general patterns as the inhabited islands. (See the list, below, of the ten largest islands in the Hebrides and their outliers.)",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The etymology of the name “St Kilda”, a small archipelago west of the Outer Hebrides, and the name of its main island, “Hirta,” is very complex. No saint is known by the name of Kilda, so various other theories have been proposed for the word's origin, which dates from the late 16th century. Haswell-Smith (2004) notes that the full name \"St Kilda\" first appears on a Dutch map dated 1666, and that it may derive from the Norse phrase sunt kelda (\"sweet wellwater\") or from a mistaken Dutch assumption that the spring Tobar Childa was dedicated to a saint. (Tobar Childa is a tautological placename, consisting of the Gaelic and Norse words for well, i.e., \"well well\"). Similarly unclear is the origin of the Gaelic for \"Hirta\", Hiort, Hirt, or Irt a name for the island that long pre-dates the name \"St Kilda\". Watson (1926) suggests that it may derive from the Old Irish word hirt (\"death\"), possibly a reference to the often lethally dangerous surrounding sea. Maclean (1977) notes that an Icelandic saga about an early 13th-century voyage to Ireland refers to “the islands of Hirtir”, which means \"stags\" in Norse, and suggests that the outline of the island of Hirta resembles the shape of a stag, speculating that therefore the name “Hirta” may be a reference to the island's shape.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The etymology of the names of small islands may be no less complex and elusive. In relation to Dubh Artach, Robert Louis Stevenson believed that \"black and dismal\" was one translation of the name, noting that \"as usual, in Gaelic, it is not the only one.\"",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Hebrides were settled during the Mesolithic era around 6500 BC or earlier, after the climatic conditions improved enough to sustain human settlement. Occupation at a site on Rùm is dated to 8590 ±95 uncorrected radiocarbon years BP, which is amongst the oldest evidence of occupation in Scotland. There are many examples of structures from the Neolithic period, the finest example being the standing stones at Callanish, dating to the 3rd millennium BC. Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age settlement on South Uist is the only site in the UK where prehistoric mummies have been found.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 55 BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that there was an island called Hyperborea (which means \"beyond the North Wind\"), where a round temple stood from which the moon appeared only a little distance above the earth every 19 years. This may have been a reference to the stone circle at Callanish.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A traveller called Demetrius of Tarsus related to Plutarch the tale of an expedition to the west coast of Scotland in or shortly before 83 AD. He stated it was a gloomy journey amongst uninhabited islands, but he had visited one which was the retreat of holy men. He mentioned neither the druids nor the name of the island.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The first written records of native life begin in the 6th century AD, when the founding of the kingdom of Dál Riata took place. This encompassed roughly what is now Argyll and Bute and Lochaber in Scotland and County Antrim in Ireland. The figure of Columba looms large in any history of Dál Riata, and his founding of a monastery on Iona ensured that the kingdom would be of great importance in the spread of Christianity in northern Britain. However, Iona was far from unique. Lismore in the territory of the Cenél Loairn, was sufficiently important for the death of its abbots to be recorded with some frequency and many smaller sites, such as on Eigg, Hinba, and Tiree, are known from the annals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "North of Dál Riata, the Inner and Outer Hebrides were nominally under Pictish control, although the historical record is sparse. Hunter (2000) states that in relation to King Bridei I of the Picts in the sixth century: \"As for Shetland, Orkney, Skye and the Western Isles, their inhabitants, most of whom appear to have been Pictish in culture and speech at this time, are likely to have regarded Bridei as a fairly distant presence.”",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Viking raids began on Scottish shores towards the end of the 8th century, and the Hebrides came under Norse control and settlement during the ensuing decades, especially following the success of Harald Fairhair at the Battle of Hafrsfjord in 872. In the Western Isles Ketill Flatnose may have been the dominant figure of the mid 9th century, by which time he had amassed a substantial island realm and made a variety of alliances with other Norse leaders. These princelings nominally owed allegiance to the Norwegian crown, although in practice the latter's control was fairly limited. Norse control of the Hebrides was formalised in 1098 when Edgar of Scotland formally signed the islands over to Magnus III of Norway. The Scottish acceptance of Magnus III as King of the Isles came after the Norwegian king had conquered Orkney, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man in a swift campaign earlier the same year, directed against the local Norwegian leaders of the various island petty kingdoms. By capturing the islands Magnus imposed a more direct royal control, although at a price. His skald Bjorn Cripplehand recorded that in Lewis \"fire played high in the heaven\" as \"flame spouted from the houses\" and that in the Uists \"the king dyed his sword red in blood\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Hebrides were now part of the Kingdom of the Isles, whose rulers were themselves vassals of the Kings of Norway. This situation lasted until the partitioning of the Western Isles in 1156, at which time the Outer Hebrides remained under Norwegian control while the Inner Hebrides broke out under Somerled, the Norse-Gael kinsman of the Manx royal house.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Following the ill-fated 1263 expedition of Haakon IV of Norway, the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man were yielded to the Kingdom of Scotland as a result of the 1266 Treaty of Perth. Although their contribution to the islands can still be found in personal and place names, the archaeological record of the Norse period is very limited. The best known find is the Lewis chessmen, which date from the mid 12th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "As the Norse era drew to a close, the Norse-speaking princes were gradually replaced by Gaelic-speaking clan chiefs including the MacLeods of Lewis and Harris, Clan Donald and MacNeil of Barra. This transition did little to relieve the islands of internecine strife although by the early 14th century the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, based on Islay, were in theory these chiefs' feudal superiors and managed to exert some control.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Lords of the Isles ruled the Inner Hebrides as well as part of the Western Highlands as subjects of the King of Scots until John MacDonald, fourth Lord of the Isles, squandered the family's powerful position. A rebellion by his nephew, Alexander of Lochalsh provoked an exasperated James IV to forfeit the family's lands in 1493.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1598, King James VI authorised some \"Gentleman Adventurers\" from Fife to civilise the \"most barbarous Isle of Lewis\". Initially successful, the colonists were driven out by local forces commanded by Murdoch and Neil MacLeod, who based their forces on Bearasaigh in Loch Ròg. The colonists tried again in 1605 with the same result, but a third attempt in 1607 was more successful and in due course Stornoway became a Burgh of Barony. By this time, Lewis was held by the Mackenzies of Kintail (later the Earls of Seaforth), who pursued a more enlightened approach, investing in fishing in particular. The Seaforths' royalist inclinations led to Lewis becoming garrisoned during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by Cromwell's troops, who destroyed the old castle in Stornoway.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "With the implementation of the Treaty of Union in 1707, the Hebrides became part of the new Kingdom of Great Britain, but the clans' loyalties to a distant monarch were not strong. A considerable number of islesmen \"came out\" in support of the Jacobite Earl of Mar in the 1715 and again in the 1745 rising including Macleod of Dunvegan and MacLea of Lismore. The aftermath of the decisive Battle of Culloden, which effectively ended Jacobite hopes of a Stuart restoration, was widely felt. The British government's strategy was to estrange the clan chiefs from their kinsmen and turn their descendants into English-speaking landlords whose main concern was the revenues their estates brought rather than the welfare of those who lived on them. This may have brought peace to the islands, but in the following century it came at a terrible price. In the wake of the rebellion, the clan system was broken up and islands of the Hebrides became a series of landed estates.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The early 19th century was a time of improvement and population growth. Roads and quays were built; the slate industry became a significant employer on Easdale and surrounding islands; and the construction of the Crinan and Caledonian canals and other engineering works such as Clachan Bridge improved transport and access. However, in the mid-19th century, the inhabitants of many parts of the Hebrides were devastated by the Clearances, which destroyed communities throughout the Highlands and Islands as the human populations were evicted and replaced with sheep farms. The position was exacerbated by the failure of the islands' kelp industry that thrived from the 18th century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and large scale emigration became endemic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "As Iain Mac Fhearchair, a Gaelic poet from South Uist, wrote for his countrymen who were obliged to leave the Hebrides in the late 18th century, emigration was the only alternative to \"sinking into slavery\" as the Gaels had been unfairly dispossessed by rapacious landlords. In the 1880s, the \"Battle of the Braes\" involved a demonstration against unfair land regulation and eviction, stimulating the calling of the Napier Commission. Disturbances continued until the passing of the 1886 Crofters' Act.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The residents of the Hebrides have spoken a variety of different languages during the long period of human occupation.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "It is assumed that Pictish must once have predominated in the northern Inner Hebrides and Outer Hebrides. The Scottish Gaelic language arrived from Ireland due to the growing influence of the kingdom of Dál Riata from the 6th century AD onwards, and became the dominant language of the southern Hebrides at that time. For a few centuries, the military might of the Gall-Ghàidheil meant that Old Norse was prevalent in the Hebrides. North of Ardnamurchan, the place names that existed prior to the 9th century have been all but obliterated. The Old Norse name for the Hebrides during the Viking occupation was Suðreyjar, which means \"Southern Isles\"; in contrast to the Norðreyjar, or \"Northern Isles\" of Orkney and Shetland.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "South of Ardnamurchan, Gaelic place names are more common, and after the 13th century, Gaelic became the main language of the entire Hebridean archipelago. Due to Scots and English being favoured in government and the educational system, the Hebrides have been in a state of diglossia since at least the 17th century. The Highland Clearances of the 19th century accelerated the language shift away from Scottish Gaelic, as did increased migration and the continuing lower status of Gaelic speakers. Nevertheless, as late as the end of the 19th century, there were significant populations of monolingual Gaelic speakers, and the Hebrides still contain the highest percentages of Gaelic speakers in Scotland. This is especially true of the Outer Hebrides, where a slim majority speak the language. The Scottish Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, is based on Skye and Islay.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Ironically, given the status of the Western Isles as the last Gaelic-speaking stronghold in Scotland, the Gaelic language name for the islands – Innse Gall – means \"isles of the foreigners\"; from the time when they were under Norse colonisation.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "For those who remained, new economic opportunities emerged through the export of cattle, commercial fishing and tourism. Nonetheless, emigration and military service became the choice of many and the archipelago's populations continued to dwindle throughout the late 19th century and for much of the 20th century. Lengthy periods of continuous occupation notwithstanding, many of the smaller islands were abandoned.",
"title": "Modern economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There were, however, continuing gradual economic improvements, among the most visible of which was the replacement of the traditional thatched blackhouse with accommodation of a more modern design and with the assistance of Highlands and Islands Enterprise many of the islands' populations have begun to increase after decades of decline. The discovery of substantial deposits of North Sea oil in 1965 and the renewables sector have contributed to a degree of economic stability in recent decades. For example, the Arnish yard has had a chequered history but has been a significant employer in both the oil and renewables industries.",
"title": "Modern economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The widespread immigration of mainlanders, particularly non-Gaelic speakers, has been a subject of controversy.",
"title": "Modern economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Agriculture practised by crofters remained popular in the 21st century in the Hebrides; crofters own a small property but often share a large common grazing area. Various types of funding are available to crofters to help supplement their incomes, including the \"Basic Payment Scheme, the suckler beef support scheme, the upland sheep support scheme and the Less Favoured Area support scheme\". One reliable source discussed the Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme (CAGS) in March 2020:",
"title": "Modern economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "the scheme \"pays up to £25,000 per claim in any two-year period, covering 80% of investment costs for those who are under 41 and have had their croft less than five years. Older, more established crofters can get 60% grants\".",
"title": "Modern economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Many contemporary Gaelic musicians have roots in the Hebrides, including Julie Fowlis (North Uist), Catherine-Ann MacPhee (Barra), Kathleen MacInnes (South Uist), and Ishbel MacAskill (Lewis). All of these singers have repertoire based on the Hebridean tradition, such as puirt à beul and òrain luaidh (waulking songs). This tradition includes many songs composed by little-known or anonymous poets before 1800, such as \"Fear a' bhàta\", \"Ailein duinn\" and \"Alasdair mhic Cholla Ghasda\". Several of Runrig's songs are inspired by the archipelago; Calum and Ruaraidh Dòmhnallach were raised on North Uist and Donnie Munro on Skye.",
"title": "Media and the arts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Gaelic poet Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair spent much of his life in the Hebrides and often referred to them in his poetry, including in An Airce and Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill. The best known Gaelic poet of her era, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Mary MacPherson, 1821–98), embodied the spirit of the land agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. This, and her powerful evocation of the Hebrides—she was from Skye—has made her among the most enduring Gaelic poets. Allan MacDonald (1859–1905), who spent his adult life on Eriskay and South Uist, composed hymns and verse in honour of the Blessed Virgin, the Christ Child, and the Eucharist. In his secular poetry, MacDonald praised the beauty of Eriskay and its people. In his verse drama, Parlamaid nan Cailleach (The Old Wives' Parliament), he lampooned the gossiping of his female parishioners and local marriage customs.",
"title": "Media and the arts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the 20th century, Murdo Macfarlane of Lewis wrote Cànan nan Gàidheal, a well-known poem about the Gaelic revival in the Outer Hebrides. Sorley MacLean, the most respected 20th-century Gaelic writer, was born and raised on Raasay, where he set his best known poem, Hallaig, about the devastating effect of the Highland Clearances. Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, raised on South Uist and described by MacLean as \"one of the few really significant living poets in Scotland, writing in any language\" (West Highland Free Press, October 1992) wrote the Scottish Gaelic-language novel An Oidhche Mus do Sheòl Sinn which was voted in the Top Ten of the 100 Best-Ever Books from Scotland.",
"title": "Media and the arts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is set on the Isle of Skye, part of the Inner Hebrides.",
"title": "Media and the arts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In some respects the Hebrides lack biodiversity in comparison to mainland Britain; for example, there are only half as many mammalian species. However, these islands provide breeding grounds for many important seabird species including the world's largest colony of northern gannets. Avian life includes the corncrake, red-throated diver, rock dove, kittiwake, tystie, Atlantic puffin, goldeneye, golden eagle and white-tailed sea eagle. The latter was re-introduced to Rùm in 1975 and has successfully spread to various neighbouring islands, including Mull. There is a small population of red-billed chough concentrated on the islands of Islay and Colonsay.",
"title": "Natural history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Red deer are common on the hills and the grey seal and common seal are present around the coasts of Scotland. Colonies of seals are found on Oronsay and the Treshnish Isles. The rich freshwater streams contain brown trout, Atlantic salmon and water shrew. Offshore, minke whales, orcas, basking sharks, porpoises and dolphins are among the sealife that can be seen.",
"title": "Natural history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Heather moor containing ling, bell heather, cross-leaved heath, bog myrtle and fescues is abundant and there is a diversity of Arctic and alpine plants including Alpine pearlwort and mossy cyphal.",
"title": "Natural history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Loch Druidibeg on South Uist is a national nature reserve owned and managed by Scottish Natural Heritage. The reserve covers 1,677 hectares across the whole range of local habitats. Over 200 species of flowering plants have been recorded on the reserve, some of which are nationally scarce. South Uist is considered the best place in the UK for the aquatic plant slender naiad, which is a European Protected Species.",
"title": "Natural history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Hedgehogs are not native to the Outer Hebrides—they were introduced in the 1970s to reduce garden pests—and their spread poses a threat to the eggs of ground nesting wading birds. In 2003, Scottish Natural Heritage undertook culls of hedgehogs in the area although these were halted in 2007 due to protests. Trapped animals were relocated to the mainland.",
"title": "Natural history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "57°00′N 07°00′W / 57.000°N 7.000°W / 57.000; -7.000",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| The Hebrides are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner and Outer Hebrides. These islands have a long history of occupation, and the culture of the inhabitants has been successively influenced by the cultures of Celtic-speaking, Norse-speaking, and English-speaking peoples. This diversity is reflected in the various names given to the islands, which are derived from the different languages that have been spoken there at various points in their history. The Hebrides are where much of Scottish Gaelic literature and Gaelic music has historically originated. Today, the economy of the islands is dependent on crofting, fishing, tourism, the oil industry, and renewable energy. The Hebrides have less biodiversity than mainland Scotland, but a significant number of seals and seabirds. The islands have a combined area of 7,285 km2 (2,813 sq mi), and, as of 2011, a combined population of around 45,000. | 2001-11-17T23:55:52Z | 2023-12-27T20:07:11Z | [
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14,158 | HMS Dreadnought | Several ships and one submarine of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Dreadnought in the expectation that they would "dread nought", i.e. "fear nothing". The 1906 ship, which revolutionized battleship design, became one of the Royal Navy's most famous vessels; battleships built after her were referred to as 'dreadnoughts', and earlier battleships became known as pre-dreadnoughts. | [
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"text": "Several ships and one submarine of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Dreadnought in the expectation that they would \"dread nought\", i.e. \"fear nothing\". The 1906 ship, which revolutionized battleship design, became one of the Royal Navy's most famous vessels; battleships built after her were referred to as 'dreadnoughts', and earlier battleships became known as pre-dreadnoughts.",
"title": ""
}
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| Several ships and one submarine of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Dreadnought in the expectation that they would "dread nought", i.e. "fear nothing". The 1906 ship, which revolutionized battleship design, became one of the Royal Navy's most famous vessels; battleships built after her were referred to as 'dreadnoughts', and earlier battleships became known as pre-dreadnoughts. English ship Dreadnought (1553) was a 40-gun ship built in 1553.
English ship Dreadnought (1573) was a 41-gun ship launched in 1573, rebuilt in 1592 and 1614, then broken up in 1648.
HMS Dreadnought (1654) was a 52-gun third-rate ship of the line launched in 1654 as the Torrington for the Commonwealth of England Navy, renamed Dreadnought at the Restoration in 1660, and lost in 1690.
HMS Dreadnought (1691) was a 60-gun fourth-rate ship of the line launched in 1691, rebuilt in 1706 and broken up 1748.
HMS Dreadnought (1723) was a 60-gun ship of the line built at Portsmouth
HMS Dreadnought (1742) was a 60-gun fourth rate launched in 1742 and sold 1784.
HMS Dreadnought (1801) was a 98-gun second rate launched in 1801, converted to a hospital ship in 1827, and broken up 1857.
HMS Dreadnought (1856) was a hospital ship, formerly HMS Caledonia.
HMS Dreadnought (1875) was a battleship launched in 1875 and hulked in 1903, then sold in 1908.
HMS Dreadnought (1906) was a revolutionary battleship, launched in 1906 and sold for breakup in 1921.
HMS Dreadnought (S101) was the UK's first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1960 and decommissioned in 1980.
HMS Dreadnought (Dreadnought-class submarine) will be the first of the UK's new Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines. | 2023-07-22T06:11:15Z | [
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|
14,159 | Hartmann Schedel | Hartmann Schedel (13 February 1440 – 28 November 1514) was a German historian, physician, humanist, and one of the first cartographers to use the printing press. He was born and died in Nuremberg. Matheolus Perusinus served as his tutor.
Schedel is best known for his writing the text for the Nuremberg Chronicle, known as Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel's World Chronicle), published in 1493 in Nuremberg. It was commissioned by Sebald Schreyer (1446–1520) and Sebastian Kammermeister (1446–1503). Maps in the Chronicle were the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries.
With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447, it became feasible to print books and maps for a larger customer basis. Because they had to be handwritten, books had previously been rare and very expensive.
Schedel was also a notable collector of books, art and old master prints. An album he had bound in 1504, which once contained five engravings by Jacopo de' Barbari, provides important evidence for dating de' Barbari's work. | [
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"text": "Hartmann Schedel (13 February 1440 – 28 November 1514) was a German historian, physician, humanist, and one of the first cartographers to use the printing press. He was born and died in Nuremberg. Matheolus Perusinus served as his tutor.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Schedel is best known for his writing the text for the Nuremberg Chronicle, known as Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel's World Chronicle), published in 1493 in Nuremberg. It was commissioned by Sebald Schreyer (1446–1520) and Sebastian Kammermeister (1446–1503). Maps in the Chronicle were the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447, it became feasible to print books and maps for a larger customer basis. Because they had to be handwritten, books had previously been rare and very expensive.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Schedel was also a notable collector of books, art and old master prints. An album he had bound in 1504, which once contained five engravings by Jacopo de' Barbari, provides important evidence for dating de' Barbari's work.",
"title": ""
}
]
| Hartmann Schedel was a German historian, physician, humanist, and one of the first cartographers to use the printing press. He was born and died in Nuremberg. Matheolus Perusinus served as his tutor. Schedel is best known for his writing the text for the Nuremberg Chronicle, known as Schedelsche Weltchronik, published in 1493 in Nuremberg. It was commissioned by Sebald Schreyer (1446–1520) and Sebastian Kammermeister (1446–1503). Maps in the Chronicle were the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries. With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447, it became feasible to print books and maps for a larger customer basis. Because they had to be handwritten, books had previously been rare and very expensive. Schedel was also a notable collector of books, art and old master prints. An album he had bound in 1504, which once contained five engravings by Jacopo de' Barbari, provides important evidence for dating de' Barbari's work. | 2022-11-07T01:54:17Z | [
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|
14,160 | Hexameter | Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi.
In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these rules:
A short syllable (υ) is a syllable with a short vowel and no consonant at the end. A long syllable (–) is a syllable that either has a long vowel, one or more consonants at the end (or a long consonant), or both. Spaces between words are not counted in syllabification, so for instance "cat" is a long syllable in isolation, but "cat attack" would be syllabified as short-short-long: "ca", "ta", "tack" (υ υ –).
Variations of the sequence from line to line, as well as the use of caesura (logical full stops within the line) are essential in avoiding what may otherwise be a monotonous sing-song effect.
Although the rules seem simple, it is hard to use classical hexameter in English, because English is a stress-timed language that condenses vowels and consonants between stressed syllables, while hexameter relies on the regular timing of the phonetic sounds. Languages having the latter properties (i.e., languages that are not stress-timed) include Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian and Hungarian.
While the above classical hexameter has never enjoyed much popularity in English, where the standard metre is iambic pentameter, English poems have frequently been written in iambic hexameter. There are numerous examples from the 16th century and a few from the 17th; the most prominent of these is Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) in couplets of iambic hexameter. An example from Drayton (marking the feet):
In the 17th century the iambic hexameter, also called alexandrine, was used as a substitution in the heroic couplet, and as one of the types of permissible lines in lyrical stanzas and the Pindaric odes of Cowley and Dryden.
Several attempts were made in the 19th century to naturalise the dactylic hexameter to English, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough and others, none of them particularly successful. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote many of his poems in six-foot iambic and sprung rhythm lines. In the 20th century a loose ballad-like six-foot line with a strong medial pause was used by William Butler Yeats. The iambic six-foot line has also been used occasionally, and an accentual six-foot line has been used by translators from the Latin and many poets.
In the late 18th century the hexameter was adapted to the Lithuanian language by Kristijonas Donelaitis. His poem "Metai" (The Seasons) is considered the most successful hexameter text in Lithuanian as yet.
For dactylic hexameter poetry in Hungarian language, see Dactylic hexameter#In Hungarian.
Albert Meyer (1893-1962, Berne, Switzerland, translated verses of Homer's Odyssey into the Swiss dialect of Berne. This dialect uses a natural form of hexameter. See http://www.edimuster.ch/baernduetsch/chaernduetsch.htm | [
{
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"text": "Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a \"foot\" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a \"foot\" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these rules:",
"title": "Classical Hexameter"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A short syllable (υ) is a syllable with a short vowel and no consonant at the end. A long syllable (–) is a syllable that either has a long vowel, one or more consonants at the end (or a long consonant), or both. Spaces between words are not counted in syllabification, so for instance \"cat\" is a long syllable in isolation, but \"cat attack\" would be syllabified as short-short-long: \"ca\", \"ta\", \"tack\" (υ υ –).",
"title": "Classical Hexameter"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Variations of the sequence from line to line, as well as the use of caesura (logical full stops within the line) are essential in avoiding what may otherwise be a monotonous sing-song effect.",
"title": "Classical Hexameter"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Although the rules seem simple, it is hard to use classical hexameter in English, because English is a stress-timed language that condenses vowels and consonants between stressed syllables, while hexameter relies on the regular timing of the phonetic sounds. Languages having the latter properties (i.e., languages that are not stress-timed) include Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian and Hungarian.",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "While the above classical hexameter has never enjoyed much popularity in English, where the standard metre is iambic pentameter, English poems have frequently been written in iambic hexameter. There are numerous examples from the 16th century and a few from the 17th; the most prominent of these is Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) in couplets of iambic hexameter. An example from Drayton (marking the feet):",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the 17th century the iambic hexameter, also called alexandrine, was used as a substitution in the heroic couplet, and as one of the types of permissible lines in lyrical stanzas and the Pindaric odes of Cowley and Dryden.",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Several attempts were made in the 19th century to naturalise the dactylic hexameter to English, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough and others, none of them particularly successful. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote many of his poems in six-foot iambic and sprung rhythm lines. In the 20th century a loose ballad-like six-foot line with a strong medial pause was used by William Butler Yeats. The iambic six-foot line has also been used occasionally, and an accentual six-foot line has been used by translators from the Latin and many poets.",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the late 18th century the hexameter was adapted to the Lithuanian language by Kristijonas Donelaitis. His poem \"Metai\" (The Seasons) is considered the most successful hexameter text in Lithuanian as yet.",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "For dactylic hexameter poetry in Hungarian language, see Dactylic hexameter#In Hungarian.",
"title": "Application"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Albert Meyer (1893-1962, Berne, Switzerland, translated verses of Homer's Odyssey into the Swiss dialect of Berne. This dialect uses a natural form of hexameter. See http://www.edimuster.ch/baernduetsch/chaernduetsch.htm",
"title": "Application"
}
]
| Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi. | 2001-11-11T05:21:45Z | 2023-09-08T13:05:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter |
14,162 | Timeline of Polish history | This is a timeline of Polish history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Poland and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Poland. See also the list of Polish monarchs and list of prime ministers of Poland.
| La Tene Culture || || | [
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"text": "This is a timeline of Polish history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Poland and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Poland. See also the list of Polish monarchs and list of prime ministers of Poland.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "| La Tene Culture || ||",
"title": "Prehistory"
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| This is a timeline of Polish history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Poland and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Poland. See also the list of Polish monarchs and list of prime ministers of Poland. | 2001-11-19T20:25:55Z | 2023-12-12T10:12:54Z | [
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14,168 | Himalia | Himalia may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Himalia may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Himalia may refer to: Himalia (moon), a moon of Jupiter
Himalia group
Himalia (mythology), a nymph from Cyprus in Greek mythology
Himalia Ridge, a ridge on the Ganymede Heights massif on Alexander Island, Antarctica | 2023-05-16T12:25:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalia |
|
14,169 | Heracleidae | The Heracleidae (/hɛrəˈklaɪdiː/; Ancient Greek: Ἡρακλεῖδαι) or Heraclids /ˈhɛrəklɪdz/ were the numerous descendants of Heracles (Hercules), especially applied in a narrower sense to the descendants of Hyllus, the eldest of his four sons by Deianira (Hyllus was also sometimes thought of as Heracles' son by Melite). Other Heracleidae included Macaria, Lamos, Manto, Bianor, Tlepolemus, and Telephus. These Heraclids were a group of Dorian kings who conquered the Peloponnesian kingdoms of Mycenae, Sparta and Argos; according to the literary tradition in Greek mythology, they claimed a right to rule through their ancestor. Since Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier (1830, English translation 1839), I. ch. 3, their rise to dominance has been associated with a "Dorian invasion". Though details of genealogy differ from one ancient author to another, the cultural significance of the mythic theme, that the descendants of Heracles, exiled after his death, returned some generations later to reclaim land that their ancestors had held in Mycenaean Greece, was to assert the primal legitimacy of a traditional ruling clan that traced its origin, thus its legitimacy, to Heracles.
In the historical period, several dynasties claimed descent from Heracles, such as the Agiads and Eurypontids of Sparta, or the Temenids of Macedonia.
Heracles, whom Zeus had originally intended to be ruler of Argos, Lacedaemon and Messenian Pylos, had been supplanted by the cunning of Hera, and his intended possessions had fallen into the hands of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae. After the death of Heracles, his children, after many wanderings, found refuge from Eurystheus at Athens. Eurystheus, on his demand for their surrender being refused, attacked Athens, but was defeated and slain. Hyllus and his brothers then invaded Peloponnesus, but after a year's stay were forced by a pestilence to quit. They withdrew to Thessaly, where Aegimius, the mythical ancestor of the Dorians, whom Heracles had assisted in war against the Lapithae, adopted Hyllus and made over to him a third part of his territory.
After the death of Aegimius, his two sons, Pamphylus and Dymas, voluntarily submitted to Hyllus (who was, according to the Dorian tradition in Herodotus V. 72, really an Achaean), who thus became ruler of the Dorians, the three branches of that race being named after these three heroes. Desiring to reconquer his paternal inheritance, Hyllus consulted the Delphic oracle, which told him to wait for "the third fruit", (or "the third crop") and then enter Peloponnesus by "a narrow passage by sea". Accordingly, after three years, Hyllus marched across the isthmus of Corinth to attack Atreus, the successor of Eurystheus, but was slain in single combat by Echemus, king of Tegea. This second attempt was followed by a third under Cleodaeus and a fourth under Aristomachus, both unsuccessful.
At last, Temenus, Cresphontes and Aristodemus, the sons of Aristomachus, complained to the oracle that its instructions had proved fatal to those who had followed them. They received the answer that by the "third fruit" the "third generation" was meant, and that the "narrow passage" was not the isthmus of Corinth, but the straits of Rhium. They accordingly built a fleet at Naupactus, but before they set sail, Aristodemus was struck by lightning (or shot by Apollo) and the fleet destroyed, because one of the Heracleidae had slain an Acarnanian soothsayer.
The oracle, being again consulted by Temenus, bade him offer an expiatory sacrifice and banish the murderer for ten years, and look out for a man with three eyes to act as guide. On his way back to Naupactus, Temenus fell in with Oxylus, an Aetolian, who had lost one eye, riding on a horse (thus making up the three eyes) and immediately pressed him into his service. According to another account, a mule on which Oxylus rode had lost an eye. The Heracleidae repaired their ships, sailed from Naupactus to Antirrhium, and thence to Rhium in Peloponnesus. A decisive battle was fought with Tisamenus, son of Orestes, the chief ruler in the peninsula, who was defeated and slain. This conquest was traditionally dated eighty years after the Trojan War.
The Heracleidae, who thus became practically masters of Peloponnesus, proceeded to distribute its territory among themselves by lot. Argos fell to Temenus, Lacedaemon to Procles and Eurysthenes, the twin sons of Aristodemus; and Messenia to Cresphontes (tradition maintains that Cresphontes cheated in order to obtain Messenia, which had the best land of all.) The fertile district of Elis had been reserved by agreement for Oxylus. The Heracleidae ruled in Lacedaemon until 221 BCE, but disappeared much earlier in the other countries.
This conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorians, commonly called the "Dorian invasion" or the "Return of the Heraclidae", is represented as the recovery by the descendants of Heracles of the rightful inheritance of their hero ancestor and his sons. The Dorians followed the custom of other Greek tribes in claiming as ancestor for their ruling families one of the legendary heroes, but the traditions must not on that account be regarded as entirely mythical. They represent a joint invasion of Peloponnesus by Aetolians and Dorians, the latter having been driven southward from their original northern home under pressure from the Thessalians. It is noticeable that there is no mention of these Heraclidae or their invasion in Homer or Hesiod. Herodotus (vi. 52) speaks of poets who had celebrated their deeds, but these were limited to events immediately succeeding the death of Heracles.
At Sparta, the Heraclids formed two dynasties ruling jointly: the Agiads and the Eurypontids. Other Spartiates also claimed Heraclid descent, such as Lysander.
At Corinth the Heraclids ruled as the Bacchiadae dynasty before the aristocratic revolution, which brought a Bacchiad aristocracy into power.
A descendant of Heracles, Temenus, was the first king of Argos, who later counted the famous tyrant Pheidon.
At Macedonia, the Heraclids formed the Argead Dynasty, whose name comes from Argos, as one of the Heraclids from this city, Perdiccas I, settled in Macedonia, where he founded his kingdom. By the time of Philip II the family had expanded their reign further, to include under the rule of Macedonia all Upper Macedonian states. Their most celebrated members were Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, under whose leadership the kingdom of Macedonia gradually gained predominance throughout Greece, defeated the Achaemenid Empire and expanded as far as Egypt and India. The mythical founder of the Argead dynasty is King Caranus.
The Greek tragedians amplified the story, probably drawing inspiration from local legends which glorified the services rendered by Athens to the rulers of Peloponnesus.
The Heracleidae feature as the main subjects of Euripides' play, Heracleidae. J. A. Spranger found the political subtext of Heracleidae, never far to seek, so particularly apt in Athens towards the end of the peace of Nicias, in 419 BCE, that he suggested the date as that of the play's first performance.
In the tragedy, Iolaus, Heracles' old comrade and nephew, and Heracles' children, Macaria and her brothers and sisters have hidden from Eurystheus in Athens, ruled by King Demophon; as the first scene makes clear, they expect that the blood relationship of the kings with Heracles and their father's past indebtedness to Theseus will finally provide them sanctuary. As Eurystheus prepares to attack, an oracle tells Demophon that only the sacrifice of a noble woman to Persephone can guarantee an Athenian victory. Macaria volunteers for the sacrifice and a spring is named the Macarian spring in her honor.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Heraclidae". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 308–309. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Heracleidae (/hɛrəˈklaɪdiː/; Ancient Greek: Ἡρακλεῖδαι) or Heraclids /ˈhɛrəklɪdz/ were the numerous descendants of Heracles (Hercules), especially applied in a narrower sense to the descendants of Hyllus, the eldest of his four sons by Deianira (Hyllus was also sometimes thought of as Heracles' son by Melite). Other Heracleidae included Macaria, Lamos, Manto, Bianor, Tlepolemus, and Telephus. These Heraclids were a group of Dorian kings who conquered the Peloponnesian kingdoms of Mycenae, Sparta and Argos; according to the literary tradition in Greek mythology, they claimed a right to rule through their ancestor. Since Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier (1830, English translation 1839), I. ch. 3, their rise to dominance has been associated with a \"Dorian invasion\". Though details of genealogy differ from one ancient author to another, the cultural significance of the mythic theme, that the descendants of Heracles, exiled after his death, returned some generations later to reclaim land that their ancestors had held in Mycenaean Greece, was to assert the primal legitimacy of a traditional ruling clan that traced its origin, thus its legitimacy, to Heracles.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the historical period, several dynasties claimed descent from Heracles, such as the Agiads and Eurypontids of Sparta, or the Temenids of Macedonia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Heracles, whom Zeus had originally intended to be ruler of Argos, Lacedaemon and Messenian Pylos, had been supplanted by the cunning of Hera, and his intended possessions had fallen into the hands of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae. After the death of Heracles, his children, after many wanderings, found refuge from Eurystheus at Athens. Eurystheus, on his demand for their surrender being refused, attacked Athens, but was defeated and slain. Hyllus and his brothers then invaded Peloponnesus, but after a year's stay were forced by a pestilence to quit. They withdrew to Thessaly, where Aegimius, the mythical ancestor of the Dorians, whom Heracles had assisted in war against the Lapithae, adopted Hyllus and made over to him a third part of his territory.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After the death of Aegimius, his two sons, Pamphylus and Dymas, voluntarily submitted to Hyllus (who was, according to the Dorian tradition in Herodotus V. 72, really an Achaean), who thus became ruler of the Dorians, the three branches of that race being named after these three heroes. Desiring to reconquer his paternal inheritance, Hyllus consulted the Delphic oracle, which told him to wait for \"the third fruit\", (or \"the third crop\") and then enter Peloponnesus by \"a narrow passage by sea\". Accordingly, after three years, Hyllus marched across the isthmus of Corinth to attack Atreus, the successor of Eurystheus, but was slain in single combat by Echemus, king of Tegea. This second attempt was followed by a third under Cleodaeus and a fourth under Aristomachus, both unsuccessful.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "At last, Temenus, Cresphontes and Aristodemus, the sons of Aristomachus, complained to the oracle that its instructions had proved fatal to those who had followed them. They received the answer that by the \"third fruit\" the \"third generation\" was meant, and that the \"narrow passage\" was not the isthmus of Corinth, but the straits of Rhium. They accordingly built a fleet at Naupactus, but before they set sail, Aristodemus was struck by lightning (or shot by Apollo) and the fleet destroyed, because one of the Heracleidae had slain an Acarnanian soothsayer.",
"title": "Dorian invasion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The oracle, being again consulted by Temenus, bade him offer an expiatory sacrifice and banish the murderer for ten years, and look out for a man with three eyes to act as guide. On his way back to Naupactus, Temenus fell in with Oxylus, an Aetolian, who had lost one eye, riding on a horse (thus making up the three eyes) and immediately pressed him into his service. According to another account, a mule on which Oxylus rode had lost an eye. The Heracleidae repaired their ships, sailed from Naupactus to Antirrhium, and thence to Rhium in Peloponnesus. A decisive battle was fought with Tisamenus, son of Orestes, the chief ruler in the peninsula, who was defeated and slain. This conquest was traditionally dated eighty years after the Trojan War.",
"title": "Dorian invasion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Heracleidae, who thus became practically masters of Peloponnesus, proceeded to distribute its territory among themselves by lot. Argos fell to Temenus, Lacedaemon to Procles and Eurysthenes, the twin sons of Aristodemus; and Messenia to Cresphontes (tradition maintains that Cresphontes cheated in order to obtain Messenia, which had the best land of all.) The fertile district of Elis had been reserved by agreement for Oxylus. The Heracleidae ruled in Lacedaemon until 221 BCE, but disappeared much earlier in the other countries.",
"title": "Dorian invasion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "This conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorians, commonly called the \"Dorian invasion\" or the \"Return of the Heraclidae\", is represented as the recovery by the descendants of Heracles of the rightful inheritance of their hero ancestor and his sons. The Dorians followed the custom of other Greek tribes in claiming as ancestor for their ruling families one of the legendary heroes, but the traditions must not on that account be regarded as entirely mythical. They represent a joint invasion of Peloponnesus by Aetolians and Dorians, the latter having been driven southward from their original northern home under pressure from the Thessalians. It is noticeable that there is no mention of these Heraclidae or their invasion in Homer or Hesiod. Herodotus (vi. 52) speaks of poets who had celebrated their deeds, but these were limited to events immediately succeeding the death of Heracles.",
"title": "Dorian invasion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At Sparta, the Heraclids formed two dynasties ruling jointly: the Agiads and the Eurypontids. Other Spartiates also claimed Heraclid descent, such as Lysander.",
"title": "List of Heracleidae"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "At Corinth the Heraclids ruled as the Bacchiadae dynasty before the aristocratic revolution, which brought a Bacchiad aristocracy into power.",
"title": "List of Heracleidae"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A descendant of Heracles, Temenus, was the first king of Argos, who later counted the famous tyrant Pheidon.",
"title": "List of Heracleidae"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "At Macedonia, the Heraclids formed the Argead Dynasty, whose name comes from Argos, as one of the Heraclids from this city, Perdiccas I, settled in Macedonia, where he founded his kingdom. By the time of Philip II the family had expanded their reign further, to include under the rule of Macedonia all Upper Macedonian states. Their most celebrated members were Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, under whose leadership the kingdom of Macedonia gradually gained predominance throughout Greece, defeated the Achaemenid Empire and expanded as far as Egypt and India. The mythical founder of the Argead dynasty is King Caranus.",
"title": "List of Heracleidae"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Greek tragedians amplified the story, probably drawing inspiration from local legends which glorified the services rendered by Athens to the rulers of Peloponnesus.",
"title": "In Euripides' tragedy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Heracleidae feature as the main subjects of Euripides' play, Heracleidae. J. A. Spranger found the political subtext of Heracleidae, never far to seek, so particularly apt in Athens towards the end of the peace of Nicias, in 419 BCE, that he suggested the date as that of the play's first performance.",
"title": "In Euripides' tragedy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the tragedy, Iolaus, Heracles' old comrade and nephew, and Heracles' children, Macaria and her brothers and sisters have hidden from Eurystheus in Athens, ruled by King Demophon; as the first scene makes clear, they expect that the blood relationship of the kings with Heracles and their father's past indebtedness to Theseus will finally provide them sanctuary. As Eurystheus prepares to attack, an oracle tells Demophon that only the sacrifice of a noble woman to Persephone can guarantee an Athenian victory. Macaria volunteers for the sacrifice and a spring is named the Macarian spring in her honor.",
"title": "In Euripides' tragedy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). \"Heraclidae\". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 308–309.",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| The Heracleidae or Heraclids were the numerous descendants of Heracles (Hercules), especially applied in a narrower sense to the descendants of Hyllus, the eldest of his four sons by Deianira. Other Heracleidae included Macaria, Lamos, Manto, Bianor, Tlepolemus, and Telephus. These Heraclids were a group of Dorian kings who conquered the Peloponnesian kingdoms of Mycenae, Sparta and Argos; according to the literary tradition in Greek mythology, they claimed a right to rule through their ancestor. Since Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier, I. ch. 3, their rise to dominance has been associated with a "Dorian invasion". Though details of genealogy differ from one ancient author to another, the cultural significance of the mythic theme, that the descendants of Heracles, exiled after his death, returned some generations later to reclaim land that their ancestors had held in Mycenaean Greece, was to assert the primal legitimacy of a traditional ruling clan that traced its origin, thus its legitimacy, to Heracles. In the historical period, several dynasties claimed descent from Heracles, such as the Agiads and Eurypontids of Sparta, or the Temenids of Macedonia. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-09-26T22:39:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleidae |
14,170 | HIV | The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of Lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive. Without treatment, the average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype.
In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells. Research has shown (for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples) that HIV is untransmittable through condomless sexual intercourse if the HIV-positive partner has a consistently undetectable viral load.
HIV infects vital cells in the human immune system, such as helper T cells (specifically CD4 T cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4 T cells through a number of mechanisms, including pyroptosis of abortively infected T cells, apoptosis of uninfected bystander cells, direct viral killing of infected cells, and killing of infected CD4 T cells by CD8 cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells. When CD4 T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections, leading to the development of AIDS.
HIV is a member of the genus Lentivirus, part of the family Retroviridae. Lentiviruses have many morphologies and biological properties in common. Many species are infected by lentiviruses, which are characteristically responsible for long-duration illnesses with a long incubation period. Lentiviruses are transmitted as single-stranded, positive-sense, enveloped RNA viruses. Upon entry into the target cell, the viral RNA genome is converted (reverse transcribed) into double-stranded DNA by a virally encoded enzyme, reverse transcriptase, that is transported along with the viral genome in the virus particle. The resulting viral DNA is then imported into the cell nucleus and integrated into the cellular DNA by a virally encoded enzyme, integrase, and host co-factors. Once integrated, the virus may become latent, allowing the virus and its host cell to avoid detection by the immune system, for an indeterminate amount of time. The virus can remain dormant in the human body for up to ten years after primary infection; during this period the virus does not cause symptoms. Alternatively, the integrated viral DNA may be transcribed, producing new RNA genomes and viral proteins, using host cell resources, that are packaged and released from the cell as new virus particles that will begin the replication cycle anew.
Two types of HIV have been characterized: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is the virus that was initially discovered and termed both lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV) and human T-lymphotropic virus 3 (HTLV-III). HIV-1 is more virulent and more infective than HIV-2, and is the cause of the majority of HIV infections globally. The lower infectivity of HIV-2, compared to HIV-1, implies that fewer of those exposed to HIV-2 will be infected per exposure. Due to its relatively poor capacity for transmission, HIV-2 is largely confined to West Africa.
HIV is similar in structure to other retroviruses. It is roughly spherical with a diameter of about 120 nm, around 100,000 times smaller in volume than a red blood cell. It is composed of two copies of positive-sense single-stranded RNA that codes for the virus' nine genes enclosed by a conical capsid composed of 2,000 copies of the viral protein p24. The single-stranded RNA is tightly bound to nucleocapsid proteins, p7, and enzymes needed for the development of the virion such as reverse transcriptase, proteases, ribonuclease and integrase. A matrix composed of the viral protein p17 surrounds the capsid ensuring the integrity of the virion particle.
This is, in turn, surrounded by the viral envelope, that is composed of the lipid bilayer taken from the membrane of a human host cell when the newly formed virus particle buds from the cell. The viral envelope contains proteins from the host cell and relatively few copies of the HIV envelope protein, which consists of a cap made of three molecules known as glycoprotein (gp) 120, and a stem consisting of three gp41 molecules that anchor the structure into the viral envelope. The envelope protein, encoded by the HIV env gene, allows the virus to attach to target cells and fuse the viral envelope with the target cell's membrane releasing the viral contents into the cell and initiating the infectious cycle.
As the sole viral protein on the surface of the virus, the envelope protein is a major target for HIV vaccine efforts. Over half of the mass of the trimeric envelope spike is N-linked glycans. The density is high as the glycans shield the underlying viral protein from neutralisation by antibodies. This is one of the most densely glycosylated molecules known and the density is sufficiently high to prevent the normal maturation process of glycans during biogenesis in the endoplasmic and Golgi apparatus. The majority of the glycans are therefore stalled as immature 'high-mannose' glycans not normally present on human glycoproteins that are secreted or present on a cell surface. The unusual processing and high density means that almost all broadly neutralising antibodies that have so far been identified (from a subset of patients that have been infected for many months to years) bind to, or are adapted to cope with, these envelope glycans.
The molecular structure of the viral spike has now been determined by X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy. These advances in structural biology were made possible due to the development of stable recombinant forms of the viral spike by the introduction of an intersubunit disulphide bond and an isoleucine to proline mutation (radical replacement of an amino acid) in gp41. The so-called SOSIP trimers not only reproduce the antigenic properties of the native viral spike, but also display the same degree of immature glycans as presented on the native virus. Recombinant trimeric viral spikes are promising vaccine candidates as they display less non-neutralising epitopes than recombinant monomeric gp120, which act to suppress the immune response to target epitopes.
The RNA genome consists of at least seven structural landmarks (LTR, TAR, RRE, PE, SLIP, CRS, and INS), and nine genes (gag, pol, and env, tat, rev, nef, vif, vpr, vpu, and sometimes a tenth tev, which is a fusion of tat, env and rev), encoding 19 proteins. Three of these genes, gag, pol, and env, contain information needed to make the structural proteins for new virus particles. For example, env codes for a protein called gp160 that is cut in two by a cellular protease to form gp120 and gp41. The six remaining genes, tat, rev, nef, vif, vpr, and vpu (or vpx in the case of HIV-2), are regulatory genes for proteins that control the ability of HIV to infect cells, produce new copies of virus (replicate), or cause disease.
The two tat proteins (p16 and p14) are transcriptional transactivators for the LTR promoter acting by binding the TAR RNA element. The TAR may also be processed into microRNAs that regulate the apoptosis genes ERCC1 and IER3. The rev protein (p19) is involved in shuttling RNAs from the nucleus and the cytoplasm by binding to the RRE RNA element. The vif protein (p23) prevents the action of APOBEC3G (a cellular protein that deaminates cytidine to uridine in the single-stranded viral DNA and/or interferes with reverse transcription). The vpr protein (p14) arrests cell division at G2/M. The nef protein (p27) down-regulates CD4 (the major viral receptor), as well as the MHC class I and class II molecules.
Nef also interacts with SH3 domains. The vpu protein (p16) influences the release of new virus particles from infected cells. The ends of each strand of HIV RNA contain an RNA sequence called a long terminal repeat (LTR). Regions in the LTR act as switches to control production of new viruses and can be triggered by proteins from either HIV or the host cell. The Psi element is involved in viral genome packaging and recognized by gag and rev proteins. The SLIP element (TTTTTT) is involved in the frameshift in the gag-pol reading frame required to make functional pol.
The term viral tropism refers to the cell types a virus infects. HIV can infect a variety of immune cells such as CD4 T cells, macrophages, and microglial cells. HIV-1 entry to macrophages and CD4 T cells is mediated through interaction of the virion envelope glycoproteins (gp120) with the CD4 molecule on the target cells' membrane and also with chemokine co-receptors.
Macrophage-tropic (M-tropic) strains of HIV-1, or non-syncytia-inducing strains (NSI; now called R5 viruses) use the β-chemokine receptor, CCR5, for entry and are thus able to replicate in both macrophages and CD4 T cells. This CCR5 co-receptor is used by almost all primary HIV-1 isolates regardless of viral genetic subtype. Indeed, macrophages play a key role in several critical aspects of HIV infection. They appear to be the first cells infected by HIV and perhaps the source of HIV production when CD4 cells become depleted in the patient. Macrophages and microglial cells are the cells infected by HIV in the central nervous system. In the tonsils and adenoids of HIV-infected patients, macrophages fuse into multinucleated giant cells that produce huge amounts of virus.
T-tropic strains of HIV-1, or syncytia-inducing strains (SI; now called X4 viruses) replicate in primary CD4 T cells as well as in macrophages and use the α-chemokine receptor, CXCR4, for entry.
Dual-tropic HIV-1 strains are thought to be transitional strains of HIV-1 and thus are able to use both CCR5 and CXCR4 as co-receptors for viral entry.
The α-chemokine SDF-1, a ligand for CXCR4, suppresses replication of T-tropic HIV-1 isolates. It does this by down-regulating the expression of CXCR4 on the surface of HIV target cells. M-tropic HIV-1 isolates that use only the CCR5 receptor are termed R5; those that use only CXCR4 are termed X4, and those that use both, X4R5. However, the use of co-receptors alone does not explain viral tropism, as not all R5 viruses are able to use CCR5 on macrophages for a productive infection and HIV can also infect a subtype of myeloid dendritic cells, which probably constitute a reservoir that maintains infection when CD4 T cell numbers have declined to extremely low levels.
Some people are resistant to certain strains of HIV. For example, people with the CCR5-Δ32 mutation are resistant to infection by the R5 virus, as the mutation leaves HIV unable to bind to this co-receptor, reducing its ability to infect target cells.
Sexual intercourse is the major mode of HIV transmission. Both X4 and R5 HIV are present in the seminal fluid, which enables the virus to be transmitted from a male to his sexual partner. The virions can then infect numerous cellular targets and disseminate into the whole organism. However, a selection process leads to a predominant transmission of the R5 virus through this pathway. In patients infected with subtype B HIV-1, there is often a co-receptor switch in late-stage disease and T-tropic variants that can infect a variety of T cells through CXCR4. These variants then replicate more aggressively with heightened virulence that causes rapid T cell depletion, immune system collapse, and opportunistic infections that mark the advent of AIDS. HIV-positive patients acquire an enormously broad spectrum of opportunistic infections, which was particularly problematic prior to the onset of HAART therapies; however, the same infections are reported among HIV-infected patients examined post-mortem following the onset of antiretroviral therapies. Thus, during the course of infection, viral adaptation to the use of CXCR4 instead of CCR5 may be a key step in the progression to AIDS. A number of studies with subtype B-infected individuals have determined that between 40 and 50 percent of AIDS patients can harbour viruses of the SI and, it is presumed, the X4 phenotypes.
HIV-2 is much less pathogenic than HIV-1 and is restricted in its worldwide distribution to West Africa. The adoption of "accessory genes" by HIV-2 and its more promiscuous pattern of co-receptor usage (including CD4-independence) may assist the virus in its adaptation to avoid innate restriction factors present in host cells. Adaptation to use normal cellular machinery to enable transmission and productive infection has also aided the establishment of HIV-2 replication in humans. A survival strategy for any infectious agent is not to kill its host, but ultimately become a commensal organism. Having achieved a low pathogenicity, over time, variants that are more successful at transmission will be selected.
The HIV virion enters macrophages and CD4 T cells by the adsorption of glycoproteins on its surface to receptors on the target cell followed by fusion of the viral envelope with the target cell membrane and the release of the HIV capsid into the cell.
Entry to the cell begins through interaction of the trimeric envelope complex (gp160 spike) on the HIV viral envelope and both CD4 and a chemokine co-receptor (generally either CCR5 or CXCR4, but others are known to interact) on the target cell surface. Gp120 binds to integrin α4β7 activating LFA-1, the central integrin involved in the establishment of virological synapses, which facilitate efficient cell-to-cell spreading of HIV-1. The gp160 spike contains binding domains for both CD4 and chemokine receptors.
The first step in fusion involves the high-affinity attachment of the CD4 binding domains of gp120 to CD4. Once gp120 is bound with the CD4 protein, the envelope complex undergoes a structural change, exposing the chemokine receptor binding domains of gp120 and allowing them to interact with the target chemokine receptor. This allows for a more stable two-pronged attachment, which allows the N-terminal fusion peptide gp41 to penetrate the cell membrane. Repeat sequences in gp41, HR1, and HR2 then interact, causing the collapse of the extracellular portion of gp41 into a hairpin shape. This loop structure brings the virus and cell membranes close together, allowing fusion of the membranes and subsequent entry of the viral capsid.
After HIV has bound to the target cell, the HIV RNA and various enzymes, including reverse transcriptase, integrase, ribonuclease, and protease, are injected into the cell. During the microtubule-based transport to the nucleus, the viral single-strand RNA genome is transcribed into double-strand DNA, which is then integrated into a host chromosome.
HIV can infect dendritic cells (DCs) by this CD4-CCR5 route, but another route using mannose-specific C-type lectin receptors such as DC-SIGN can also be used. DCs are one of the first cells encountered by the virus during sexual transmission. They are currently thought to play an important role by transmitting HIV to T cells when the virus is captured in the mucosa by DCs. The presence of FEZ-1, which occurs naturally in neurons, is believed to prevent the infection of cells by HIV.
HIV-1 entry, as well as entry of many other retroviruses, has long been believed to occur exclusively at the plasma membrane. More recently, however, productive infection by pH-independent, clathrin-mediated endocytosis of HIV-1 has also been reported and was recently suggested to constitute the only route of productive entry.
Shortly after the viral capsid enters the cell, an enzyme called reverse transcriptase liberates the positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome from the attached viral proteins and copies it into a complementary DNA (cDNA) molecule. The process of reverse transcription is extremely error-prone, and the resulting mutations may cause drug resistance or allow the virus to evade the body's immune system. The reverse transcriptase also has ribonuclease activity that degrades the viral RNA during the synthesis of cDNA, as well as DNA-dependent DNA polymerase activity that creates a sense DNA from the antisense cDNA. Together, the cDNA and its complement form a double-stranded viral DNA that is then transported into the cell nucleus. The integration of the viral DNA into the host cell's genome is carried out by another viral enzyme called integrase.
The integrated viral DNA may then lie dormant, in the latent stage of HIV infection. To actively produce the virus, certain cellular transcription factors need to be present, the most important of which is NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa B), which is upregulated when T cells become activated. This means that those cells most likely to be targeted, entered and subsequently killed by HIV are those actively fighting infection.
During viral replication, the integrated DNA provirus is transcribed into RNA. The full-length genomic RNAs (gRNA) can be packaged into new viral particles in a pseudodiploid form. The selectivity in the packaging is explained by the structural properties of the dimeric conformer of the gRNA. The gRNA dimer is characterized by a tandem three-way junction within the gRNA monomer, in which the SD and AUG hairpins, responsible for splicing and translation respectively, are sequestered and the DIS (dimerization initiation signal) hairpin is exposed. The formation of the gRNA dimer is mediated by a 'kissing' interaction between the DIS hairpin loops of the gRNA monomers. At the same time, certain guanosine residues in the gRNA are made available for binding of the nucleocapsid (NC) protein leading to the subsequent virion assembly. The labile gRNA dimer has been also reported to achieve a more stable conformation following the NC binding, in which both the DIS and the U5:AUG regions of the gRNA participate in extensive base pairing.
RNA can also be processed to produce mature messenger RNAs (mRNAs). In most cases, this processing involves RNA splicing to produce mRNAs that are shorter than the full-length genome. Which part of the RNA is removed during RNA splicing determines which of the HIV protein-coding sequences is translated.
Mature HIV mRNAs are exported from the nucleus into the cytoplasm, where they are translated to produce HIV proteins, including Rev. As the newly produced Rev protein is produced it moves to the nucleus, where it binds to full-length, unspliced copies of virus RNAs and allows them to leave the nucleus. Some of these full-length RNAs function as mRNAs that are translated to produce the structural proteins Gag and Env. Gag proteins bind to copies of the virus RNA genome to package them into new virus particles. HIV-1 and HIV-2 appear to package their RNA differently. HIV-1 will bind to any appropriate RNA. HIV-2 will preferentially bind to the mRNA that was used to create the Gag protein itself.
Two RNA genomes are encapsidated in each HIV-1 particle (see Structure and genome of HIV). Upon infection and replication catalyzed by reverse transcriptase, recombination between the two genomes can occur. Recombination occurs as the single-strand, positive-sense RNA genomes are reverse transcribed to form DNA. During reverse transcription, the nascent DNA can switch multiple times between the two copies of the viral RNA. This form of recombination is known as copy-choice. Recombination events may occur throughout the genome. Anywhere from two to 20 recombination events per genome may occur at each replication cycle, and these events can rapidly shuffle the genetic information that is transmitted from parental to progeny genomes.
Viral recombination produces genetic variation that likely contributes to the evolution of resistance to anti-retroviral therapy. Recombination may also contribute, in principle, to overcoming the immune defenses of the host. Yet, for the adaptive advantages of genetic variation to be realized, the two viral genomes packaged in individual infecting virus particles need to have arisen from separate progenitor parental viruses of differing genetic constitution. It is unknown how often such mixed packaging occurs under natural conditions.
Bonhoeffer et al. suggested that template switching by reverse transcriptase acts as a repair process to deal with breaks in the single-stranded RNA genome. In addition, Hu and Temin suggested that recombination is an adaptation for repair of damage in the RNA genomes. Strand switching (copy-choice recombination) by reverse transcriptase could generate an undamaged copy of genomic DNA from two damaged single-stranded RNA genome copies. This view of the adaptive benefit of recombination in HIV could explain why each HIV particle contains two complete genomes, rather than one. Furthermore, the view that recombination is a repair process implies that the benefit of repair can occur at each replication cycle, and that this benefit can be realized whether or not the two genomes differ genetically. On the view that recombination in HIV is a repair process, the generation of recombinational variation would be a consequence, but not the cause of, the evolution of template switching.
HIV-1 infection causes chronic inflammation and production of reactive oxygen species. Thus, the HIV genome may be vulnerable to oxidative damage, including breaks in the single-stranded RNA. For HIV, as well as for viruses in general, successful infection depends on overcoming host defense strategies that often include production of genome-damaging reactive oxygen species. Thus, Michod et al. suggested that recombination by viruses is an adaptation for repair of genome damage, and that recombinational variation is a byproduct that may provide a separate benefit.
The final step of the viral cycle, assembly of new HIV-1 virions, begins at the plasma membrane of the host cell. The Env polyprotein (gp160) goes through the endoplasmic reticulum and is transported to the Golgi apparatus where it is cleaved by furin resulting in the two HIV envelope glycoproteins, gp41 and gp120. These are transported to the plasma membrane of the host cell where gp41 anchors gp120 to the membrane of the infected cell. The Gag (p55) and Gag-Pol (p160) polyproteins also associate with the inner surface of the plasma membrane along with the HIV genomic RNA as the forming virion begins to bud from the host cell. The budded virion is still immature as the gag polyproteins still need to be cleaved into the actual matrix, capsid and nucleocapsid proteins. This cleavage is mediated by the packaged viral protease and can be inhibited by antiretroviral drugs of the protease inhibitor class. The various structural components then assemble to produce a mature HIV virion. Only mature virions are then able to infect another cell.
The classical process of infection of a cell by a virion can be called "cell-free spread" to distinguish it from a more recently recognized process called "cell-to-cell spread". In cell-free spread (see figure), virus particles bud from an infected T cell, enter the blood or extracellular fluid and then infect another T cell following a chance encounter. HIV can also disseminate by direct transmission from one cell to another by a process of cell-to-cell spread, for which two pathways have been described. Firstly, an infected T cell can transmit virus directly to a target T cell via a virological synapse. Secondly, an antigen-presenting cell (APC), such as a macrophage or dendritic cell, can transmit HIV to T cells by a process that either involves productive infection (in the case of macrophages) or capture and transfer of virions in trans (in the case of dendritic cells). Whichever pathway is used, infection by cell-to-cell transfer is reported to be much more efficient than cell-free virus spread. A number of factors contribute to this increased efficiency, including polarised virus budding towards the site of cell-to-cell contact, close apposition of cells, which minimizes fluid-phase diffusion of virions, and clustering of HIV entry receptors on the target cell towards the contact zone. Cell-to-cell spread is thought to be particularly important in lymphoid tissues, where CD4 T cells are densely packed and likely to interact frequently. Intravital imaging studies have supported the concept of the HIV virological synapse in vivo. The many dissemination mechanisms available to HIV contribute to the virus' ongoing replication in spite of anti-retroviral therapies.
HIV differs from many viruses in that it has very high genetic variability. This diversity is a result of its fast replication cycle, with the generation of about 10 virions every day, coupled with a high mutation rate of approximately 3 x 10 per nucleotide base per cycle of replication and recombinogenic properties of reverse transcriptase.
This complex scenario leads to the generation of many variants of HIV in a single infected patient in the course of one day. This variability is compounded when a single cell is simultaneously infected by two or more different strains of HIV. When simultaneous infection occurs, the genome of progeny virions may be composed of RNA strands from two different strains. This hybrid virion then infects a new cell where it undergoes replication. As this happens, the reverse transcriptase, by jumping back and forth between the two different RNA templates, will generate a newly synthesized retroviral DNA sequence that is a recombinant between the two parental genomes. This recombination is most obvious when it occurs between subtypes.
The closely related simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) has evolved into many strains, classified by the natural host species. SIV strains of the African green monkey (SIVagm) and sooty mangabey (SIVsmm) are thought to have a long evolutionary history with their hosts. These hosts have adapted to the presence of the virus, which is present at high levels in the host's blood, but evokes only a mild immune response, does not cause the development of simian AIDS, and does not undergo the extensive mutation and recombination typical of HIV infection in humans.
In contrast, when these strains infect species that have not adapted to SIV ("heterologous" or similar hosts such as rhesus or cynomologus macaques), the animals develop AIDS and the virus generates genetic diversity similar to what is seen in human HIV infection. Chimpanzee SIV (SIVcpz), the closest genetic relative of HIV-1, is associated with increased mortality and AIDS-like symptoms in its natural host. SIVcpz appears to have been transmitted relatively recently to chimpanzee and human populations, so their hosts have not yet adapted to the virus. This virus has also lost a function of the nef gene that is present in most SIVs. For non-pathogenic SIV variants, nef suppresses T cell activation through the CD3 marker. Nef's function in non-pathogenic forms of SIV is to downregulate expression of inflammatory cytokines, MHC-1, and signals that affect T cell trafficking. In HIV-1 and SIVcpz, nef does not inhibit T-cell activation and it has lost this function. Without this function, T cell depletion is more likely, leading to immunodeficiency.
Three groups of HIV-1 have been identified on the basis of differences in the envelope (env) region: M, N, and O. Group M is the most prevalent and is subdivided into eight subtypes (or clades), based on the whole genome, which are geographically distinct. The most prevalent are subtypes B (found mainly in North America and Europe), A and D (found mainly in Africa), and C (found mainly in Africa and Asia); these subtypes form branches in the phylogenetic tree representing the lineage of the M group of HIV-1. Co-infection with distinct subtypes gives rise to circulating recombinant forms (CRFs). In 2000, the last year in which an analysis of global subtype prevalence was made, 47.2% of infections worldwide were of subtype C, 26.7% were of subtype A/CRF02_AG, 12.3% were of subtype B, 5.3% were of subtype D, 3.2% were of CRF_AE, and the remaining 5.3% were composed of other subtypes and CRFs. Most HIV-1 research is focused on subtype B; few laboratories focus on the other subtypes. The existence of a fourth group, "P", has been hypothesised based on a virus isolated in 2009. The strain is apparently derived from gorilla SIV (SIVgor), first isolated from western lowland gorillas in 2006.
HIV-2's closest relative is SIVsm, a strain of SIV found in sooty mangabees. Since HIV-1 is derived from SIVcpz, and HIV-2 from SIVsm, the genetic sequence of HIV-2 is only partially homologous to HIV-1 and more closely resembles that of SIVsm.
Many HIV-positive people are unaware that they are infected with the virus. For example, in 2001 less than 1% of the sexually active urban population in Africa had been tested, and this proportion is even lower in rural populations. Furthermore, in 2001 only 0.5% of pregnant women attending urban health facilities were counselled, tested or received their test results. Again, this proportion is even lower in rural health facilities. Since donors may therefore be unaware of their infection, donor blood and blood products used in medicine and medical research are routinely screened for HIV.
HIV-1 testing is initially done using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect antibodies to HIV-1. Specimens with a non-reactive result from the initial ELISA are considered HIV-negative, unless new exposure to an infected partner or partner of unknown HIV status has occurred. Specimens with a reactive ELISA result are retested in duplicate. If the result of either duplicate test is reactive, the specimen is reported as repeatedly reactive and undergoes confirmatory testing with a more specific supplemental test (e.g., a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), western blot or, less commonly, an immunofluorescence assay (IFA)). Only specimens that are repeatedly reactive by ELISA and positive by IFA or PCR or reactive by western blot are considered HIV-positive and indicative of HIV infection. Specimens that are repeatedly ELISA-reactive occasionally provide an indeterminate western blot result, which may be either an incomplete antibody response to HIV in an infected person or nonspecific reactions in an uninfected person.
HIV deaths in 2014 excluding the U.S.:
Although IFA can be used to confirm infection in these ambiguous cases, this assay is not widely used. In general, a second specimen should be collected more than a month later and retested for persons with indeterminate western blot results. Although much less commonly available, nucleic acid testing (e.g., viral RNA or proviral DNA amplification method) can also help diagnosis in certain situations. In addition, a few tested specimens might provide inconclusive results because of a low quantity specimen. In these situations, a second specimen is collected and tested for HIV infection.
Modern HIV testing is extremely accurate, when the window period is taken into consideration. A single screening test is correct more than 99% of the time. The chance of a false-positive result in a standard two-step testing protocol is estimated to be about 1 in 250,000 in a low risk population. Testing post-exposure is recommended immediately and then at six weeks, three months, and six months.
The latest recommendations of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that HIV testing must start with an immunoassay combination test for HIV-1 and HIV-2 antibodies and p24 antigen. A negative result rules out HIV exposure, while a positive one must be followed by an HIV-1/2 antibody differentiation immunoassay to detect which antibodies are present. This gives rise to four possible scenarios:
HIV/AIDS research includes all medical research that attempts to prevent, treat, or cure HIV/AIDS, as well as fundamental research about the nature of HIV as an infectious agent and AIDS as the disease caused by HIV.
Many governments and research institutions participate in HIV/AIDS research. This research includes behavioral health interventions, such as research into sex education, and drug development, such as research into microbicides for sexually transmitted diseases, HIV vaccines, and anti-retroviral drugs. Other medical research areas include the topics of pre-exposure prophylaxis, post-exposure prophylaxis, circumcision, and accelerated aging effects.
The management of HIV/AIDS normally includes the use of multiple antiretroviral drugs. In many parts of the world, HIV has become a chronic condition in which progression to AIDS is increasingly rare.
HIV latency, and the consequent viral reservoir in CD4 T cells, dendritic cells, as well as macrophages, is the main barrier to eradication of the virus.
Although HIV is highly virulent, transmission does not occur through sex when an HIV-positive person has a consistently undetectable viral load (<50 copies/ml) due to anti-retroviral treatment. This was first argued by the Swiss Federal Commission for AIDS/HIV in 2008 in the Swiss Statement, though the statement was controversial at the time. However, following multiple studies, it became clear that the chance of passing on HIV through sex is effectively zero where the HIV-positive person has a consistently undetectable viral load; this is known as U=U, "Undetectable=Untransmittable", also phrased as "can't pass it on". The studies demonstrating U=U are: Opposites Attract, PARTNER 1, PARTNER 2, (for male-male couples) and HPTN052 (for heterosexual couples) when "the partner living with HIV had a durably suppressed viral load." In these studies, couples where one partner was HIV positive and one partner was HIV negative were enrolled and regular HIV testing completed. In total from the four studies, 4097 couples were enrolled over four continents and 151,880 acts of condomless sex were reported; there were zero phylogenetically linked transmissions of HIV where the positive partner had an undetectable viral load. Following this, the U=U consensus statement advocating the use of "zero risk" was signed by hundreds of individuals and organisations, including the US CDC, British HIV Association and The Lancet medical journal. The importance of the final results of the PARTNER 2 study were described by the medical director of the Terrence Higgins Trust as "impossible to overstate", while lead author Alison Rodger declared that the message that "undetectable viral load makes HIV untransmittable ... can help end the HIV pandemic by preventing HIV transmission. The authors summarised their findings in The Lancet as follows:
Our results provide a similar level of evidence on viral suppression and HIV transmission risk for gay men to that previously generated for heterosexual couples and suggest that the risk of HIV transmission in gay couples through condomless sex when HIV viral load is suppressed is effectively zero. Our findings support the message of the U=U (undetectable equals untransmittable) campaign, and the benefits of early testing and treatment for HIV.
This result is consistent with the conclusion presented by Anthony S. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and his team in a viewpoint published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that U=U is an effective HIV prevention method when an undetectable viral load is maintained.
Genital herpes (HSV-2) reactivation in those infected with the virus have an associated increase in CCR-5 enriched CD4+ T cells as well as inflammatory dendritic cells in the submucosa of the genital skin. Tropism of HIV for CCR-5 positive cells explains the two to threefold increase in HIV acquisition among persons with genital herpes. Daily antiviral (e.g. acyclovir) medication does not reduce the sub-clinical post reactivation inflammation and therefore does not confer reduced risk of HIV acquisition.
The first news story on "an exotic new disease" appeared May 18, 1981, in the gay newspaper New York Native.
AIDS was first clinically observed in 1981 in the United States. The initial cases were a cluster of injection drug users and gay men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP or PJP, the latter term recognizing that the causative agent is now called Pneumocystis jirovecii), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems. Soon thereafter, researchers at the NYU School of Medicine studied gay men developing a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PJP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. The earliest retrospectively described case of AIDS is believed to have been in Norway beginning in 1966.
In the beginning, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. The CDC, in search of a name and looking at the infected communities, coined "the 4H disease", as it seemed to single out homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS.
In 1983, two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. Gallo claimed that a virus his group had isolated from a person with AIDS was strikingly similar in shape to other human T-lymphotropic viruses (HTLVs) his group had been the first to isolate. Gallo admitted in 1987 that the virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984 was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before. Gallo's group called their newly isolated virus HTLV-III. Montagnier's group isolated a virus from a patient presenting with swelling of the lymph nodes of the neck and physical weakness, two classic symptoms of primary HIV infection. Contradicting the report from Gallo's group, Montagnier and his colleagues showed that core proteins of this virus were immunologically different from those of HTLV-I. Montagnier's group named their isolated virus lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). As these two viruses turned out to be the same, in 1986 LAV and HTLV-III were renamed HIV.
Another group working contemporaneously with the Montagnier and Gallo groups was that of Jay A. Levy at the University of California, San Francisco. He independently discovered the AIDS virus in 1983 and named it the AIDS associated retrovirus (ARV). This virus was very different from the virus reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups. The ARV strains indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates and several of these remain classic examples of the AIDS virus found in the United States.
Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa, and are believed to have transferred to humans (a process known as zoonosis) in the early 20th century.
HIV-1 appears to have originated in southern Cameroon through the evolution of SIVcpz, a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that infects wild chimpanzees (HIV-1 descends from the SIVcpz endemic in the chimpanzee subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes). The closest relative of HIV-2 is SIVsmm, a virus of the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys atys), an Old World monkey living in littoral West Africa (from southern Senegal to western Côte d'Ivoire). New World monkeys such as the owl monkey are resistant to HIV-1 infection, possibly because of a genomic fusion of two viral resistance genes.
HIV-1 is thought to have jumped the species barrier on at least three separate occasions, giving rise to the three groups of the virus, M, N, and O.
There is evidence that humans who participate in bushmeat activities, either as hunters or as bushmeat vendors, commonly acquire SIV. However, SIV is a weak virus, and it is typically suppressed by the human immune system within weeks of infection. It is thought that several transmissions of the virus from individual to individual in quick succession are necessary to allow it enough time to mutate into HIV. Furthermore, due to its relatively low person-to-person transmission rate, it can only spread throughout the population in the presence of one or more high-risk transmission channels, which are thought to have been absent in Africa prior to the 20th century.
Specific proposed high-risk transmission channels, allowing the virus to adapt to humans and spread throughout the society, depend on the proposed timing of the animal-to-human crossing. Genetic studies of the virus suggest that the most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group dates back to c. 1910. Proponents of this dating link the HIV epidemic with the emergence of colonialism and growth of large colonial African cities, leading to social changes, including different patterns of sexual contact (especially multiple, concurrent partnerships), the spread of prostitution, and the concomitant high frequency of genital ulcer diseases (such as syphilis) in nascent colonial cities. While transmission rates of HIV during vaginal intercourse are typically low, they are increased manyfold if one of the partners has a sexually transmitted infection resulting in genital ulcers. Early 1900s colonial cities were notable for their high prevalence of prostitution and genital ulcers to the degree that as of 1928 as many as 45% of female residents of eastern Leopoldville (currently Kinshasa) were thought to have been prostitutes and as of 1933 around 15% of all residents of the same city were infected by one of the forms of syphilis.
The earliest, well-documented case of HIV in a human dates back to 1959 in the Belgian Congo. The virus may have been present in the United States as early as the mid- to late 1960s, as a sixteen-year-old male named Robert Rayford presented with symptoms in 1966 and died in 1969.
An alternative and likely complementary hypothesis points to the widespread use of unsafe medical practices in Africa during years following World War II, such as unsterile reuse of single-use syringes during mass vaccination, antibiotic, and anti-malaria treatment campaigns. Research on the timing of most recent common ancestor for HIV-1 groups M and O, as well as on HIV-2 groups A and B, indicates that SIV has given rise to transmissible HIV lineages throughout the twentieth century. The dispersed timing of these transmissions to humans implies that no single external factor is needed to explain the cross-species transmission of HIV. This observation is consistent with both of the two prevailing views of the origin of the HIV epidemics, namely SIV transmission to humans during the slaughter or butchering of infected primates, and the colonial expansion of sub-Saharan African cities. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of Lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive. Without treatment, the average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells. Research has shown (for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples) that HIV is untransmittable through condomless sexual intercourse if the HIV-positive partner has a consistently undetectable viral load.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "HIV infects vital cells in the human immune system, such as helper T cells (specifically CD4 T cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4 T cells through a number of mechanisms, including pyroptosis of abortively infected T cells, apoptosis of uninfected bystander cells, direct viral killing of infected cells, and killing of infected CD4 T cells by CD8 cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells. When CD4 T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections, leading to the development of AIDS.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "HIV is a member of the genus Lentivirus, part of the family Retroviridae. Lentiviruses have many morphologies and biological properties in common. Many species are infected by lentiviruses, which are characteristically responsible for long-duration illnesses with a long incubation period. Lentiviruses are transmitted as single-stranded, positive-sense, enveloped RNA viruses. Upon entry into the target cell, the viral RNA genome is converted (reverse transcribed) into double-stranded DNA by a virally encoded enzyme, reverse transcriptase, that is transported along with the viral genome in the virus particle. The resulting viral DNA is then imported into the cell nucleus and integrated into the cellular DNA by a virally encoded enzyme, integrase, and host co-factors. Once integrated, the virus may become latent, allowing the virus and its host cell to avoid detection by the immune system, for an indeterminate amount of time. The virus can remain dormant in the human body for up to ten years after primary infection; during this period the virus does not cause symptoms. Alternatively, the integrated viral DNA may be transcribed, producing new RNA genomes and viral proteins, using host cell resources, that are packaged and released from the cell as new virus particles that will begin the replication cycle anew.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Two types of HIV have been characterized: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is the virus that was initially discovered and termed both lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV) and human T-lymphotropic virus 3 (HTLV-III). HIV-1 is more virulent and more infective than HIV-2, and is the cause of the majority of HIV infections globally. The lower infectivity of HIV-2, compared to HIV-1, implies that fewer of those exposed to HIV-2 will be infected per exposure. Due to its relatively poor capacity for transmission, HIV-2 is largely confined to West Africa.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "HIV is similar in structure to other retroviruses. It is roughly spherical with a diameter of about 120 nm, around 100,000 times smaller in volume than a red blood cell. It is composed of two copies of positive-sense single-stranded RNA that codes for the virus' nine genes enclosed by a conical capsid composed of 2,000 copies of the viral protein p24. The single-stranded RNA is tightly bound to nucleocapsid proteins, p7, and enzymes needed for the development of the virion such as reverse transcriptase, proteases, ribonuclease and integrase. A matrix composed of the viral protein p17 surrounds the capsid ensuring the integrity of the virion particle.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "This is, in turn, surrounded by the viral envelope, that is composed of the lipid bilayer taken from the membrane of a human host cell when the newly formed virus particle buds from the cell. The viral envelope contains proteins from the host cell and relatively few copies of the HIV envelope protein, which consists of a cap made of three molecules known as glycoprotein (gp) 120, and a stem consisting of three gp41 molecules that anchor the structure into the viral envelope. The envelope protein, encoded by the HIV env gene, allows the virus to attach to target cells and fuse the viral envelope with the target cell's membrane releasing the viral contents into the cell and initiating the infectious cycle.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As the sole viral protein on the surface of the virus, the envelope protein is a major target for HIV vaccine efforts. Over half of the mass of the trimeric envelope spike is N-linked glycans. The density is high as the glycans shield the underlying viral protein from neutralisation by antibodies. This is one of the most densely glycosylated molecules known and the density is sufficiently high to prevent the normal maturation process of glycans during biogenesis in the endoplasmic and Golgi apparatus. The majority of the glycans are therefore stalled as immature 'high-mannose' glycans not normally present on human glycoproteins that are secreted or present on a cell surface. The unusual processing and high density means that almost all broadly neutralising antibodies that have so far been identified (from a subset of patients that have been infected for many months to years) bind to, or are adapted to cope with, these envelope glycans.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The molecular structure of the viral spike has now been determined by X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy. These advances in structural biology were made possible due to the development of stable recombinant forms of the viral spike by the introduction of an intersubunit disulphide bond and an isoleucine to proline mutation (radical replacement of an amino acid) in gp41. The so-called SOSIP trimers not only reproduce the antigenic properties of the native viral spike, but also display the same degree of immature glycans as presented on the native virus. Recombinant trimeric viral spikes are promising vaccine candidates as they display less non-neutralising epitopes than recombinant monomeric gp120, which act to suppress the immune response to target epitopes.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The RNA genome consists of at least seven structural landmarks (LTR, TAR, RRE, PE, SLIP, CRS, and INS), and nine genes (gag, pol, and env, tat, rev, nef, vif, vpr, vpu, and sometimes a tenth tev, which is a fusion of tat, env and rev), encoding 19 proteins. Three of these genes, gag, pol, and env, contain information needed to make the structural proteins for new virus particles. For example, env codes for a protein called gp160 that is cut in two by a cellular protease to form gp120 and gp41. The six remaining genes, tat, rev, nef, vif, vpr, and vpu (or vpx in the case of HIV-2), are regulatory genes for proteins that control the ability of HIV to infect cells, produce new copies of virus (replicate), or cause disease.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The two tat proteins (p16 and p14) are transcriptional transactivators for the LTR promoter acting by binding the TAR RNA element. The TAR may also be processed into microRNAs that regulate the apoptosis genes ERCC1 and IER3. The rev protein (p19) is involved in shuttling RNAs from the nucleus and the cytoplasm by binding to the RRE RNA element. The vif protein (p23) prevents the action of APOBEC3G (a cellular protein that deaminates cytidine to uridine in the single-stranded viral DNA and/or interferes with reverse transcription). The vpr protein (p14) arrests cell division at G2/M. The nef protein (p27) down-regulates CD4 (the major viral receptor), as well as the MHC class I and class II molecules.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Nef also interacts with SH3 domains. The vpu protein (p16) influences the release of new virus particles from infected cells. The ends of each strand of HIV RNA contain an RNA sequence called a long terminal repeat (LTR). Regions in the LTR act as switches to control production of new viruses and can be triggered by proteins from either HIV or the host cell. The Psi element is involved in viral genome packaging and recognized by gag and rev proteins. The SLIP element (TTTTTT) is involved in the frameshift in the gag-pol reading frame required to make functional pol.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The term viral tropism refers to the cell types a virus infects. HIV can infect a variety of immune cells such as CD4 T cells, macrophages, and microglial cells. HIV-1 entry to macrophages and CD4 T cells is mediated through interaction of the virion envelope glycoproteins (gp120) with the CD4 molecule on the target cells' membrane and also with chemokine co-receptors.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Macrophage-tropic (M-tropic) strains of HIV-1, or non-syncytia-inducing strains (NSI; now called R5 viruses) use the β-chemokine receptor, CCR5, for entry and are thus able to replicate in both macrophages and CD4 T cells. This CCR5 co-receptor is used by almost all primary HIV-1 isolates regardless of viral genetic subtype. Indeed, macrophages play a key role in several critical aspects of HIV infection. They appear to be the first cells infected by HIV and perhaps the source of HIV production when CD4 cells become depleted in the patient. Macrophages and microglial cells are the cells infected by HIV in the central nervous system. In the tonsils and adenoids of HIV-infected patients, macrophages fuse into multinucleated giant cells that produce huge amounts of virus.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "T-tropic strains of HIV-1, or syncytia-inducing strains (SI; now called X4 viruses) replicate in primary CD4 T cells as well as in macrophages and use the α-chemokine receptor, CXCR4, for entry.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Dual-tropic HIV-1 strains are thought to be transitional strains of HIV-1 and thus are able to use both CCR5 and CXCR4 as co-receptors for viral entry.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The α-chemokine SDF-1, a ligand for CXCR4, suppresses replication of T-tropic HIV-1 isolates. It does this by down-regulating the expression of CXCR4 on the surface of HIV target cells. M-tropic HIV-1 isolates that use only the CCR5 receptor are termed R5; those that use only CXCR4 are termed X4, and those that use both, X4R5. However, the use of co-receptors alone does not explain viral tropism, as not all R5 viruses are able to use CCR5 on macrophages for a productive infection and HIV can also infect a subtype of myeloid dendritic cells, which probably constitute a reservoir that maintains infection when CD4 T cell numbers have declined to extremely low levels.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Some people are resistant to certain strains of HIV. For example, people with the CCR5-Δ32 mutation are resistant to infection by the R5 virus, as the mutation leaves HIV unable to bind to this co-receptor, reducing its ability to infect target cells.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Sexual intercourse is the major mode of HIV transmission. Both X4 and R5 HIV are present in the seminal fluid, which enables the virus to be transmitted from a male to his sexual partner. The virions can then infect numerous cellular targets and disseminate into the whole organism. However, a selection process leads to a predominant transmission of the R5 virus through this pathway. In patients infected with subtype B HIV-1, there is often a co-receptor switch in late-stage disease and T-tropic variants that can infect a variety of T cells through CXCR4. These variants then replicate more aggressively with heightened virulence that causes rapid T cell depletion, immune system collapse, and opportunistic infections that mark the advent of AIDS. HIV-positive patients acquire an enormously broad spectrum of opportunistic infections, which was particularly problematic prior to the onset of HAART therapies; however, the same infections are reported among HIV-infected patients examined post-mortem following the onset of antiretroviral therapies. Thus, during the course of infection, viral adaptation to the use of CXCR4 instead of CCR5 may be a key step in the progression to AIDS. A number of studies with subtype B-infected individuals have determined that between 40 and 50 percent of AIDS patients can harbour viruses of the SI and, it is presumed, the X4 phenotypes.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "HIV-2 is much less pathogenic than HIV-1 and is restricted in its worldwide distribution to West Africa. The adoption of \"accessory genes\" by HIV-2 and its more promiscuous pattern of co-receptor usage (including CD4-independence) may assist the virus in its adaptation to avoid innate restriction factors present in host cells. Adaptation to use normal cellular machinery to enable transmission and productive infection has also aided the establishment of HIV-2 replication in humans. A survival strategy for any infectious agent is not to kill its host, but ultimately become a commensal organism. Having achieved a low pathogenicity, over time, variants that are more successful at transmission will be selected.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The HIV virion enters macrophages and CD4 T cells by the adsorption of glycoproteins on its surface to receptors on the target cell followed by fusion of the viral envelope with the target cell membrane and the release of the HIV capsid into the cell.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Entry to the cell begins through interaction of the trimeric envelope complex (gp160 spike) on the HIV viral envelope and both CD4 and a chemokine co-receptor (generally either CCR5 or CXCR4, but others are known to interact) on the target cell surface. Gp120 binds to integrin α4β7 activating LFA-1, the central integrin involved in the establishment of virological synapses, which facilitate efficient cell-to-cell spreading of HIV-1. The gp160 spike contains binding domains for both CD4 and chemokine receptors.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The first step in fusion involves the high-affinity attachment of the CD4 binding domains of gp120 to CD4. Once gp120 is bound with the CD4 protein, the envelope complex undergoes a structural change, exposing the chemokine receptor binding domains of gp120 and allowing them to interact with the target chemokine receptor. This allows for a more stable two-pronged attachment, which allows the N-terminal fusion peptide gp41 to penetrate the cell membrane. Repeat sequences in gp41, HR1, and HR2 then interact, causing the collapse of the extracellular portion of gp41 into a hairpin shape. This loop structure brings the virus and cell membranes close together, allowing fusion of the membranes and subsequent entry of the viral capsid.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After HIV has bound to the target cell, the HIV RNA and various enzymes, including reverse transcriptase, integrase, ribonuclease, and protease, are injected into the cell. During the microtubule-based transport to the nucleus, the viral single-strand RNA genome is transcribed into double-strand DNA, which is then integrated into a host chromosome.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "HIV can infect dendritic cells (DCs) by this CD4-CCR5 route, but another route using mannose-specific C-type lectin receptors such as DC-SIGN can also be used. DCs are one of the first cells encountered by the virus during sexual transmission. They are currently thought to play an important role by transmitting HIV to T cells when the virus is captured in the mucosa by DCs. The presence of FEZ-1, which occurs naturally in neurons, is believed to prevent the infection of cells by HIV.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "HIV-1 entry, as well as entry of many other retroviruses, has long been believed to occur exclusively at the plasma membrane. More recently, however, productive infection by pH-independent, clathrin-mediated endocytosis of HIV-1 has also been reported and was recently suggested to constitute the only route of productive entry.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Shortly after the viral capsid enters the cell, an enzyme called reverse transcriptase liberates the positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome from the attached viral proteins and copies it into a complementary DNA (cDNA) molecule. The process of reverse transcription is extremely error-prone, and the resulting mutations may cause drug resistance or allow the virus to evade the body's immune system. The reverse transcriptase also has ribonuclease activity that degrades the viral RNA during the synthesis of cDNA, as well as DNA-dependent DNA polymerase activity that creates a sense DNA from the antisense cDNA. Together, the cDNA and its complement form a double-stranded viral DNA that is then transported into the cell nucleus. The integration of the viral DNA into the host cell's genome is carried out by another viral enzyme called integrase.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The integrated viral DNA may then lie dormant, in the latent stage of HIV infection. To actively produce the virus, certain cellular transcription factors need to be present, the most important of which is NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa B), which is upregulated when T cells become activated. This means that those cells most likely to be targeted, entered and subsequently killed by HIV are those actively fighting infection.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "During viral replication, the integrated DNA provirus is transcribed into RNA. The full-length genomic RNAs (gRNA) can be packaged into new viral particles in a pseudodiploid form. The selectivity in the packaging is explained by the structural properties of the dimeric conformer of the gRNA. The gRNA dimer is characterized by a tandem three-way junction within the gRNA monomer, in which the SD and AUG hairpins, responsible for splicing and translation respectively, are sequestered and the DIS (dimerization initiation signal) hairpin is exposed. The formation of the gRNA dimer is mediated by a 'kissing' interaction between the DIS hairpin loops of the gRNA monomers. At the same time, certain guanosine residues in the gRNA are made available for binding of the nucleocapsid (NC) protein leading to the subsequent virion assembly. The labile gRNA dimer has been also reported to achieve a more stable conformation following the NC binding, in which both the DIS and the U5:AUG regions of the gRNA participate in extensive base pairing.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "RNA can also be processed to produce mature messenger RNAs (mRNAs). In most cases, this processing involves RNA splicing to produce mRNAs that are shorter than the full-length genome. Which part of the RNA is removed during RNA splicing determines which of the HIV protein-coding sequences is translated.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Mature HIV mRNAs are exported from the nucleus into the cytoplasm, where they are translated to produce HIV proteins, including Rev. As the newly produced Rev protein is produced it moves to the nucleus, where it binds to full-length, unspliced copies of virus RNAs and allows them to leave the nucleus. Some of these full-length RNAs function as mRNAs that are translated to produce the structural proteins Gag and Env. Gag proteins bind to copies of the virus RNA genome to package them into new virus particles. HIV-1 and HIV-2 appear to package their RNA differently. HIV-1 will bind to any appropriate RNA. HIV-2 will preferentially bind to the mRNA that was used to create the Gag protein itself.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Two RNA genomes are encapsidated in each HIV-1 particle (see Structure and genome of HIV). Upon infection and replication catalyzed by reverse transcriptase, recombination between the two genomes can occur. Recombination occurs as the single-strand, positive-sense RNA genomes are reverse transcribed to form DNA. During reverse transcription, the nascent DNA can switch multiple times between the two copies of the viral RNA. This form of recombination is known as copy-choice. Recombination events may occur throughout the genome. Anywhere from two to 20 recombination events per genome may occur at each replication cycle, and these events can rapidly shuffle the genetic information that is transmitted from parental to progeny genomes.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Viral recombination produces genetic variation that likely contributes to the evolution of resistance to anti-retroviral therapy. Recombination may also contribute, in principle, to overcoming the immune defenses of the host. Yet, for the adaptive advantages of genetic variation to be realized, the two viral genomes packaged in individual infecting virus particles need to have arisen from separate progenitor parental viruses of differing genetic constitution. It is unknown how often such mixed packaging occurs under natural conditions.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Bonhoeffer et al. suggested that template switching by reverse transcriptase acts as a repair process to deal with breaks in the single-stranded RNA genome. In addition, Hu and Temin suggested that recombination is an adaptation for repair of damage in the RNA genomes. Strand switching (copy-choice recombination) by reverse transcriptase could generate an undamaged copy of genomic DNA from two damaged single-stranded RNA genome copies. This view of the adaptive benefit of recombination in HIV could explain why each HIV particle contains two complete genomes, rather than one. Furthermore, the view that recombination is a repair process implies that the benefit of repair can occur at each replication cycle, and that this benefit can be realized whether or not the two genomes differ genetically. On the view that recombination in HIV is a repair process, the generation of recombinational variation would be a consequence, but not the cause of, the evolution of template switching.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "HIV-1 infection causes chronic inflammation and production of reactive oxygen species. Thus, the HIV genome may be vulnerable to oxidative damage, including breaks in the single-stranded RNA. For HIV, as well as for viruses in general, successful infection depends on overcoming host defense strategies that often include production of genome-damaging reactive oxygen species. Thus, Michod et al. suggested that recombination by viruses is an adaptation for repair of genome damage, and that recombinational variation is a byproduct that may provide a separate benefit.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The final step of the viral cycle, assembly of new HIV-1 virions, begins at the plasma membrane of the host cell. The Env polyprotein (gp160) goes through the endoplasmic reticulum and is transported to the Golgi apparatus where it is cleaved by furin resulting in the two HIV envelope glycoproteins, gp41 and gp120. These are transported to the plasma membrane of the host cell where gp41 anchors gp120 to the membrane of the infected cell. The Gag (p55) and Gag-Pol (p160) polyproteins also associate with the inner surface of the plasma membrane along with the HIV genomic RNA as the forming virion begins to bud from the host cell. The budded virion is still immature as the gag polyproteins still need to be cleaved into the actual matrix, capsid and nucleocapsid proteins. This cleavage is mediated by the packaged viral protease and can be inhibited by antiretroviral drugs of the protease inhibitor class. The various structural components then assemble to produce a mature HIV virion. Only mature virions are then able to infect another cell.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The classical process of infection of a cell by a virion can be called \"cell-free spread\" to distinguish it from a more recently recognized process called \"cell-to-cell spread\". In cell-free spread (see figure), virus particles bud from an infected T cell, enter the blood or extracellular fluid and then infect another T cell following a chance encounter. HIV can also disseminate by direct transmission from one cell to another by a process of cell-to-cell spread, for which two pathways have been described. Firstly, an infected T cell can transmit virus directly to a target T cell via a virological synapse. Secondly, an antigen-presenting cell (APC), such as a macrophage or dendritic cell, can transmit HIV to T cells by a process that either involves productive infection (in the case of macrophages) or capture and transfer of virions in trans (in the case of dendritic cells). Whichever pathway is used, infection by cell-to-cell transfer is reported to be much more efficient than cell-free virus spread. A number of factors contribute to this increased efficiency, including polarised virus budding towards the site of cell-to-cell contact, close apposition of cells, which minimizes fluid-phase diffusion of virions, and clustering of HIV entry receptors on the target cell towards the contact zone. Cell-to-cell spread is thought to be particularly important in lymphoid tissues, where CD4 T cells are densely packed and likely to interact frequently. Intravital imaging studies have supported the concept of the HIV virological synapse in vivo. The many dissemination mechanisms available to HIV contribute to the virus' ongoing replication in spite of anti-retroviral therapies.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "HIV differs from many viruses in that it has very high genetic variability. This diversity is a result of its fast replication cycle, with the generation of about 10 virions every day, coupled with a high mutation rate of approximately 3 x 10 per nucleotide base per cycle of replication and recombinogenic properties of reverse transcriptase.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "This complex scenario leads to the generation of many variants of HIV in a single infected patient in the course of one day. This variability is compounded when a single cell is simultaneously infected by two or more different strains of HIV. When simultaneous infection occurs, the genome of progeny virions may be composed of RNA strands from two different strains. This hybrid virion then infects a new cell where it undergoes replication. As this happens, the reverse transcriptase, by jumping back and forth between the two different RNA templates, will generate a newly synthesized retroviral DNA sequence that is a recombinant between the two parental genomes. This recombination is most obvious when it occurs between subtypes.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The closely related simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) has evolved into many strains, classified by the natural host species. SIV strains of the African green monkey (SIVagm) and sooty mangabey (SIVsmm) are thought to have a long evolutionary history with their hosts. These hosts have adapted to the presence of the virus, which is present at high levels in the host's blood, but evokes only a mild immune response, does not cause the development of simian AIDS, and does not undergo the extensive mutation and recombination typical of HIV infection in humans.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In contrast, when these strains infect species that have not adapted to SIV (\"heterologous\" or similar hosts such as rhesus or cynomologus macaques), the animals develop AIDS and the virus generates genetic diversity similar to what is seen in human HIV infection. Chimpanzee SIV (SIVcpz), the closest genetic relative of HIV-1, is associated with increased mortality and AIDS-like symptoms in its natural host. SIVcpz appears to have been transmitted relatively recently to chimpanzee and human populations, so their hosts have not yet adapted to the virus. This virus has also lost a function of the nef gene that is present in most SIVs. For non-pathogenic SIV variants, nef suppresses T cell activation through the CD3 marker. Nef's function in non-pathogenic forms of SIV is to downregulate expression of inflammatory cytokines, MHC-1, and signals that affect T cell trafficking. In HIV-1 and SIVcpz, nef does not inhibit T-cell activation and it has lost this function. Without this function, T cell depletion is more likely, leading to immunodeficiency.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Three groups of HIV-1 have been identified on the basis of differences in the envelope (env) region: M, N, and O. Group M is the most prevalent and is subdivided into eight subtypes (or clades), based on the whole genome, which are geographically distinct. The most prevalent are subtypes B (found mainly in North America and Europe), A and D (found mainly in Africa), and C (found mainly in Africa and Asia); these subtypes form branches in the phylogenetic tree representing the lineage of the M group of HIV-1. Co-infection with distinct subtypes gives rise to circulating recombinant forms (CRFs). In 2000, the last year in which an analysis of global subtype prevalence was made, 47.2% of infections worldwide were of subtype C, 26.7% were of subtype A/CRF02_AG, 12.3% were of subtype B, 5.3% were of subtype D, 3.2% were of CRF_AE, and the remaining 5.3% were composed of other subtypes and CRFs. Most HIV-1 research is focused on subtype B; few laboratories focus on the other subtypes. The existence of a fourth group, \"P\", has been hypothesised based on a virus isolated in 2009. The strain is apparently derived from gorilla SIV (SIVgor), first isolated from western lowland gorillas in 2006.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "HIV-2's closest relative is SIVsm, a strain of SIV found in sooty mangabees. Since HIV-1 is derived from SIVcpz, and HIV-2 from SIVsm, the genetic sequence of HIV-2 is only partially homologous to HIV-1 and more closely resembles that of SIVsm.",
"title": "Virology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Many HIV-positive people are unaware that they are infected with the virus. For example, in 2001 less than 1% of the sexually active urban population in Africa had been tested, and this proportion is even lower in rural populations. Furthermore, in 2001 only 0.5% of pregnant women attending urban health facilities were counselled, tested or received their test results. Again, this proportion is even lower in rural health facilities. Since donors may therefore be unaware of their infection, donor blood and blood products used in medicine and medical research are routinely screened for HIV.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "HIV-1 testing is initially done using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect antibodies to HIV-1. Specimens with a non-reactive result from the initial ELISA are considered HIV-negative, unless new exposure to an infected partner or partner of unknown HIV status has occurred. Specimens with a reactive ELISA result are retested in duplicate. If the result of either duplicate test is reactive, the specimen is reported as repeatedly reactive and undergoes confirmatory testing with a more specific supplemental test (e.g., a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), western blot or, less commonly, an immunofluorescence assay (IFA)). Only specimens that are repeatedly reactive by ELISA and positive by IFA or PCR or reactive by western blot are considered HIV-positive and indicative of HIV infection. Specimens that are repeatedly ELISA-reactive occasionally provide an indeterminate western blot result, which may be either an incomplete antibody response to HIV in an infected person or nonspecific reactions in an uninfected person.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "HIV deaths in 2014 excluding the U.S.:",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Although IFA can be used to confirm infection in these ambiguous cases, this assay is not widely used. In general, a second specimen should be collected more than a month later and retested for persons with indeterminate western blot results. Although much less commonly available, nucleic acid testing (e.g., viral RNA or proviral DNA amplification method) can also help diagnosis in certain situations. In addition, a few tested specimens might provide inconclusive results because of a low quantity specimen. In these situations, a second specimen is collected and tested for HIV infection.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Modern HIV testing is extremely accurate, when the window period is taken into consideration. A single screening test is correct more than 99% of the time. The chance of a false-positive result in a standard two-step testing protocol is estimated to be about 1 in 250,000 in a low risk population. Testing post-exposure is recommended immediately and then at six weeks, three months, and six months.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The latest recommendations of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that HIV testing must start with an immunoassay combination test for HIV-1 and HIV-2 antibodies and p24 antigen. A negative result rules out HIV exposure, while a positive one must be followed by an HIV-1/2 antibody differentiation immunoassay to detect which antibodies are present. This gives rise to four possible scenarios:",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "HIV/AIDS research includes all medical research that attempts to prevent, treat, or cure HIV/AIDS, as well as fundamental research about the nature of HIV as an infectious agent and AIDS as the disease caused by HIV.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Many governments and research institutions participate in HIV/AIDS research. This research includes behavioral health interventions, such as research into sex education, and drug development, such as research into microbicides for sexually transmitted diseases, HIV vaccines, and anti-retroviral drugs. Other medical research areas include the topics of pre-exposure prophylaxis, post-exposure prophylaxis, circumcision, and accelerated aging effects.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The management of HIV/AIDS normally includes the use of multiple antiretroviral drugs. In many parts of the world, HIV has become a chronic condition in which progression to AIDS is increasingly rare.",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "HIV latency, and the consequent viral reservoir in CD4 T cells, dendritic cells, as well as macrophages, is the main barrier to eradication of the virus.",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Although HIV is highly virulent, transmission does not occur through sex when an HIV-positive person has a consistently undetectable viral load (<50 copies/ml) due to anti-retroviral treatment. This was first argued by the Swiss Federal Commission for AIDS/HIV in 2008 in the Swiss Statement, though the statement was controversial at the time. However, following multiple studies, it became clear that the chance of passing on HIV through sex is effectively zero where the HIV-positive person has a consistently undetectable viral load; this is known as U=U, \"Undetectable=Untransmittable\", also phrased as \"can't pass it on\". The studies demonstrating U=U are: Opposites Attract, PARTNER 1, PARTNER 2, (for male-male couples) and HPTN052 (for heterosexual couples) when \"the partner living with HIV had a durably suppressed viral load.\" In these studies, couples where one partner was HIV positive and one partner was HIV negative were enrolled and regular HIV testing completed. In total from the four studies, 4097 couples were enrolled over four continents and 151,880 acts of condomless sex were reported; there were zero phylogenetically linked transmissions of HIV where the positive partner had an undetectable viral load. Following this, the U=U consensus statement advocating the use of \"zero risk\" was signed by hundreds of individuals and organisations, including the US CDC, British HIV Association and The Lancet medical journal. The importance of the final results of the PARTNER 2 study were described by the medical director of the Terrence Higgins Trust as \"impossible to overstate\", while lead author Alison Rodger declared that the message that \"undetectable viral load makes HIV untransmittable ... can help end the HIV pandemic by preventing HIV transmission. The authors summarised their findings in The Lancet as follows:",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Our results provide a similar level of evidence on viral suppression and HIV transmission risk for gay men to that previously generated for heterosexual couples and suggest that the risk of HIV transmission in gay couples through condomless sex when HIV viral load is suppressed is effectively zero. Our findings support the message of the U=U (undetectable equals untransmittable) campaign, and the benefits of early testing and treatment for HIV.",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "This result is consistent with the conclusion presented by Anthony S. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and his team in a viewpoint published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that U=U is an effective HIV prevention method when an undetectable viral load is maintained.",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Genital herpes (HSV-2) reactivation in those infected with the virus have an associated increase in CCR-5 enriched CD4+ T cells as well as inflammatory dendritic cells in the submucosa of the genital skin. Tropism of HIV for CCR-5 positive cells explains the two to threefold increase in HIV acquisition among persons with genital herpes. Daily antiviral (e.g. acyclovir) medication does not reduce the sub-clinical post reactivation inflammation and therefore does not confer reduced risk of HIV acquisition.",
"title": "Treatment and transmission"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The first news story on \"an exotic new disease\" appeared May 18, 1981, in the gay newspaper New York Native.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "AIDS was first clinically observed in 1981 in the United States. The initial cases were a cluster of injection drug users and gay men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP or PJP, the latter term recognizing that the causative agent is now called Pneumocystis jirovecii), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems. Soon thereafter, researchers at the NYU School of Medicine studied gay men developing a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PJP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak. The earliest retrospectively described case of AIDS is believed to have been in Norway beginning in 1966.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the beginning, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. In the general press, the term GRID, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. The CDC, in search of a name and looking at the infected communities, coined \"the 4H disease\", as it seemed to single out homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1983, two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. Gallo claimed that a virus his group had isolated from a person with AIDS was strikingly similar in shape to other human T-lymphotropic viruses (HTLVs) his group had been the first to isolate. Gallo admitted in 1987 that the virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984 was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before. Gallo's group called their newly isolated virus HTLV-III. Montagnier's group isolated a virus from a patient presenting with swelling of the lymph nodes of the neck and physical weakness, two classic symptoms of primary HIV infection. Contradicting the report from Gallo's group, Montagnier and his colleagues showed that core proteins of this virus were immunologically different from those of HTLV-I. Montagnier's group named their isolated virus lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). As these two viruses turned out to be the same, in 1986 LAV and HTLV-III were renamed HIV.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Another group working contemporaneously with the Montagnier and Gallo groups was that of Jay A. Levy at the University of California, San Francisco. He independently discovered the AIDS virus in 1983 and named it the AIDS associated retrovirus (ARV). This virus was very different from the virus reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups. The ARV strains indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates and several of these remain classic examples of the AIDS virus found in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa, and are believed to have transferred to humans (a process known as zoonosis) in the early 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "HIV-1 appears to have originated in southern Cameroon through the evolution of SIVcpz, a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that infects wild chimpanzees (HIV-1 descends from the SIVcpz endemic in the chimpanzee subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes). The closest relative of HIV-2 is SIVsmm, a virus of the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys atys), an Old World monkey living in littoral West Africa (from southern Senegal to western Côte d'Ivoire). New World monkeys such as the owl monkey are resistant to HIV-1 infection, possibly because of a genomic fusion of two viral resistance genes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "HIV-1 is thought to have jumped the species barrier on at least three separate occasions, giving rise to the three groups of the virus, M, N, and O.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "There is evidence that humans who participate in bushmeat activities, either as hunters or as bushmeat vendors, commonly acquire SIV. However, SIV is a weak virus, and it is typically suppressed by the human immune system within weeks of infection. It is thought that several transmissions of the virus from individual to individual in quick succession are necessary to allow it enough time to mutate into HIV. Furthermore, due to its relatively low person-to-person transmission rate, it can only spread throughout the population in the presence of one or more high-risk transmission channels, which are thought to have been absent in Africa prior to the 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Specific proposed high-risk transmission channels, allowing the virus to adapt to humans and spread throughout the society, depend on the proposed timing of the animal-to-human crossing. Genetic studies of the virus suggest that the most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group dates back to c. 1910. Proponents of this dating link the HIV epidemic with the emergence of colonialism and growth of large colonial African cities, leading to social changes, including different patterns of sexual contact (especially multiple, concurrent partnerships), the spread of prostitution, and the concomitant high frequency of genital ulcer diseases (such as syphilis) in nascent colonial cities. While transmission rates of HIV during vaginal intercourse are typically low, they are increased manyfold if one of the partners has a sexually transmitted infection resulting in genital ulcers. Early 1900s colonial cities were notable for their high prevalence of prostitution and genital ulcers to the degree that as of 1928 as many as 45% of female residents of eastern Leopoldville (currently Kinshasa) were thought to have been prostitutes and as of 1933 around 15% of all residents of the same city were infected by one of the forms of syphilis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The earliest, well-documented case of HIV in a human dates back to 1959 in the Belgian Congo. The virus may have been present in the United States as early as the mid- to late 1960s, as a sixteen-year-old male named Robert Rayford presented with symptoms in 1966 and died in 1969.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "An alternative and likely complementary hypothesis points to the widespread use of unsafe medical practices in Africa during years following World War II, such as unsterile reuse of single-use syringes during mass vaccination, antibiotic, and anti-malaria treatment campaigns. Research on the timing of most recent common ancestor for HIV-1 groups M and O, as well as on HIV-2 groups A and B, indicates that SIV has given rise to transmissible HIV lineages throughout the twentieth century. The dispersed timing of these transmissions to humans implies that no single external factor is needed to explain the cross-species transmission of HIV. This observation is consistent with both of the two prevailing views of the origin of the HIV epidemics, namely SIV transmission to humans during the slaughter or butchering of infected primates, and the colonial expansion of sub-Saharan African cities.",
"title": "History"
}
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| The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of Lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive. Without treatment, the average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype. In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant during pregnancy, during childbirth by exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid, and through breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells.
Research has shown (for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples) that HIV is untransmittable through condomless sexual intercourse if the HIV-positive partner has a consistently undetectable viral load. HIV infects vital cells in the human immune system, such as helper T cells (specifically CD4+ T cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4+ T cells through a number of mechanisms, including pyroptosis of abortively infected T cells, apoptosis of uninfected bystander cells, direct viral killing of infected cells, and killing of infected CD4+ T cells by CD8+ cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells. When CD4+ T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections, leading to the development of AIDS. | 2001-11-21T07:48:43Z | 2023-12-26T20:54:05Z | [
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14,173 | HOL | Hol or HOL may refer to: | [
{
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"text": "Hol or HOL may refer to:",
"title": ""
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| Hol or HOL may refer to: | 2023-03-09T07:43:30Z | [
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14,174 | Hostile witness | A hostile witness, also known as an adverse witness or an unfavorable witness, is a witness at trial whose testimony on direct examination is either openly antagonistic or appears to be contrary to the legal position of the party who called the witness. This concept is used in the legal proceedings in the United States, and analogues of it exist in other legal systems in Western countries.
During direct examination, if the examining attorney who called the witness finds that their testimony is antagonistic or contrary to the legal position of their client, the attorney may request that the judge declare the witness "hostile". If the request is granted, the attorney may proceed to ask the witness leading questions. Leading questions either suggest the answer ("You saw my client sign the contract, correct?") or challenge (impeach) the witness's testimony. As a rule, leading questions are generally allowed only during cross-examination, but a hostile witness is an exception to this rule.
In cross-examination conducted by the opposing party's attorney, a witness is presumed to be hostile and the examining attorney is not required to seek the judge's permission before asking leading questions. Attorneys can influence a hostile witness's responses by using Gestalt psychology to influence the way the witness perceives the situation, and utility theory to understand their likely responses. The attorney will integrate a hostile witness's expected responses into the larger case strategy through pretrial planning and through adapting as necessary during the course of the trial.
In the state of New South Wales, the term 'unfavourable witness' is defined by section 38 of the Evidence Act which permits the prosecution to cross-examine their own witness. For example, if the prosecution calls all material witnesses relevant to a case before the court, and any evidence given is not favourable to, or supports the prosecution case, or a witness has given a prior inconsistent statement, then the prosecution may seek leave of the court, via section 192, to test the witness in relation to their evidence.
In New Zealand, section 94 of the Evidence Act 2006 permits a party to cross-examine their own witness if the presiding judge determines the witness to be hostile and gives permission. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A hostile witness, also known as an adverse witness or an unfavorable witness, is a witness at trial whose testimony on direct examination is either openly antagonistic or appears to be contrary to the legal position of the party who called the witness. This concept is used in the legal proceedings in the United States, and analogues of it exist in other legal systems in Western countries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "During direct examination, if the examining attorney who called the witness finds that their testimony is antagonistic or contrary to the legal position of their client, the attorney may request that the judge declare the witness \"hostile\". If the request is granted, the attorney may proceed to ask the witness leading questions. Leading questions either suggest the answer (\"You saw my client sign the contract, correct?\") or challenge (impeach) the witness's testimony. As a rule, leading questions are generally allowed only during cross-examination, but a hostile witness is an exception to this rule.",
"title": "Process"
},
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"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In cross-examination conducted by the opposing party's attorney, a witness is presumed to be hostile and the examining attorney is not required to seek the judge's permission before asking leading questions. Attorneys can influence a hostile witness's responses by using Gestalt psychology to influence the way the witness perceives the situation, and utility theory to understand their likely responses. The attorney will integrate a hostile witness's expected responses into the larger case strategy through pretrial planning and through adapting as necessary during the course of the trial.",
"title": "Process"
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"text": "In the state of New South Wales, the term 'unfavourable witness' is defined by section 38 of the Evidence Act which permits the prosecution to cross-examine their own witness. For example, if the prosecution calls all material witnesses relevant to a case before the court, and any evidence given is not favourable to, or supports the prosecution case, or a witness has given a prior inconsistent statement, then the prosecution may seek leave of the court, via section 192, to test the witness in relation to their evidence.",
"title": "Jurisdiction"
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"text": "In New Zealand, section 94 of the Evidence Act 2006 permits a party to cross-examine their own witness if the presiding judge determines the witness to be hostile and gives permission.",
"title": "Jurisdiction"
}
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| A hostile witness, also known as an adverse witness or an unfavorable witness, is a witness at trial whose testimony on direct examination is either openly antagonistic or appears to be contrary to the legal position of the party who called the witness. This concept is used in the legal proceedings in the United States, and analogues of it exist in other legal systems in Western countries. | 2023-02-21T01:24:03Z | [
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14,179 | Henry I of England | Henry I (c. 1068 – 1 December 1135), also known as Henry Beauclerc, was King of England from 1100 to his death in 1135. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror and was educated in Latin and the liberal arts. On William's death in 1087, Henry's elder brothers Robert Curthose and William Rufus inherited Normandy and England, respectively, but Henry was left landless. He purchased the County of Cotentin in western Normandy from Robert, but his brothers deposed him in 1091. He gradually rebuilt his power base in the Cotentin and allied himself with William Rufus against Robert.
Present in England with his brother William, who died in a hunting accident, Henry seized the English throne, promising at his coronation to correct many of William's less popular policies. He married Matilda of Scotland and they had two surviving children, Empress Matilda and William Adelin; he also had many illegitimate children by his numerous mistresses. Robert, who invaded from Normandy in 1101, disputed Henry's control of England; this military campaign ended in a negotiated settlement that confirmed Henry as king. The peace was short-lived, and Henry invaded the Duchy of Normandy in 1105 and 1106, finally defeating Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray. Henry kept Robert imprisoned for the rest of his life. Henry's control of Normandy was challenged by Louis VI of France, Baldwin VII of Flanders and Fulk V of Anjou, who promoted the rival claims of Robert's son, William Clito, and supported a major rebellion in the Duchy between 1116 and 1119. Following Henry's victory at the Battle of Brémule, a favourable peace settlement was agreed with Louis in 1120.
Considered by contemporaries to be a harsh but effective ruler, Henry skilfully manipulated the barons in England and Normandy. In England, he drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxation, but also strengthened it with more institutions, including the royal exchequer and itinerant justices. Normandy was also governed through a growing system of justices and an exchequer. Many of the officials who ran Henry's system were "new men" of obscure backgrounds, rather than from families of high status, who rose through the ranks as administrators. Henry encouraged ecclesiastical reform, but became embroiled in a serious dispute in 1101 with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, which was resolved through a compromise solution in 1105. He supported the Cluniac order and played a major role in the selection of the senior clergy in England and Normandy.
Henry's son William drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, throwing the royal succession into doubt. Henry took a second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. In response to this, he declared his daughter Matilda his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The relationship between Henry and the couple became strained, and fighting broke out along the border with Anjou. Henry died on 1 December 1135 after a week of illness. Despite his plans for Matilda, the King was succeeded by his nephew Stephen of Blois, resulting in a period of civil war known as the Anarchy.
Henry was probably born in England in 1068, in either the summer or the last weeks of the year, possibly in the town of Selby in Yorkshire. His father was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy who had invaded England in 1066 to become the king of England, establishing lands stretching into Wales. The invasion had created an Anglo-Norman ruling class, many with estates on both sides of the English Channel. These Anglo-Norman barons typically had close links to the Kingdom of France, which was then a loose collection of counties and smaller polities, only nominally under control of the king. Henry's mother, Matilda of Flanders, was the granddaughter of Robert II of France, and she probably named Henry after her uncle, King Henry I of France.
Henry was the youngest of William and Matilda's four sons. Physically he resembled his older brothers Robert Curthose, Richard and William Rufus, being, as historian David Carpenter describes, "short, stocky and barrel-chested," with black hair. As a result of their age differences and Richard's early death, Henry would have probably seen relatively little of his older brothers. He probably knew his sister Adela well, as the two were close in age. There is little documentary evidence for his early years; historians Warren Hollister and Kathleen Thompson suggest he was brought up predominantly in England, while Judith Green argues he was initially brought up in the Duchy. He was probably educated by the Church, possibly by Bishop Osmund, the King's chancellor, at Salisbury Cathedral; it is uncertain if this indicated an intent by his parents for Henry to become a member of the clergy. It is also uncertain how far Henry's education extended, but he was probably able to read Latin and had some background in the liberal arts. He was given military training by an instructor called Robert Achard, and Henry was knighted by his father on 24 May 1086.
In 1087, William was fatally injured during a campaign in the Vexin. Henry joined his dying father near Rouen in September, where the King partitioned his possessions among his sons. The rules of succession in western Europe at the time were uncertain; in some parts of France, primogeniture, in which the eldest son would inherit a title, was growing in popularity. In other parts of Europe, including Normandy and England, the tradition was for lands to be divided, with the eldest son taking patrimonial lands – usually considered to be the most valuable – and younger sons given smaller, or more recently acquired, partitions or estates.
In dividing his lands, William appears to have followed the Norman tradition, distinguishing between Normandy, which he had inherited, and England, which he had acquired through war. William's second son, Richard, had died in a hunting accident, leaving Henry and his two brothers to inherit William's estate. Robert, the eldest, despite being in armed rebellion against his father at the time of his death, received Normandy. England was given to William Rufus, who was in favour with the dying king. Henry was given a large sum of money, usually reported as £5,000, with the expectation that he would also be given his mother's modest set of lands in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire. William's funeral at Caen was marred by angry complaints from a local man, and Henry may have been responsible for resolving the dispute by buying off the protester with silver.
Robert returned to Normandy, expecting to have been given both the Duchy and England, to find that William Rufus had crossed the Channel and been crowned king. The two brothers disagreed fundamentally over the inheritance, and Robert soon began to plan an invasion of England to seize the kingdom, helped by a rebellion by some of the leading nobles against William Rufus. Henry remained in Normandy and took up a role within Robert's court, possibly either because he was unwilling to side openly with William Rufus, or because Robert might have taken the opportunity to confiscate Henry's inherited money if he had tried to leave. William Rufus sequestered Henry's new estates in England, leaving Henry landless.
In 1088, Robert's plans for the invasion of England began to falter, and he turned to Henry, proposing that his brother lend him some of his inheritance, which Henry refused. Henry and Robert then came to an alternative arrangement, in which Robert would make Henry the count of western Normandy, in exchange for £3,000. Henry's lands were a new countship created by a delegation of the ducal authority in the Cotentin, but it extended across the Avranchin, with control over the bishoprics of both. This also gave Henry influence over two major Norman leaders, Hugh d'Avranches and Richard de Redvers, and the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, whose lands spread out further across the Duchy. Robert's invasion force failed to leave Normandy, leaving William Rufus secure in England.
Henry quickly established himself as count, building up a network of followers from western Normandy and eastern Brittany, whom the historian John Le Patourel has characterised as "Henry's gang". His early supporters included Roger of Mandeville, Richard of Redvers, Richard d'Avranches and Robert Fitzhamon, along with the churchman Roger of Salisbury. Robert attempted to go back on his deal with Henry and re-appropriate the county, but Henry's grip was already sufficiently firm to prevent this. Robert's rule of the duchy was chaotic, and parts of Henry's lands became almost independent of central control from Rouen.
During this period, neither William nor Robert seems to have trusted Henry. Waiting until the rebellion against William Rufus was safely over, Henry returned to England in July 1088. He met with the King but was unable to persuade him to grant him their mother's estates, and travelled back to Normandy in the autumn. While he had been away, however, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who regarded Henry as a potential competitor, had convinced Robert that Henry was conspiring against the duke with William Rufus. On landing, Odo seized Henry and imprisoned him in Neuilly-la-Forêt, and Robert took back the county of the Cotentin. Henry was held there over the winter, but in the spring of 1089 the senior elements of the Normandy nobility prevailed upon Robert to release him.
Although no longer formally the Count of Cotentin, Henry continued to control the west of Normandy. The struggle between his brothers continued. William Rufus continued to put down resistance to his rule in England, but began to build a series of alliances against Robert with barons in Normandy and neighbouring Ponthieu. Robert allied himself with Philip I of France. In late 1090 William Rufus encouraged Conan Pilatus, a powerful burgher in Rouen, to rebel against Robert; Conan was supported by most of Rouen and made appeals to the neighbouring ducal garrisons to switch allegiance as well.
Robert issued an appeal for help to his barons, and Henry was the first to arrive in Rouen in November. Violence broke out, leading to savage, confused street fighting as both sides attempted to take control of the city. Robert and Henry left the castle to join the battle, but Robert then retreated, leaving Henry to continue the fighting. The battle turned in favour of the ducal forces and Henry took Conan prisoner. Henry was angry that Conan had turned against his feudal lord. He had him taken to the top of Rouen Castle and then, despite Conan's offers to pay a huge ransom, threw him off the top of the castle to his death. Contemporaries considered Henry to have acted appropriately in making an example of Conan, and Henry became famous for his exploits in the battle.
In the aftermath, Robert forced Henry to leave Rouen, probably because Henry's role in the fighting had been more prominent than his own, and possibly because Henry had asked to be formally reinstated as the count of the Cotentin. In early 1091, William Rufus invaded Normandy with a sufficiently large army to bring Robert to the negotiating table. The two brothers signed a treaty at Rouen, granting William Rufus a range of lands and castles in Normandy. In return, William Rufus promised to support Robert's attempts to regain control of the neighbouring county of Maine, once under Norman control, and help in regaining control over the duchy, including Henry's lands. They nominated each other as heirs to England and Normandy, excluding Henry from any succession while either one of them lived.
War now broke out between Henry and his brothers. Henry mobilised a mercenary army in the west of Normandy, but as William Rufus and Robert's forces advanced, his network of baronial support melted away. Henry focused his remaining forces at Mont Saint-Michel, where he was besieged, probably in March 1091. The site was easy to defend, but lacked fresh water. The chronicler William of Malmesbury suggested that when Henry's water ran short, Robert allowed his brother fresh supplies, leading to remonstrations between Robert and William Rufus. The events of the final days of the siege are unclear: the besiegers had begun to argue about the future strategy for the campaign, but Henry then abandoned Mont Saint-Michel, probably as part of a negotiated surrender. He left for Brittany and crossed over into France.
Henry's next steps are not well documented; one chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, suggests that he travelled in the French Vexin, along the Normandy border, for over a year with a small band of followers. By the end of the year, Robert and William Rufus had fallen out once again, and the Treaty of Rouen had been abandoned. In 1092, Henry and his followers seized the Normandy town of Domfront. Domfront had previously been controlled by Robert of Bellême, but the inhabitants disliked his rule and invited Henry to take over the town, which he did in a bloodless coup. Over the next two years, Henry re-established his network of supporters across western Normandy, forming what Judith Green terms a "court in waiting". By 1094, he was allocating lands and castles to his followers as if he were the Duke of Normandy. William Rufus began to support Henry with money, encouraging his campaign against Robert, and Henry used some of this to construct a substantial castle at Domfront.
William Rufus crossed into Normandy to take the war to Robert in 1094, and when progress stalled, called upon Henry for assistance. Henry responded, but travelled to London instead of joining the main campaign further east in Normandy, possibly at the request of the King, who in any event abandoned the campaign and returned to England. Over the next few years, Henry appears to have strengthened his power base in western Normandy, visiting England occasionally to attend at William Rufus's court. In 1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, encouraging knights from across Europe to join. Robert joined the Crusade, borrowing money from William Rufus to do so, and granting the King temporary custody of his part of the Duchy in exchange. The King appeared confident of regaining the remainder of Normandy from Robert, and Henry appeared ever closer to William Rufus. They campaigned together in the Norman Vexin between 1097 and 1098.
On the afternoon of 2 August 1100, King William Rufus went hunting in the New Forest, accompanied by a team of huntsmen and Norman nobility, including Henry. An arrow, possibly shot by the baron Walter Tirel, hit and killed William Rufus. Many conspiracy theories have been put forward suggesting that the King was killed deliberately; most modern historians reject these, as hunting was a risky activity and such accidents were common. Chaos broke out, and Tirel fled the scene for France, either because he had shot the fatal arrow, or because he had been incorrectly accused and feared that he would be made a scapegoat for the King's death.
Henry rode to Winchester, where an argument ensued as to who now had the best claim to the throne. William of Breteuil championed the rights of Robert, who was still abroad, returning from the Crusade, and to whom Henry and the barons had given homage in previous years. Henry argued that, unlike Robert, he had been born to a reigning king and queen, thereby giving him a claim under the right of porphyrogeniture. Tempers flared, but Henry, supported by Henry de Beaumont and Robert of Meulan, held sway and persuaded the barons to follow him. He occupied Winchester Castle and seized the royal treasury.
Henry was hastily crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 5 August by Maurice, the bishop of London, as Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been exiled by William Rufus, and Thomas, the archbishop of York, was in the north of England at Ripon. In accordance with English tradition and in a bid to legitimise his rule, Henry issued a coronation charter laying out various commitments. The new king presented himself as having restored order to a trouble-torn country. He announced that he would abandon William Rufus's policies towards the Church, which had been seen as oppressive by the clergy; he promised to prevent royal abuses of the barons' property rights, and assured a return to the gentler customs of Edward the Confessor; he asserted that he would "establish a firm peace" across England and ordered "that this peace shall henceforth be kept".
As well as his existing circle of supporters, many of whom were richly rewarded with new lands, Henry quickly co-opted many of the existing administration into his new royal household. William Giffard, William Rufus's chancellor, was made the bishop of Winchester, and the prominent sheriffs Urse d'Abetot, Haimo Dapifer and Robert Fitzhamon continued to play a senior role in government. By contrast, the unpopular Ranulf Flambard, the bishop of Durham and a key member of the previous regime, was imprisoned in the Tower of London and charged with corruption. The late king had left many Church positions unfilled, and Henry set about nominating candidates to these, in an effort to build further support for his new government. The appointments needed to be consecrated, and Henry wrote to Anselm, apologising for having been crowned while the archbishop was still in France and asking him to return at once.
On 11 November 1100 Henry married Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland, in Westminster Abbey. Henry was now around 31 years old, but late marriages for noblemen were not unusual in the 11th century. The pair had probably first met earlier the previous decade, possibly being introduced through Bishop Osmund of Salisbury. Historian Warren Hollister argues that Henry and Matilda were emotionally close, but their union was also certainly politically motivated. Matilda had originally been named Edith, an Anglo-Saxon name, and was a member of the West Saxon royal family, being the niece of Edgar the Ætheling, the great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and a descendant of Alfred the Great. For Henry, marrying Matilda gave his reign increased legitimacy, and for Matilda, an ambitious woman, it was an opportunity for high status and power in England.
Matilda had been educated in a sequence of convents and may well have taken the vows to formally become a nun, which formed an obstacle to the marriage progressing. She did not wish to be a nun and appealed to Anselm for permission to marry Henry, and the Archbishop established a council at Lambeth Palace to judge the issue. Despite some dissenting voices, the council concluded that although Matilda had lived in a convent, she had not actually become a nun and was therefore free to marry, a judgement that Anselm then affirmed, allowing the marriage to proceed. Matilda proved an effective queen for Henry, acting as a regent in England on occasion, addressing and presiding over councils, and extensively supporting the arts. The couple soon had two children, Matilda, born in 1102, and William Adelin, born in 1103; it is possible that they also had a second son, Richard, who died young. Following the birth of these children, Matilda preferred to remain based in Westminster while Henry travelled across England and Normandy, either for religious reasons or because she enjoyed being involved in the machinery of royal governance.
Henry had a considerable sexual appetite and enjoyed a substantial number of sexual partners, resulting in many illegitimate children, at least nine sons and 13 daughters, many of whom he appears to have recognised and supported. It was normal for unmarried Anglo-Norman noblemen to have sexual relations with prostitutes and local women, and kings were also expected to have mistresses. Some of these relationships occurred before Henry was married, but many others took place after his marriage to Matilda. Henry had a wide range of mistresses from a range of backgrounds, and the relationships appear to have been conducted relatively openly. He may have chosen some of his noble mistresses for political purposes, but the evidence to support this theory is limited.
By early 1101, Henry's new regime was established and functioning, but many of the Anglo-Norman elite still supported his brother Robert, or would be prepared to switch sides if Robert appeared likely to gain power in England. In February, Flambard escaped from the Tower of London and crossed the Channel to Normandy, where he injected fresh direction and energy to Robert's attempts to mobilise an invasion force. By July, Robert had formed an army and a fleet, ready to move against Henry in England. Raising the stakes in the conflict, Henry seized Flambard's lands and, with the support of Anselm, Flambard was removed from his position as bishop. The King held court in April and June, where the nobility renewed their oaths of allegiance to him, but their support still appeared partial and shaky.
With the invasion imminent, Henry mobilised his forces and fleet outside Pevensey, close to Robert's anticipated landing site, training some of them personally in how to counter cavalry charges. Despite English levies and knights owing military service to the Church arriving in considerable numbers, many of his barons did not appear. Anselm intervened with some of the doubters, emphasising the religious importance of their loyalty to Henry. Robert unexpectedly landed further up the coast at Portsmouth on 20 July with a modest force of a few hundred men, but these were quickly joined by many of the barons in England. Instead of marching into nearby Winchester and seizing Henry's treasury, Robert paused, giving Henry time to march west and intercept the invasion force.
The two armies met at Alton, Hampshire, where peace negotiations began, possibly initiated by either Henry or Robert, and probably supported by Flambard. The brothers then agreed to the Treaty of Alton, under which Robert released Henry from his oath of homage and recognised him as king; Henry renounced his claims on western Normandy, except for Domfront, and agreed to pay Robert £2,000 a year for life; if either brother died without a male heir, the other would inherit his lands; the barons whose lands had been seized by either the King or the Duke for supporting his rival would have them returned, and Flambard would be reinstated as bishop; the two brothers would campaign together to defend their territories in Normandy. Robert remained in England for a few months more with Henry before returning to Normandy.
Despite the treaty, Henry set about inflicting severe penalties on the barons who had stood against him during the invasion. William de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey, was accused of fresh crimes, which were not covered by the Alton amnesty, and was banished from England. In 1102 Henry then turned against Robert of Bellême and his brothers, the most powerful of the barons, accusing him of 45 different offences. Robert escaped and took up arms against Henry. Henry besieged Robert's castles at Arundel, Tickhill and Shrewsbury, pushing down into the south-west to attack Bridgnorth. His power base in England broken, Robert accepted Henry's offer of banishment and left the country for Normandy.
Henry's network of allies in Normandy became stronger during 1103. He arranged the marriages of his illegitimate daughters, Juliane and Matilda, to Eustace of Breteuil and Rotrou III, Count of Perche, respectively, the latter union securing the Norman border. Henry attempted to win over other members of the Norman nobility and gave other English estates and lucrative offers to key Norman lords. Duke Robert continued to fight Robert of Bellême, but the Duke's position worsened, until by 1104, he had to ally himself formally with Bellême to survive. Arguing that the Duke had broken the terms of their treaty, the King crossed over the Channel to Domfront, where he met with senior barons from across Normandy, eager to ally themselves with him. He confronted the Duke and accused him of siding with his enemies, before returning to England.
Normandy continued to disintegrate into chaos. In 1105, Henry sent his friend Robert Fitzhamon and a force of knights into the Duchy, apparently to provoke a confrontation with Duke Robert. Fitzhamon was captured, and Henry used this as an excuse to invade, promising to restore peace and order. Henry had the support of most of the neighbouring counts around Normandy's borders, and King Philip of France was persuaded to remain neutral. Henry occupied western Normandy, and advanced east on Bayeux, where Fitzhamon was held. The city refused to surrender, and Henry besieged it, burning it to the ground. Terrified of meeting the same fate, the town of Caen switched sides and surrendered, allowing Henry to advance on Falaise, Calvados, which he took with some casualties. His campaign stalled, and the King instead began peace discussions with Robert. The negotiations were inconclusive and the fighting dragged on until Christmas, when Henry returned to England.
Henry invaded again in July 1106, hoping to provoke a decisive battle. After some initial tactical successes, he turned south-west towards the castle of Tinchebray. He besieged the castle and Duke Robert, supported by Robert of Bellême, advanced from Falaise to relieve it. After attempts at negotiation failed, the Battle of Tinchebray took place, probably on 28 September. The battle lasted around an hour, and began with a charge by Duke Robert's cavalry; the infantry and dismounted knights of both sides then joined the battle. Henry's reserves, led by Elias I, Count of Maine, and Alan IV, Duke of Brittany, attacked the enemy's flanks, routing first Bellême's troops and then the bulk of the ducal forces. Duke Robert was taken prisoner, but Bellême escaped.
Henry mopped up the remaining resistance in Normandy, and Duke Robert ordered his last garrisons to surrender. Reaching Rouen, Henry reaffirmed the laws and customs of Normandy and took homage from the leading barons and citizens. The lesser prisoners taken at Tinchebray were released, but the Duke and several other leading nobles were imprisoned indefinitely. The Duke's son, William Clito, was only three years old and was released to the care of Helias of Saint-Saens, a Norman baron. Henry reconciled himself with Robert of Bellême, who gave up the ducal lands he had seized and rejoined the royal court. Henry had no way of legally removing the Duchy from his brother, and initially Henry avoided using the title "duke" at all, emphasising that, as the king of England, he was only acting as the guardian of the troubled Duchy.
Henry inherited the kingdom of England from William Rufus, giving him a claim of suzerainty over Wales and Scotland, and acquired the Duchy of Normandy, a complex entity with troubled borders. The borders between England and Scotland were still uncertain during Henry's reign, with Anglo-Norman influence pushing northwards through Cumbria, but his relationship with King David I of Scotland was generally good, partially due to Henry's marriage to his sister. In Wales, Henry used his power to coerce and charm the indigenous Welsh princes, while Norman Marcher Lords pushed across the valleys of South Wales. Normandy was controlled via interlocking networks of ducal, ecclesiastical and family contacts, backed by a growing string of important ducal castles along the borders. Alliances and relationships with neighbouring counties along the Norman border were particularly important to maintaining the stability of the Duchy.
Henry ruled through the barons and lords in England and Normandy, whom he manipulated skilfully for political effect. Political friendships, termed amicitia in Latin, were important during the 12th century, and Henry maintained a wide range of these, mediating between his friends in factions across his realm when necessary, and rewarding those who were loyal to him. He also had a reputation for punishing those barons who stood against him, and he maintained an effective network of informers and spies who reported to him on events. Henry was a harsh, firm ruler, but not excessively so by the standards of the day. Over time, he increased the degree of his control over the barons, removing his enemies and bolstering his friends until the "reconstructed baronage", as historian Warren Hollister describes it, was predominantly loyal and dependent on the King.
Henry's itinerant royal court comprised several parts. At the heart was his domestic household, called the domus; a wider grouping was termed the familia regis, and formal gatherings of the court were termed curia. The domus was divided into several parts. The chapel, headed by the chancellor, looked after the royal documents, the chamber dealt with financial affairs and the master-marshal was responsible for travel and accommodation. The familia regis included Henry's mounted household troops, up to several hundred strong, who came from a wider range of social backgrounds, and could be deployed across England and Normandy as required. Initially Henry continued his father's practice of regular crown-wearing ceremonies at his curia, but they became less frequent as the years passed. Henry's court was grand and ostentatious, financing the construction of large new buildings and castles with a range of precious gifts on display, including his private menagerie of exotic animals, which he kept at Woodstock Palace. Despite being a lively community, Henry's court was more tightly controlled than those of previous kings. Strict rules controlled personal behaviour and prohibited members of the court from pillaging neighbouring villages, as had been the norm under William Rufus.
Henry was responsible for a substantial expansion of the royal justice system. In England, Henry drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxes, but strengthened it with more central governmental institutions. Roger of Salisbury began to develop the royal exchequer after 1110, using it to collect and audit revenues from the King's sheriffs in the shires. Itinerant justices began to emerge under Henry, travelling around the country managing eyre courts, and many more laws were formally recorded. Henry gathered increasing revenue from the expansion of royal justice, both from fines and from fees. The first Pipe Roll that is known to have survived dates from 1130, recording royal expenditures. Henry reformed the coinage in 1107, 1108 and in 1125, inflicting harsh corporal punishments to English coiners who had been found guilty of debasing the currency. In Normandy, he restored law and order after 1106, operating through a body of Norman justices and an exchequer system similar to that in England. Norman institutions grew in scale and scope under Henry, although less quickly than in England. Many of the officials that ran Henry's system were termed "new men", relatively low-born individuals who rose through the ranks as administrators, managing justice or the royal revenues.
Henry's ability to govern was intimately bound up with the Church, which formed the key to the administration of both England and Normandy, and this relationship changed considerably over the course of his reign. William the Conqueror had reformed the English Church with the support of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, who became a close colleague and advisor to the King. Under William Rufus this arrangement had collapsed, the King and Archbishop Anselm had become estranged and Anselm had gone into exile. Henry also believed in Church reform, but on taking power in England he became embroiled in the investiture controversy.
The argument concerned who should invest a new bishop with his staff and ring: traditionally, this had been carried out by the King in a symbolic demonstration of royal power, but Pope Urban II had condemned this practice in 1099, arguing that only the papacy could carry out this task, and declaring that the clergy should not give homage to their local temporal rulers. Anselm returned to England from exile in 1100 having heard Urban's pronouncement, and informed Henry that he would be complying with the Pope's wishes. Henry was in a difficult position. On one hand, the symbolism and homage was important to him; on the other hand, he needed Anselm's support in his struggle with his brother Duke Robert.
Anselm stuck firmly to the letter of the papal decree, despite Henry's attempts to persuade him to give way in return for a vague assurance of a future royal compromise. Matters escalated, with Anselm going back into exile and Henry confiscating the revenues of his estates. Anselm threatened excommunication, and in July 1105 the two men finally negotiated a solution. A distinction was drawn between the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the prelates, under which Henry gave up his right to invest his clergy, but retained the custom of requiring them to come and do homage for the temporalities, the landed properties they held in England. Despite this argument, the pair worked closely together, combining to deal with Duke Robert's invasion of 1101, for example, and holding major reforming councils in 1102 and 1108.
A long-running dispute between the Archbishops of Canterbury and York flared up under Anselm's successor, Ralph d'Escures. Canterbury, traditionally the senior of the two establishments, had long argued that the Archbishop of York should formally promise to obey their Archbishop, but York argued that the two episcopates were independent within the English Church and that no such promise was necessary. Henry supported the primacy of Canterbury, to ensure that England remained under a single ecclesiastical administration, but the Pope preferred the case of York. The matter was complicated by Henry's personal friendship with Thurstan, the Archbishop of York, and the King's desire that the case should not end up in a papal court, beyond royal control. Henry needed the support of the Papacy in his struggle with Louis of France, however, and therefore allowed Thurstan to attend the Council of Rheims in 1119, where Thurstan was then consecrated by the Pope with no mention of any duty towards Canterbury. Henry believed that this went against assurances Thurstan had previously made and exiled him from England until the King and Archbishop came to a negotiated solution the following year.
Even after the investiture dispute, Henry continued to play a major role in the selection of new English and Norman bishops and archbishops. He appointed many of his officials to bishoprics and, as historian Martin Brett suggests, "some of his officers could look forward to a mitre with all but absolute confidence". Henry's chancellors, and those of his queens, became bishops of Durham, Hereford, London, Lincoln, Winchester and Salisbury. Henry increasingly drew on a wider range of these bishops as advisors – particularly Roger of Salisbury – breaking with the earlier tradition of relying primarily on the Archbishop of Canterbury. The result was a cohesive body of administrators through which Henry could exercise careful influence, holding general councils to discuss key matters of policy. This stability shifted slightly after 1125, when he began to inject a wider range of candidates into the senior positions of the Church, often with more reformist views, and the impact of this generation would be felt in the years after Henry's death.
Like other rulers of the period, Henry donated to the Church and patronised several religious communities, but contemporary chroniclers did not consider him an unusually pious king. His personal beliefs and piety may have developed during the course of his life; Henry had always taken an interest in religion, but in his later years he may have become much more concerned about spiritual affairs. If so, the major shifts in his thinking would appear to have occurred after 1120, when his son William Adelin died, and 1129, when his daughter's marriage teetered on the verge of collapse.
As a proponent of religious reform, Henry gave extensively to reformist groups within the Church. He was a keen supporter of the Cluniac order, probably for intellectual reasons. He donated money to the abbey at Cluny itself, and after 1120 gave generously to Reading Abbey, a Cluniac establishment. Construction on Reading began in 1121, and Henry endowed it with rich lands and extensive privileges, making it a symbol of his dynastic lines. He also focused effort on promoting the conversion of communities of clerks into Augustinian canons, the foundation of leper hospitals, expanding the provision of nunneries, and the charismatic orders of the Savigniacs and Tironensians. He was an avid collector of relics, sending an embassy to Constantinople in 1118 to collect Byzantine items, some of which were donated to Reading Abbey.
Normandy faced an increased threat from France, Anjou and Flanders after 1108. King Louis VI succeeded to the French throne in 1108 and began to reassert central royal power. Louis demanded Henry give homage to him and that two disputed castles along the Normandy border be placed into the control of neutral castellans. Henry refused, and Louis responded by mobilising an army. After some arguments, the two kings negotiated a truce and retreated without fighting, leaving the underlying issues unresolved. Fulk V assumed power in Anjou in 1109 and began to rebuild Angevin authority. He inherited the county of Maine, but refused to recognise Henry as his feudal lord and instead allied himself with Louis. Robert II of Flanders also briefly joined the alliance, before his death in 1111.
In 1108, Henry betrothed his six-year-old daughter, Matilda, to Henry V, the future Holy Roman Emperor. For King Henry, this was a prestigious match; for Henry V, it was an opportunity to restore his financial situation and fund an expedition to Italy, as he received a dowry of £6,666 from England and Normandy. Raising this money proved challenging, and required the implementation of a special "aid", or tax, in England. Matilda was crowned German queen in 1110.
Henry responded to the French and Angevin threat by expanding his own network of supporters beyond the Norman borders. Some Norman barons deemed unreliable were arrested or dispossessed, and Henry used their forfeited estates to bribe his potential allies in the neighbouring territories, in particular Maine. Around 1110, Henry attempted to arrest the young William Clito, but William's mentors moved him to the safety of Flanders before he could be taken. At about this time, Henry probably began to style himself as the duke of Normandy. Robert of Bellême turned against Henry once again, and when he appeared at Henry's court in 1112 in a new role as a French ambassador, he was arrested and imprisoned.
Rebellions broke out in France and Anjou between 1111 and 1113, and Henry crossed into Normandy to support his nephew, Count Theobald II, Count of Champagne, who had sided against Louis in the uprising. In a bid to isolate Louis diplomatically, Henry betrothed his young son, William Adelin, to Fulk's daughter Matilda, and married his illegitimate daughter Matilda to Duke Conan III of Brittany, creating alliances with Anjou and Brittany respectively. Louis backed down and in March 1113 met with Henry near Gisors to agree a peace settlement, giving Henry the disputed fortresses and confirming Henry's overlordship of Maine, Bellême and Brittany.
Meanwhile, the situation in Wales was deteriorating. Henry had conducted a campaign in South Wales in 1108, pushing out royal power in the region and colonising the area around Pembroke with Flemings. By 1114, some of the resident Norman lords were under attack, while in Mid-Wales, Owain ap Cadwgan blinded one of the political hostages he was holding, and in North Wales Gruffudd ap Cynan threatened the power of the Earl of Chester. Henry sent three armies into Wales that year, with Gilbert Fitz Richard leading a force from the south, Alexander, King of Scotland, pressing from the north and Henry himself advancing into Mid-Wales. Owain and Gruffudd sued for peace, and Henry accepted a political compromise. He reinforced the Welsh Marches with his own appointees, strengthening the border territories.
Concerned about the succession, Henry sought to persuade Louis VI to accept his son, William Adelin, as the legitimate future Duke of Normandy, in exchange for his son's homage. Henry crossed into Normandy in 1115 and assembled the Norman barons to swear loyalty; he also almost successfully negotiated a settlement with Louis, affirming William's right to the Duchy in exchange for a large sum of money. Louis, backed by his ally Baldwin of Flanders, instead declared that he considered William Clito the legitimate heir to the Duchy.
War broke out after Henry returned to Normandy with an army to support Theobald of Blois, who was under attack from Louis. Henry and Louis raided each other's towns along the border, and a wider conflict then broke out, probably in 1116. Henry was pushed onto the defensive as French, Flemish and Angevin forces began to pillage the Normandy countryside. Amaury III of Montfort and many other barons rose up against Henry, and there was an assassination plot from within his own household. Henry's wife, Matilda, died in early 1118, but the situation in Normandy was sufficiently pressing that Henry was unable to return to England for her funeral.
Henry responded by mounting campaigns against the rebel barons and deepening his alliance with Theobald. Baldwin of Flanders was wounded in battle and died in September 1118, easing the pressure on Normandy from the north-east. Henry attempted to crush a revolt in the city of Alençon, but was defeated by Fulk and the Angevin army. Forced to retreat from Alençon, Henry's position deteriorated alarmingly, as his resources became overstretched and more barons abandoned his cause. Early in 1119, Eustace of Breteuil and Henry's daughter, Juliana, threatened to join the baronial revolt. Hostages were exchanged in a bid to avoid conflict, but relations broke down and both sides mutilated their captives. Henry attacked and took the town of Breteuil, Eure, despite Juliana's attempt to kill her father with a crossbow. In the aftermath, Henry dispossessed the couple of almost all of their lands in Normandy.
Henry's situation improved in May 1119 when he enticed Fulk to switch sides by finally agreeing to marry William Adelin to Fulk's daughter, Matilda, and paying Fulk a large sum of money. Fulk left for the Levant, leaving the County of Maine in Henry's care, and the King was free to focus on crushing his remaining enemies. During the summer Henry advanced into the Norman Vexin, where he encountered Louis's army, resulting in the Battle of Brémule. Henry appears to have deployed scouts and then organised his troops into several carefully formed lines of dismounted knights. Unlike Henry's forces, the French knights remained mounted; they hastily charged the Anglo-Norman positions, breaking through the first rank of the defences but then becoming entangled in Henry's second line of knights. Surrounded, the French army began to collapse. In the melee, Henry was hit by a sword blow, but his armour protected him. Louis and William Clito escaped from the battle, leaving Henry to return to Rouen in triumph.
The war slowly petered out after this battle, and Louis took the dispute over Normandy to Pope Callixtus II's council in Reims that October. Henry faced French complaints concerning his acquisition and subsequent management of Normandy, and despite being defended by Geoffrey, the Archbishop of Rouen, Henry's case was shouted down by the pro-French elements of the council. Callixtus declined to support Louis, and merely advised the two rulers to seek peace. Amaury de Montfort came to terms with Henry, but Henry and William Clito failed to find a mutually satisfactory compromise. In June 1120, Henry and Louis formally made peace on terms advantageous to the King of England: William Adelin gave homage to Louis, and in return Louis confirmed William's rights to the Duchy.
Henry's succession plans were thrown into chaos by the sinking of the White Ship on 25 November 1120. Henry had left the port of Barfleur for England in the early evening, leaving William Adelin and many of the younger members of the court to follow on that night in a separate vessel, the White Ship. Both the crew and passengers were drunk and, just outside the harbour, the ship hit a submerged rock. The ship sank, killing as many as 300 people, with only one survivor, a butcher from Rouen. Henry's court was initially too scared to report William's death to the King. When he was finally told, he collapsed with grief.
The disaster left Henry with no legitimate son, his nephews now the closest possible male heirs. Henry announced he would take a new wife, Adeliza of Louvain, opening up the prospect of a new royal son, and the two were married at Windsor Castle in January 1121. Henry appears to have chosen her because she was attractive and came from a prestigious noble line. Adeliza seems to have been fond of Henry and joined him in his travels, probably to maximise the chances of her conceiving a child. The White Ship disaster initiated fresh conflict in Wales, where the drowning of Richard, Earl of Chester, encouraged a rebellion led by Maredudd ap Bleddyn. Henry intervened in North Wales that summer with an army and, although he was hit by a Welsh arrow, the campaign reaffirmed royal power across the region.
Henry's alliance with Anjou – which had been based on his son William marrying Fulk's daughter Matilda – began to disintegrate. Fulk returned from the Levant and demanded that Henry return Matilda and her dowry, a range of estates and fortifications in Maine. Matilda left for Anjou, but Henry argued that the dowry had in fact originally belonged to him before it came into the possession of Fulk, and so declined to hand the estates back to Anjou. Fulk married his daughter Sibylla to William Clito, and granted them Maine. Once again, conflict broke out, as Amaury de Montfort allied himself with Fulk and led a revolt along the Norman-Anjou border in 1123. Amaury was joined by several other Norman barons, headed by Waleran de Beaumont, one of the sons of Henry's old ally, Robert of Meulan.
Henry dispatched Robert of Gloucester and Ranulf le Meschin to Normandy and then intervened himself in late 1123. He began the process of besieging the rebel castles, before wintering in the Duchy. In the spring of 1124, campaigning began again. In the battle of Bourgthéroulde, Odo Borleng, castellan of Bernay, Eure, led the King's army and received intelligence that the rebels were departing from the rebel base in Beaumont-le-Roger allowing him to ambush them as they traversed through the Brotonne forest. Waleran charged the royal forces, but his knights were cut down by Odo's archers and the rebels were quickly overwhelmed. Waleran was captured, but Amaury escaped. Henry mopped up the remainder of the rebellion, blinding some of the rebel leaders – considered, at the time, a more merciful punishment than execution – and recovering the last rebel castles. He paid Pope Callixtus a large amount of money, in exchange for the Papacy annulling the marriage of William Clito and Sibylla on the grounds of consanguinity.
Henry and Adeliza did not conceive any children, generating prurient speculation as to the possible explanation, and the future of the dynasty appeared at risk. Henry may have begun to look among his nephews for a possible heir. He may have considered Stephen of Blois as a possible option and, perhaps in preparation for this, he arranged a beneficial marriage for Stephen to a wealthy heiress, Matilda. Theobald of Blois, his close ally, may have also felt that he was in favour with Henry. William Clito, who was King Louis's preferred choice, remained opposed to Henry and was therefore unsuitable. Henry may have also considered his own illegitimate son, Robert of Gloucester, as a possible candidate, but English tradition and custom would have looked unfavourably on this.
Henry's plans shifted when the Empress Matilda's husband, the Emperor Henry, died in 1125. The King recalled his daughter to England the next year and declared that, should he die without a male heir, she was to be his rightful successor. The Anglo-Norman barons were gathered together at Westminster at Christmas 1126, where they swore to recognise Matilda and any future legitimate heir she might have. Putting forward a woman as a potential heir in this way was unusual: opposition to Matilda continued to exist within the English court, and Louis was vehemently opposed to her candidacy.
Fresh conflict broke out in 1127, when the childless Charles I, Count of Flanders, was murdered, creating a local succession crisis. Backed by King Louis, William Clito was chosen by the Flemings to become their new ruler. This development potentially threatened Normandy, and Henry began to finance a proxy war in Flanders, promoting the claims of William's Flemish rivals. In an effort to disrupt the French alliance with William, Henry mounted an attack into France in 1128, forcing Louis to cut his aid to William. William died unexpectedly in July, removing the last major challenger to Henry's rule and bringing the war in Flanders to a halt. Without William, the baronial opposition in Normandy lacked a leader. A fresh peace was made with France, and Henry was finally able to release the remaining prisoners from the revolt of 1123, including Waleran of Meulan, who was rehabilitated into the royal court.
Meanwhile, Henry rebuilt his alliance with Fulk of Anjou, this time by marrying Matilda to Fulk's eldest son, Geoffrey. The pair were betrothed in 1127 and married the following year. It is unknown whether Henry intended Geoffrey to have any future claim on England or Normandy, and he was probably keeping his son-in-law's status deliberately uncertain. Similarly, although Matilda was granted several castles in Normandy as part of her dowry, it was not specified when the couple would actually take possession of them. Fulk left Anjou for Jerusalem in 1129, declaring Geoffrey the Count of Anjou and Maine. The marriage proved difficult, as the couple did not particularly like each other and the disputed castles proved a point of contention, resulting in Matilda returning to Normandy later that year. Henry appears to have blamed Geoffrey for the separation, but in 1131 the couple were reconciled. Much to the pleasure and relief of Henry, Matilda then gave birth to two sons, Henry and Geoffrey, in 1133 and 1134.
Relations among Henry, Matilda, and Geoffrey became increasingly strained during the King's final years. Matilda and Geoffrey suspected that they lacked genuine support in England. In 1135 they urged Henry to hand over the royal castles in Normandy to Matilda while he was still alive, and insisted that the Norman nobility swear immediate allegiance to her, thereby giving the couple a more powerful position after Henry's death. Henry angrily declined to do so, probably out of concern that Geoffrey would try to seize power in Normandy. A fresh rebellion broke out among the barons in southern Normandy, led by William III, Count of Ponthieu, whereupon Geoffrey and Matilda intervened in support of the rebels.
Henry campaigned throughout the autumn, strengthening the southern frontier, and then travelled to Lyons-la-Forêt in November to enjoy some hunting, still apparently healthy. There he fell ill – according to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, he ate too many ("a surfeit of") lampreys against his physician's advice – and his condition worsened over the course of a week. Once the condition appeared terminal, Henry gave confession and summoned Archbishop Hugh of Amiens, who was joined by Robert of Gloucester and other members of the court. In accordance with custom, preparations were made to settle Henry's outstanding debts and to revoke outstanding sentences of forfeiture. The King died on 1 December 1135, and his corpse was taken to Rouen accompanied by the barons, where it was embalmed; his entrails were buried locally at the priory of Notre-Dame du Pré, and the preserved body was taken on to England, where it was interred at Reading Abbey.
Despite Henry's efforts, the succession was disputed. When news began to spread of the King's death, Geoffrey and Matilda were in Anjou supporting the rebels in their campaign against the royal army, which included a number of Matilda's supporters such as Robert of Gloucester. Many of these barons had taken an oath to stay in Normandy until the late king was properly buried, which prevented them from returning to England. The Norman nobility discussed declaring Theobald of Blois king. Theobald's younger brother, Stephen of Blois, quickly crossed from Boulogne to England, accompanied by his military household. Hugh Bigod dubiously testified that Henry, on his deathbed, had released the barons from their oath to Matilda, and with the help of his brother, Henry of Blois, Stephen seized power in England and was crowned king on 22 December. Matilda did not give up her claim to England and Normandy, appealing at first to the Pope against the decision to allow the coronation of Stephen, and then invading England to start a prolonged civil war, known as the Anarchy, between 1135 and 1153.
Historians have drawn on a range of sources on Henry, including the accounts of chroniclers; other documentary evidence, including early pipe rolls; and surviving buildings and architecture. The three main chroniclers to describe the events of Henry's life were William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Henry of Huntingdon, but each incorporated extensive social and moral commentary into their accounts and borrowed a range of literary devices and stereotypical events from other popular works. Other chroniclers include Eadmer, Hugh the Chanter, Abbot Suger, and the authors of the Welsh Brut. Not all royal documents from the period have survived, but there are several royal acts, charters, writs, and letters, along with some early financial records. Some of these have since been discovered to be forgeries, and others had been subsequently amended or tampered with.
Late medieval historians seized on the accounts of selected chroniclers regarding Henry's education and gave him the title of Henry "Beauclerc", a theme echoed in the analysis of Victorian and Edwardian historians such as Francis Palgrave and Henry Davis. The historian Charles David dismissed this argument in 1929, showing the more extreme claims for Henry's education to be without foundation. Modern histories of Henry commenced with Richard Southern's work in the early 1960s, followed by extensive research during the rest of the 20th century into a wide variety of themes from his reign in England, and a much more limited number of studies of his rule in Normandy. Only two major, modern biographies of Henry have been produced, C. Warren Hollister's posthumous volume in 2001, and Judith Green's 2006 work.
Interpretation of Henry's personality by historians has altered over time. Earlier historians such as Austin Poole and Richard Southern considered Henry as a cruel, draconian ruler. More recent historians, such as Hollister and Green, view his implementation of justice much more sympathetically, particularly when set against the standards of the day, but even Green has noted that Henry was "in many respects highly unpleasant", and Alan Cooper has observed that many contemporary chroniclers were probably too scared of the King to voice much criticism. Historians have also debated the extent to which Henry's administrative reforms genuinely constituted an introduction of what Hollister and John Baldwin have termed systematic, "administrative kingship", or whether his outlook remained fundamentally traditional.
Henry's burial at Reading Abbey is marked by a local cross and a plaque, but Reading Abbey was slowly demolished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. The exact location is uncertain, but the most likely location of the tomb itself is now in a built-up area of central Reading, on the site of the former abbey choir. A plan to locate his remains was announced in March 2015, with support from English Heritage and Philippa Langley, who aided with the successful discovery and exhumation of Richard III.
In addition to Matilda and William, Henry possibly had a short-lived son, Richard, with his first wife, Matilda of Scotland. Henry and his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, had no children.
Henry had several illegitimate children by various mistresses. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry I (c. 1068 – 1 December 1135), also known as Henry Beauclerc, was King of England from 1100 to his death in 1135. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror and was educated in Latin and the liberal arts. On William's death in 1087, Henry's elder brothers Robert Curthose and William Rufus inherited Normandy and England, respectively, but Henry was left landless. He purchased the County of Cotentin in western Normandy from Robert, but his brothers deposed him in 1091. He gradually rebuilt his power base in the Cotentin and allied himself with William Rufus against Robert.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Present in England with his brother William, who died in a hunting accident, Henry seized the English throne, promising at his coronation to correct many of William's less popular policies. He married Matilda of Scotland and they had two surviving children, Empress Matilda and William Adelin; he also had many illegitimate children by his numerous mistresses. Robert, who invaded from Normandy in 1101, disputed Henry's control of England; this military campaign ended in a negotiated settlement that confirmed Henry as king. The peace was short-lived, and Henry invaded the Duchy of Normandy in 1105 and 1106, finally defeating Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray. Henry kept Robert imprisoned for the rest of his life. Henry's control of Normandy was challenged by Louis VI of France, Baldwin VII of Flanders and Fulk V of Anjou, who promoted the rival claims of Robert's son, William Clito, and supported a major rebellion in the Duchy between 1116 and 1119. Following Henry's victory at the Battle of Brémule, a favourable peace settlement was agreed with Louis in 1120.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Considered by contemporaries to be a harsh but effective ruler, Henry skilfully manipulated the barons in England and Normandy. In England, he drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxation, but also strengthened it with more institutions, including the royal exchequer and itinerant justices. Normandy was also governed through a growing system of justices and an exchequer. Many of the officials who ran Henry's system were \"new men\" of obscure backgrounds, rather than from families of high status, who rose through the ranks as administrators. Henry encouraged ecclesiastical reform, but became embroiled in a serious dispute in 1101 with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, which was resolved through a compromise solution in 1105. He supported the Cluniac order and played a major role in the selection of the senior clergy in England and Normandy.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henry's son William drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, throwing the royal succession into doubt. Henry took a second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. In response to this, he declared his daughter Matilda his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The relationship between Henry and the couple became strained, and fighting broke out along the border with Anjou. Henry died on 1 December 1135 after a week of illness. Despite his plans for Matilda, the King was succeeded by his nephew Stephen of Blois, resulting in a period of civil war known as the Anarchy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Henry was probably born in England in 1068, in either the summer or the last weeks of the year, possibly in the town of Selby in Yorkshire. His father was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy who had invaded England in 1066 to become the king of England, establishing lands stretching into Wales. The invasion had created an Anglo-Norman ruling class, many with estates on both sides of the English Channel. These Anglo-Norman barons typically had close links to the Kingdom of France, which was then a loose collection of counties and smaller polities, only nominally under control of the king. Henry's mother, Matilda of Flanders, was the granddaughter of Robert II of France, and she probably named Henry after her uncle, King Henry I of France.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Henry was the youngest of William and Matilda's four sons. Physically he resembled his older brothers Robert Curthose, Richard and William Rufus, being, as historian David Carpenter describes, \"short, stocky and barrel-chested,\" with black hair. As a result of their age differences and Richard's early death, Henry would have probably seen relatively little of his older brothers. He probably knew his sister Adela well, as the two were close in age. There is little documentary evidence for his early years; historians Warren Hollister and Kathleen Thompson suggest he was brought up predominantly in England, while Judith Green argues he was initially brought up in the Duchy. He was probably educated by the Church, possibly by Bishop Osmund, the King's chancellor, at Salisbury Cathedral; it is uncertain if this indicated an intent by his parents for Henry to become a member of the clergy. It is also uncertain how far Henry's education extended, but he was probably able to read Latin and had some background in the liberal arts. He was given military training by an instructor called Robert Achard, and Henry was knighted by his father on 24 May 1086.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1087, William was fatally injured during a campaign in the Vexin. Henry joined his dying father near Rouen in September, where the King partitioned his possessions among his sons. The rules of succession in western Europe at the time were uncertain; in some parts of France, primogeniture, in which the eldest son would inherit a title, was growing in popularity. In other parts of Europe, including Normandy and England, the tradition was for lands to be divided, with the eldest son taking patrimonial lands – usually considered to be the most valuable – and younger sons given smaller, or more recently acquired, partitions or estates.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In dividing his lands, William appears to have followed the Norman tradition, distinguishing between Normandy, which he had inherited, and England, which he had acquired through war. William's second son, Richard, had died in a hunting accident, leaving Henry and his two brothers to inherit William's estate. Robert, the eldest, despite being in armed rebellion against his father at the time of his death, received Normandy. England was given to William Rufus, who was in favour with the dying king. Henry was given a large sum of money, usually reported as £5,000, with the expectation that he would also be given his mother's modest set of lands in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire. William's funeral at Caen was marred by angry complaints from a local man, and Henry may have been responsible for resolving the dispute by buying off the protester with silver.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Robert returned to Normandy, expecting to have been given both the Duchy and England, to find that William Rufus had crossed the Channel and been crowned king. The two brothers disagreed fundamentally over the inheritance, and Robert soon began to plan an invasion of England to seize the kingdom, helped by a rebellion by some of the leading nobles against William Rufus. Henry remained in Normandy and took up a role within Robert's court, possibly either because he was unwilling to side openly with William Rufus, or because Robert might have taken the opportunity to confiscate Henry's inherited money if he had tried to leave. William Rufus sequestered Henry's new estates in England, leaving Henry landless.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1088, Robert's plans for the invasion of England began to falter, and he turned to Henry, proposing that his brother lend him some of his inheritance, which Henry refused. Henry and Robert then came to an alternative arrangement, in which Robert would make Henry the count of western Normandy, in exchange for £3,000. Henry's lands were a new countship created by a delegation of the ducal authority in the Cotentin, but it extended across the Avranchin, with control over the bishoprics of both. This also gave Henry influence over two major Norman leaders, Hugh d'Avranches and Richard de Redvers, and the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, whose lands spread out further across the Duchy. Robert's invasion force failed to leave Normandy, leaving William Rufus secure in England.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Henry quickly established himself as count, building up a network of followers from western Normandy and eastern Brittany, whom the historian John Le Patourel has characterised as \"Henry's gang\". His early supporters included Roger of Mandeville, Richard of Redvers, Richard d'Avranches and Robert Fitzhamon, along with the churchman Roger of Salisbury. Robert attempted to go back on his deal with Henry and re-appropriate the county, but Henry's grip was already sufficiently firm to prevent this. Robert's rule of the duchy was chaotic, and parts of Henry's lands became almost independent of central control from Rouen.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During this period, neither William nor Robert seems to have trusted Henry. Waiting until the rebellion against William Rufus was safely over, Henry returned to England in July 1088. He met with the King but was unable to persuade him to grant him their mother's estates, and travelled back to Normandy in the autumn. While he had been away, however, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who regarded Henry as a potential competitor, had convinced Robert that Henry was conspiring against the duke with William Rufus. On landing, Odo seized Henry and imprisoned him in Neuilly-la-Forêt, and Robert took back the county of the Cotentin. Henry was held there over the winter, but in the spring of 1089 the senior elements of the Normandy nobility prevailed upon Robert to release him.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Although no longer formally the Count of Cotentin, Henry continued to control the west of Normandy. The struggle between his brothers continued. William Rufus continued to put down resistance to his rule in England, but began to build a series of alliances against Robert with barons in Normandy and neighbouring Ponthieu. Robert allied himself with Philip I of France. In late 1090 William Rufus encouraged Conan Pilatus, a powerful burgher in Rouen, to rebel against Robert; Conan was supported by most of Rouen and made appeals to the neighbouring ducal garrisons to switch allegiance as well.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Robert issued an appeal for help to his barons, and Henry was the first to arrive in Rouen in November. Violence broke out, leading to savage, confused street fighting as both sides attempted to take control of the city. Robert and Henry left the castle to join the battle, but Robert then retreated, leaving Henry to continue the fighting. The battle turned in favour of the ducal forces and Henry took Conan prisoner. Henry was angry that Conan had turned against his feudal lord. He had him taken to the top of Rouen Castle and then, despite Conan's offers to pay a huge ransom, threw him off the top of the castle to his death. Contemporaries considered Henry to have acted appropriately in making an example of Conan, and Henry became famous for his exploits in the battle.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the aftermath, Robert forced Henry to leave Rouen, probably because Henry's role in the fighting had been more prominent than his own, and possibly because Henry had asked to be formally reinstated as the count of the Cotentin. In early 1091, William Rufus invaded Normandy with a sufficiently large army to bring Robert to the negotiating table. The two brothers signed a treaty at Rouen, granting William Rufus a range of lands and castles in Normandy. In return, William Rufus promised to support Robert's attempts to regain control of the neighbouring county of Maine, once under Norman control, and help in regaining control over the duchy, including Henry's lands. They nominated each other as heirs to England and Normandy, excluding Henry from any succession while either one of them lived.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "War now broke out between Henry and his brothers. Henry mobilised a mercenary army in the west of Normandy, but as William Rufus and Robert's forces advanced, his network of baronial support melted away. Henry focused his remaining forces at Mont Saint-Michel, where he was besieged, probably in March 1091. The site was easy to defend, but lacked fresh water. The chronicler William of Malmesbury suggested that when Henry's water ran short, Robert allowed his brother fresh supplies, leading to remonstrations between Robert and William Rufus. The events of the final days of the siege are unclear: the besiegers had begun to argue about the future strategy for the campaign, but Henry then abandoned Mont Saint-Michel, probably as part of a negotiated surrender. He left for Brittany and crossed over into France.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Henry's next steps are not well documented; one chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, suggests that he travelled in the French Vexin, along the Normandy border, for over a year with a small band of followers. By the end of the year, Robert and William Rufus had fallen out once again, and the Treaty of Rouen had been abandoned. In 1092, Henry and his followers seized the Normandy town of Domfront. Domfront had previously been controlled by Robert of Bellême, but the inhabitants disliked his rule and invited Henry to take over the town, which he did in a bloodless coup. Over the next two years, Henry re-established his network of supporters across western Normandy, forming what Judith Green terms a \"court in waiting\". By 1094, he was allocating lands and castles to his followers as if he were the Duke of Normandy. William Rufus began to support Henry with money, encouraging his campaign against Robert, and Henry used some of this to construct a substantial castle at Domfront.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "William Rufus crossed into Normandy to take the war to Robert in 1094, and when progress stalled, called upon Henry for assistance. Henry responded, but travelled to London instead of joining the main campaign further east in Normandy, possibly at the request of the King, who in any event abandoned the campaign and returned to England. Over the next few years, Henry appears to have strengthened his power base in western Normandy, visiting England occasionally to attend at William Rufus's court. In 1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, encouraging knights from across Europe to join. Robert joined the Crusade, borrowing money from William Rufus to do so, and granting the King temporary custody of his part of the Duchy in exchange. The King appeared confident of regaining the remainder of Normandy from Robert, and Henry appeared ever closer to William Rufus. They campaigned together in the Norman Vexin between 1097 and 1098.",
"title": "Early life, 1068–1099"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On the afternoon of 2 August 1100, King William Rufus went hunting in the New Forest, accompanied by a team of huntsmen and Norman nobility, including Henry. An arrow, possibly shot by the baron Walter Tirel, hit and killed William Rufus. Many conspiracy theories have been put forward suggesting that the King was killed deliberately; most modern historians reject these, as hunting was a risky activity and such accidents were common. Chaos broke out, and Tirel fled the scene for France, either because he had shot the fatal arrow, or because he had been incorrectly accused and feared that he would be made a scapegoat for the King's death.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Henry rode to Winchester, where an argument ensued as to who now had the best claim to the throne. William of Breteuil championed the rights of Robert, who was still abroad, returning from the Crusade, and to whom Henry and the barons had given homage in previous years. Henry argued that, unlike Robert, he had been born to a reigning king and queen, thereby giving him a claim under the right of porphyrogeniture. Tempers flared, but Henry, supported by Henry de Beaumont and Robert of Meulan, held sway and persuaded the barons to follow him. He occupied Winchester Castle and seized the royal treasury.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Henry was hastily crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 5 August by Maurice, the bishop of London, as Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been exiled by William Rufus, and Thomas, the archbishop of York, was in the north of England at Ripon. In accordance with English tradition and in a bid to legitimise his rule, Henry issued a coronation charter laying out various commitments. The new king presented himself as having restored order to a trouble-torn country. He announced that he would abandon William Rufus's policies towards the Church, which had been seen as oppressive by the clergy; he promised to prevent royal abuses of the barons' property rights, and assured a return to the gentler customs of Edward the Confessor; he asserted that he would \"establish a firm peace\" across England and ordered \"that this peace shall henceforth be kept\".",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "As well as his existing circle of supporters, many of whom were richly rewarded with new lands, Henry quickly co-opted many of the existing administration into his new royal household. William Giffard, William Rufus's chancellor, was made the bishop of Winchester, and the prominent sheriffs Urse d'Abetot, Haimo Dapifer and Robert Fitzhamon continued to play a senior role in government. By contrast, the unpopular Ranulf Flambard, the bishop of Durham and a key member of the previous regime, was imprisoned in the Tower of London and charged with corruption. The late king had left many Church positions unfilled, and Henry set about nominating candidates to these, in an effort to build further support for his new government. The appointments needed to be consecrated, and Henry wrote to Anselm, apologising for having been crowned while the archbishop was still in France and asking him to return at once.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On 11 November 1100 Henry married Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland, in Westminster Abbey. Henry was now around 31 years old, but late marriages for noblemen were not unusual in the 11th century. The pair had probably first met earlier the previous decade, possibly being introduced through Bishop Osmund of Salisbury. Historian Warren Hollister argues that Henry and Matilda were emotionally close, but their union was also certainly politically motivated. Matilda had originally been named Edith, an Anglo-Saxon name, and was a member of the West Saxon royal family, being the niece of Edgar the Ætheling, the great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and a descendant of Alfred the Great. For Henry, marrying Matilda gave his reign increased legitimacy, and for Matilda, an ambitious woman, it was an opportunity for high status and power in England.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Matilda had been educated in a sequence of convents and may well have taken the vows to formally become a nun, which formed an obstacle to the marriage progressing. She did not wish to be a nun and appealed to Anselm for permission to marry Henry, and the Archbishop established a council at Lambeth Palace to judge the issue. Despite some dissenting voices, the council concluded that although Matilda had lived in a convent, she had not actually become a nun and was therefore free to marry, a judgement that Anselm then affirmed, allowing the marriage to proceed. Matilda proved an effective queen for Henry, acting as a regent in England on occasion, addressing and presiding over councils, and extensively supporting the arts. The couple soon had two children, Matilda, born in 1102, and William Adelin, born in 1103; it is possible that they also had a second son, Richard, who died young. Following the birth of these children, Matilda preferred to remain based in Westminster while Henry travelled across England and Normandy, either for religious reasons or because she enjoyed being involved in the machinery of royal governance.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Henry had a considerable sexual appetite and enjoyed a substantial number of sexual partners, resulting in many illegitimate children, at least nine sons and 13 daughters, many of whom he appears to have recognised and supported. It was normal for unmarried Anglo-Norman noblemen to have sexual relations with prostitutes and local women, and kings were also expected to have mistresses. Some of these relationships occurred before Henry was married, but many others took place after his marriage to Matilda. Henry had a wide range of mistresses from a range of backgrounds, and the relationships appear to have been conducted relatively openly. He may have chosen some of his noble mistresses for political purposes, but the evidence to support this theory is limited.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "By early 1101, Henry's new regime was established and functioning, but many of the Anglo-Norman elite still supported his brother Robert, or would be prepared to switch sides if Robert appeared likely to gain power in England. In February, Flambard escaped from the Tower of London and crossed the Channel to Normandy, where he injected fresh direction and energy to Robert's attempts to mobilise an invasion force. By July, Robert had formed an army and a fleet, ready to move against Henry in England. Raising the stakes in the conflict, Henry seized Flambard's lands and, with the support of Anselm, Flambard was removed from his position as bishop. The King held court in April and June, where the nobility renewed their oaths of allegiance to him, but their support still appeared partial and shaky.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "With the invasion imminent, Henry mobilised his forces and fleet outside Pevensey, close to Robert's anticipated landing site, training some of them personally in how to counter cavalry charges. Despite English levies and knights owing military service to the Church arriving in considerable numbers, many of his barons did not appear. Anselm intervened with some of the doubters, emphasising the religious importance of their loyalty to Henry. Robert unexpectedly landed further up the coast at Portsmouth on 20 July with a modest force of a few hundred men, but these were quickly joined by many of the barons in England. Instead of marching into nearby Winchester and seizing Henry's treasury, Robert paused, giving Henry time to march west and intercept the invasion force.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The two armies met at Alton, Hampshire, where peace negotiations began, possibly initiated by either Henry or Robert, and probably supported by Flambard. The brothers then agreed to the Treaty of Alton, under which Robert released Henry from his oath of homage and recognised him as king; Henry renounced his claims on western Normandy, except for Domfront, and agreed to pay Robert £2,000 a year for life; if either brother died without a male heir, the other would inherit his lands; the barons whose lands had been seized by either the King or the Duke for supporting his rival would have them returned, and Flambard would be reinstated as bishop; the two brothers would campaign together to defend their territories in Normandy. Robert remained in England for a few months more with Henry before returning to Normandy.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Despite the treaty, Henry set about inflicting severe penalties on the barons who had stood against him during the invasion. William de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey, was accused of fresh crimes, which were not covered by the Alton amnesty, and was banished from England. In 1102 Henry then turned against Robert of Bellême and his brothers, the most powerful of the barons, accusing him of 45 different offences. Robert escaped and took up arms against Henry. Henry besieged Robert's castles at Arundel, Tickhill and Shrewsbury, pushing down into the south-west to attack Bridgnorth. His power base in England broken, Robert accepted Henry's offer of banishment and left the country for Normandy.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Henry's network of allies in Normandy became stronger during 1103. He arranged the marriages of his illegitimate daughters, Juliane and Matilda, to Eustace of Breteuil and Rotrou III, Count of Perche, respectively, the latter union securing the Norman border. Henry attempted to win over other members of the Norman nobility and gave other English estates and lucrative offers to key Norman lords. Duke Robert continued to fight Robert of Bellême, but the Duke's position worsened, until by 1104, he had to ally himself formally with Bellême to survive. Arguing that the Duke had broken the terms of their treaty, the King crossed over the Channel to Domfront, where he met with senior barons from across Normandy, eager to ally themselves with him. He confronted the Duke and accused him of siding with his enemies, before returning to England.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Normandy continued to disintegrate into chaos. In 1105, Henry sent his friend Robert Fitzhamon and a force of knights into the Duchy, apparently to provoke a confrontation with Duke Robert. Fitzhamon was captured, and Henry used this as an excuse to invade, promising to restore peace and order. Henry had the support of most of the neighbouring counts around Normandy's borders, and King Philip of France was persuaded to remain neutral. Henry occupied western Normandy, and advanced east on Bayeux, where Fitzhamon was held. The city refused to surrender, and Henry besieged it, burning it to the ground. Terrified of meeting the same fate, the town of Caen switched sides and surrendered, allowing Henry to advance on Falaise, Calvados, which he took with some casualties. His campaign stalled, and the King instead began peace discussions with Robert. The negotiations were inconclusive and the fighting dragged on until Christmas, when Henry returned to England.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Henry invaded again in July 1106, hoping to provoke a decisive battle. After some initial tactical successes, he turned south-west towards the castle of Tinchebray. He besieged the castle and Duke Robert, supported by Robert of Bellême, advanced from Falaise to relieve it. After attempts at negotiation failed, the Battle of Tinchebray took place, probably on 28 September. The battle lasted around an hour, and began with a charge by Duke Robert's cavalry; the infantry and dismounted knights of both sides then joined the battle. Henry's reserves, led by Elias I, Count of Maine, and Alan IV, Duke of Brittany, attacked the enemy's flanks, routing first Bellême's troops and then the bulk of the ducal forces. Duke Robert was taken prisoner, but Bellême escaped.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Henry mopped up the remaining resistance in Normandy, and Duke Robert ordered his last garrisons to surrender. Reaching Rouen, Henry reaffirmed the laws and customs of Normandy and took homage from the leading barons and citizens. The lesser prisoners taken at Tinchebray were released, but the Duke and several other leading nobles were imprisoned indefinitely. The Duke's son, William Clito, was only three years old and was released to the care of Helias of Saint-Saens, a Norman baron. Henry reconciled himself with Robert of Bellême, who gave up the ducal lands he had seized and rejoined the royal court. Henry had no way of legally removing the Duchy from his brother, and initially Henry avoided using the title \"duke\" at all, emphasising that, as the king of England, he was only acting as the guardian of the troubled Duchy.",
"title": "Early reign, 1100–1106"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Henry inherited the kingdom of England from William Rufus, giving him a claim of suzerainty over Wales and Scotland, and acquired the Duchy of Normandy, a complex entity with troubled borders. The borders between England and Scotland were still uncertain during Henry's reign, with Anglo-Norman influence pushing northwards through Cumbria, but his relationship with King David I of Scotland was generally good, partially due to Henry's marriage to his sister. In Wales, Henry used his power to coerce and charm the indigenous Welsh princes, while Norman Marcher Lords pushed across the valleys of South Wales. Normandy was controlled via interlocking networks of ducal, ecclesiastical and family contacts, backed by a growing string of important ducal castles along the borders. Alliances and relationships with neighbouring counties along the Norman border were particularly important to maintaining the stability of the Duchy.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Henry ruled through the barons and lords in England and Normandy, whom he manipulated skilfully for political effect. Political friendships, termed amicitia in Latin, were important during the 12th century, and Henry maintained a wide range of these, mediating between his friends in factions across his realm when necessary, and rewarding those who were loyal to him. He also had a reputation for punishing those barons who stood against him, and he maintained an effective network of informers and spies who reported to him on events. Henry was a harsh, firm ruler, but not excessively so by the standards of the day. Over time, he increased the degree of his control over the barons, removing his enemies and bolstering his friends until the \"reconstructed baronage\", as historian Warren Hollister describes it, was predominantly loyal and dependent on the King.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Henry's itinerant royal court comprised several parts. At the heart was his domestic household, called the domus; a wider grouping was termed the familia regis, and formal gatherings of the court were termed curia. The domus was divided into several parts. The chapel, headed by the chancellor, looked after the royal documents, the chamber dealt with financial affairs and the master-marshal was responsible for travel and accommodation. The familia regis included Henry's mounted household troops, up to several hundred strong, who came from a wider range of social backgrounds, and could be deployed across England and Normandy as required. Initially Henry continued his father's practice of regular crown-wearing ceremonies at his curia, but they became less frequent as the years passed. Henry's court was grand and ostentatious, financing the construction of large new buildings and castles with a range of precious gifts on display, including his private menagerie of exotic animals, which he kept at Woodstock Palace. Despite being a lively community, Henry's court was more tightly controlled than those of previous kings. Strict rules controlled personal behaviour and prohibited members of the court from pillaging neighbouring villages, as had been the norm under William Rufus.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Henry was responsible for a substantial expansion of the royal justice system. In England, Henry drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxes, but strengthened it with more central governmental institutions. Roger of Salisbury began to develop the royal exchequer after 1110, using it to collect and audit revenues from the King's sheriffs in the shires. Itinerant justices began to emerge under Henry, travelling around the country managing eyre courts, and many more laws were formally recorded. Henry gathered increasing revenue from the expansion of royal justice, both from fines and from fees. The first Pipe Roll that is known to have survived dates from 1130, recording royal expenditures. Henry reformed the coinage in 1107, 1108 and in 1125, inflicting harsh corporal punishments to English coiners who had been found guilty of debasing the currency. In Normandy, he restored law and order after 1106, operating through a body of Norman justices and an exchequer system similar to that in England. Norman institutions grew in scale and scope under Henry, although less quickly than in England. Many of the officials that ran Henry's system were termed \"new men\", relatively low-born individuals who rose through the ranks as administrators, managing justice or the royal revenues.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Henry's ability to govern was intimately bound up with the Church, which formed the key to the administration of both England and Normandy, and this relationship changed considerably over the course of his reign. William the Conqueror had reformed the English Church with the support of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, who became a close colleague and advisor to the King. Under William Rufus this arrangement had collapsed, the King and Archbishop Anselm had become estranged and Anselm had gone into exile. Henry also believed in Church reform, but on taking power in England he became embroiled in the investiture controversy.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The argument concerned who should invest a new bishop with his staff and ring: traditionally, this had been carried out by the King in a symbolic demonstration of royal power, but Pope Urban II had condemned this practice in 1099, arguing that only the papacy could carry out this task, and declaring that the clergy should not give homage to their local temporal rulers. Anselm returned to England from exile in 1100 having heard Urban's pronouncement, and informed Henry that he would be complying with the Pope's wishes. Henry was in a difficult position. On one hand, the symbolism and homage was important to him; on the other hand, he needed Anselm's support in his struggle with his brother Duke Robert.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Anselm stuck firmly to the letter of the papal decree, despite Henry's attempts to persuade him to give way in return for a vague assurance of a future royal compromise. Matters escalated, with Anselm going back into exile and Henry confiscating the revenues of his estates. Anselm threatened excommunication, and in July 1105 the two men finally negotiated a solution. A distinction was drawn between the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the prelates, under which Henry gave up his right to invest his clergy, but retained the custom of requiring them to come and do homage for the temporalities, the landed properties they held in England. Despite this argument, the pair worked closely together, combining to deal with Duke Robert's invasion of 1101, for example, and holding major reforming councils in 1102 and 1108.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A long-running dispute between the Archbishops of Canterbury and York flared up under Anselm's successor, Ralph d'Escures. Canterbury, traditionally the senior of the two establishments, had long argued that the Archbishop of York should formally promise to obey their Archbishop, but York argued that the two episcopates were independent within the English Church and that no such promise was necessary. Henry supported the primacy of Canterbury, to ensure that England remained under a single ecclesiastical administration, but the Pope preferred the case of York. The matter was complicated by Henry's personal friendship with Thurstan, the Archbishop of York, and the King's desire that the case should not end up in a papal court, beyond royal control. Henry needed the support of the Papacy in his struggle with Louis of France, however, and therefore allowed Thurstan to attend the Council of Rheims in 1119, where Thurstan was then consecrated by the Pope with no mention of any duty towards Canterbury. Henry believed that this went against assurances Thurstan had previously made and exiled him from England until the King and Archbishop came to a negotiated solution the following year.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Even after the investiture dispute, Henry continued to play a major role in the selection of new English and Norman bishops and archbishops. He appointed many of his officials to bishoprics and, as historian Martin Brett suggests, \"some of his officers could look forward to a mitre with all but absolute confidence\". Henry's chancellors, and those of his queens, became bishops of Durham, Hereford, London, Lincoln, Winchester and Salisbury. Henry increasingly drew on a wider range of these bishops as advisors – particularly Roger of Salisbury – breaking with the earlier tradition of relying primarily on the Archbishop of Canterbury. The result was a cohesive body of administrators through which Henry could exercise careful influence, holding general councils to discuss key matters of policy. This stability shifted slightly after 1125, when he began to inject a wider range of candidates into the senior positions of the Church, often with more reformist views, and the impact of this generation would be felt in the years after Henry's death.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Like other rulers of the period, Henry donated to the Church and patronised several religious communities, but contemporary chroniclers did not consider him an unusually pious king. His personal beliefs and piety may have developed during the course of his life; Henry had always taken an interest in religion, but in his later years he may have become much more concerned about spiritual affairs. If so, the major shifts in his thinking would appear to have occurred after 1120, when his son William Adelin died, and 1129, when his daughter's marriage teetered on the verge of collapse.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "As a proponent of religious reform, Henry gave extensively to reformist groups within the Church. He was a keen supporter of the Cluniac order, probably for intellectual reasons. He donated money to the abbey at Cluny itself, and after 1120 gave generously to Reading Abbey, a Cluniac establishment. Construction on Reading began in 1121, and Henry endowed it with rich lands and extensive privileges, making it a symbol of his dynastic lines. He also focused effort on promoting the conversion of communities of clerks into Augustinian canons, the foundation of leper hospitals, expanding the provision of nunneries, and the charismatic orders of the Savigniacs and Tironensians. He was an avid collector of relics, sending an embassy to Constantinople in 1118 to collect Byzantine items, some of which were donated to Reading Abbey.",
"title": "Government, family and household"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Normandy faced an increased threat from France, Anjou and Flanders after 1108. King Louis VI succeeded to the French throne in 1108 and began to reassert central royal power. Louis demanded Henry give homage to him and that two disputed castles along the Normandy border be placed into the control of neutral castellans. Henry refused, and Louis responded by mobilising an army. After some arguments, the two kings negotiated a truce and retreated without fighting, leaving the underlying issues unresolved. Fulk V assumed power in Anjou in 1109 and began to rebuild Angevin authority. He inherited the county of Maine, but refused to recognise Henry as his feudal lord and instead allied himself with Louis. Robert II of Flanders also briefly joined the alliance, before his death in 1111.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1108, Henry betrothed his six-year-old daughter, Matilda, to Henry V, the future Holy Roman Emperor. For King Henry, this was a prestigious match; for Henry V, it was an opportunity to restore his financial situation and fund an expedition to Italy, as he received a dowry of £6,666 from England and Normandy. Raising this money proved challenging, and required the implementation of a special \"aid\", or tax, in England. Matilda was crowned German queen in 1110.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Henry responded to the French and Angevin threat by expanding his own network of supporters beyond the Norman borders. Some Norman barons deemed unreliable were arrested or dispossessed, and Henry used their forfeited estates to bribe his potential allies in the neighbouring territories, in particular Maine. Around 1110, Henry attempted to arrest the young William Clito, but William's mentors moved him to the safety of Flanders before he could be taken. At about this time, Henry probably began to style himself as the duke of Normandy. Robert of Bellême turned against Henry once again, and when he appeared at Henry's court in 1112 in a new role as a French ambassador, he was arrested and imprisoned.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Rebellions broke out in France and Anjou between 1111 and 1113, and Henry crossed into Normandy to support his nephew, Count Theobald II, Count of Champagne, who had sided against Louis in the uprising. In a bid to isolate Louis diplomatically, Henry betrothed his young son, William Adelin, to Fulk's daughter Matilda, and married his illegitimate daughter Matilda to Duke Conan III of Brittany, creating alliances with Anjou and Brittany respectively. Louis backed down and in March 1113 met with Henry near Gisors to agree a peace settlement, giving Henry the disputed fortresses and confirming Henry's overlordship of Maine, Bellême and Brittany.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Meanwhile, the situation in Wales was deteriorating. Henry had conducted a campaign in South Wales in 1108, pushing out royal power in the region and colonising the area around Pembroke with Flemings. By 1114, some of the resident Norman lords were under attack, while in Mid-Wales, Owain ap Cadwgan blinded one of the political hostages he was holding, and in North Wales Gruffudd ap Cynan threatened the power of the Earl of Chester. Henry sent three armies into Wales that year, with Gilbert Fitz Richard leading a force from the south, Alexander, King of Scotland, pressing from the north and Henry himself advancing into Mid-Wales. Owain and Gruffudd sued for peace, and Henry accepted a political compromise. He reinforced the Welsh Marches with his own appointees, strengthening the border territories.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Concerned about the succession, Henry sought to persuade Louis VI to accept his son, William Adelin, as the legitimate future Duke of Normandy, in exchange for his son's homage. Henry crossed into Normandy in 1115 and assembled the Norman barons to swear loyalty; he also almost successfully negotiated a settlement with Louis, affirming William's right to the Duchy in exchange for a large sum of money. Louis, backed by his ally Baldwin of Flanders, instead declared that he considered William Clito the legitimate heir to the Duchy.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "War broke out after Henry returned to Normandy with an army to support Theobald of Blois, who was under attack from Louis. Henry and Louis raided each other's towns along the border, and a wider conflict then broke out, probably in 1116. Henry was pushed onto the defensive as French, Flemish and Angevin forces began to pillage the Normandy countryside. Amaury III of Montfort and many other barons rose up against Henry, and there was an assassination plot from within his own household. Henry's wife, Matilda, died in early 1118, but the situation in Normandy was sufficiently pressing that Henry was unable to return to England for her funeral.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Henry responded by mounting campaigns against the rebel barons and deepening his alliance with Theobald. Baldwin of Flanders was wounded in battle and died in September 1118, easing the pressure on Normandy from the north-east. Henry attempted to crush a revolt in the city of Alençon, but was defeated by Fulk and the Angevin army. Forced to retreat from Alençon, Henry's position deteriorated alarmingly, as his resources became overstretched and more barons abandoned his cause. Early in 1119, Eustace of Breteuil and Henry's daughter, Juliana, threatened to join the baronial revolt. Hostages were exchanged in a bid to avoid conflict, but relations broke down and both sides mutilated their captives. Henry attacked and took the town of Breteuil, Eure, despite Juliana's attempt to kill her father with a crossbow. In the aftermath, Henry dispossessed the couple of almost all of their lands in Normandy.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Henry's situation improved in May 1119 when he enticed Fulk to switch sides by finally agreeing to marry William Adelin to Fulk's daughter, Matilda, and paying Fulk a large sum of money. Fulk left for the Levant, leaving the County of Maine in Henry's care, and the King was free to focus on crushing his remaining enemies. During the summer Henry advanced into the Norman Vexin, where he encountered Louis's army, resulting in the Battle of Brémule. Henry appears to have deployed scouts and then organised his troops into several carefully formed lines of dismounted knights. Unlike Henry's forces, the French knights remained mounted; they hastily charged the Anglo-Norman positions, breaking through the first rank of the defences but then becoming entangled in Henry's second line of knights. Surrounded, the French army began to collapse. In the melee, Henry was hit by a sword blow, but his armour protected him. Louis and William Clito escaped from the battle, leaving Henry to return to Rouen in triumph.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The war slowly petered out after this battle, and Louis took the dispute over Normandy to Pope Callixtus II's council in Reims that October. Henry faced French complaints concerning his acquisition and subsequent management of Normandy, and despite being defended by Geoffrey, the Archbishop of Rouen, Henry's case was shouted down by the pro-French elements of the council. Callixtus declined to support Louis, and merely advised the two rulers to seek peace. Amaury de Montfort came to terms with Henry, but Henry and William Clito failed to find a mutually satisfactory compromise. In June 1120, Henry and Louis formally made peace on terms advantageous to the King of England: William Adelin gave homage to Louis, and in return Louis confirmed William's rights to the Duchy.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Henry's succession plans were thrown into chaos by the sinking of the White Ship on 25 November 1120. Henry had left the port of Barfleur for England in the early evening, leaving William Adelin and many of the younger members of the court to follow on that night in a separate vessel, the White Ship. Both the crew and passengers were drunk and, just outside the harbour, the ship hit a submerged rock. The ship sank, killing as many as 300 people, with only one survivor, a butcher from Rouen. Henry's court was initially too scared to report William's death to the King. When he was finally told, he collapsed with grief.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The disaster left Henry with no legitimate son, his nephews now the closest possible male heirs. Henry announced he would take a new wife, Adeliza of Louvain, opening up the prospect of a new royal son, and the two were married at Windsor Castle in January 1121. Henry appears to have chosen her because she was attractive and came from a prestigious noble line. Adeliza seems to have been fond of Henry and joined him in his travels, probably to maximise the chances of her conceiving a child. The White Ship disaster initiated fresh conflict in Wales, where the drowning of Richard, Earl of Chester, encouraged a rebellion led by Maredudd ap Bleddyn. Henry intervened in North Wales that summer with an army and, although he was hit by a Welsh arrow, the campaign reaffirmed royal power across the region.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Henry's alliance with Anjou – which had been based on his son William marrying Fulk's daughter Matilda – began to disintegrate. Fulk returned from the Levant and demanded that Henry return Matilda and her dowry, a range of estates and fortifications in Maine. Matilda left for Anjou, but Henry argued that the dowry had in fact originally belonged to him before it came into the possession of Fulk, and so declined to hand the estates back to Anjou. Fulk married his daughter Sibylla to William Clito, and granted them Maine. Once again, conflict broke out, as Amaury de Montfort allied himself with Fulk and led a revolt along the Norman-Anjou border in 1123. Amaury was joined by several other Norman barons, headed by Waleran de Beaumont, one of the sons of Henry's old ally, Robert of Meulan.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Henry dispatched Robert of Gloucester and Ranulf le Meschin to Normandy and then intervened himself in late 1123. He began the process of besieging the rebel castles, before wintering in the Duchy. In the spring of 1124, campaigning began again. In the battle of Bourgthéroulde, Odo Borleng, castellan of Bernay, Eure, led the King's army and received intelligence that the rebels were departing from the rebel base in Beaumont-le-Roger allowing him to ambush them as they traversed through the Brotonne forest. Waleran charged the royal forces, but his knights were cut down by Odo's archers and the rebels were quickly overwhelmed. Waleran was captured, but Amaury escaped. Henry mopped up the remainder of the rebellion, blinding some of the rebel leaders – considered, at the time, a more merciful punishment than execution – and recovering the last rebel castles. He paid Pope Callixtus a large amount of money, in exchange for the Papacy annulling the marriage of William Clito and Sibylla on the grounds of consanguinity.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Henry and Adeliza did not conceive any children, generating prurient speculation as to the possible explanation, and the future of the dynasty appeared at risk. Henry may have begun to look among his nephews for a possible heir. He may have considered Stephen of Blois as a possible option and, perhaps in preparation for this, he arranged a beneficial marriage for Stephen to a wealthy heiress, Matilda. Theobald of Blois, his close ally, may have also felt that he was in favour with Henry. William Clito, who was King Louis's preferred choice, remained opposed to Henry and was therefore unsuitable. Henry may have also considered his own illegitimate son, Robert of Gloucester, as a possible candidate, but English tradition and custom would have looked unfavourably on this.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Henry's plans shifted when the Empress Matilda's husband, the Emperor Henry, died in 1125. The King recalled his daughter to England the next year and declared that, should he die without a male heir, she was to be his rightful successor. The Anglo-Norman barons were gathered together at Westminster at Christmas 1126, where they swore to recognise Matilda and any future legitimate heir she might have. Putting forward a woman as a potential heir in this way was unusual: opposition to Matilda continued to exist within the English court, and Louis was vehemently opposed to her candidacy.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Fresh conflict broke out in 1127, when the childless Charles I, Count of Flanders, was murdered, creating a local succession crisis. Backed by King Louis, William Clito was chosen by the Flemings to become their new ruler. This development potentially threatened Normandy, and Henry began to finance a proxy war in Flanders, promoting the claims of William's Flemish rivals. In an effort to disrupt the French alliance with William, Henry mounted an attack into France in 1128, forcing Louis to cut his aid to William. William died unexpectedly in July, removing the last major challenger to Henry's rule and bringing the war in Flanders to a halt. Without William, the baronial opposition in Normandy lacked a leader. A fresh peace was made with France, and Henry was finally able to release the remaining prisoners from the revolt of 1123, including Waleran of Meulan, who was rehabilitated into the royal court.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Meanwhile, Henry rebuilt his alliance with Fulk of Anjou, this time by marrying Matilda to Fulk's eldest son, Geoffrey. The pair were betrothed in 1127 and married the following year. It is unknown whether Henry intended Geoffrey to have any future claim on England or Normandy, and he was probably keeping his son-in-law's status deliberately uncertain. Similarly, although Matilda was granted several castles in Normandy as part of her dowry, it was not specified when the couple would actually take possession of them. Fulk left Anjou for Jerusalem in 1129, declaring Geoffrey the Count of Anjou and Maine. The marriage proved difficult, as the couple did not particularly like each other and the disputed castles proved a point of contention, resulting in Matilda returning to Normandy later that year. Henry appears to have blamed Geoffrey for the separation, but in 1131 the couple were reconciled. Much to the pleasure and relief of Henry, Matilda then gave birth to two sons, Henry and Geoffrey, in 1133 and 1134.",
"title": "Later reign, 1107–1135"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Relations among Henry, Matilda, and Geoffrey became increasingly strained during the King's final years. Matilda and Geoffrey suspected that they lacked genuine support in England. In 1135 they urged Henry to hand over the royal castles in Normandy to Matilda while he was still alive, and insisted that the Norman nobility swear immediate allegiance to her, thereby giving the couple a more powerful position after Henry's death. Henry angrily declined to do so, probably out of concern that Geoffrey would try to seize power in Normandy. A fresh rebellion broke out among the barons in southern Normandy, led by William III, Count of Ponthieu, whereupon Geoffrey and Matilda intervened in support of the rebels.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Henry campaigned throughout the autumn, strengthening the southern frontier, and then travelled to Lyons-la-Forêt in November to enjoy some hunting, still apparently healthy. There he fell ill – according to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, he ate too many (\"a surfeit of\") lampreys against his physician's advice – and his condition worsened over the course of a week. Once the condition appeared terminal, Henry gave confession and summoned Archbishop Hugh of Amiens, who was joined by Robert of Gloucester and other members of the court. In accordance with custom, preparations were made to settle Henry's outstanding debts and to revoke outstanding sentences of forfeiture. The King died on 1 December 1135, and his corpse was taken to Rouen accompanied by the barons, where it was embalmed; his entrails were buried locally at the priory of Notre-Dame du Pré, and the preserved body was taken on to England, where it was interred at Reading Abbey.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Despite Henry's efforts, the succession was disputed. When news began to spread of the King's death, Geoffrey and Matilda were in Anjou supporting the rebels in their campaign against the royal army, which included a number of Matilda's supporters such as Robert of Gloucester. Many of these barons had taken an oath to stay in Normandy until the late king was properly buried, which prevented them from returning to England. The Norman nobility discussed declaring Theobald of Blois king. Theobald's younger brother, Stephen of Blois, quickly crossed from Boulogne to England, accompanied by his military household. Hugh Bigod dubiously testified that Henry, on his deathbed, had released the barons from their oath to Matilda, and with the help of his brother, Henry of Blois, Stephen seized power in England and was crowned king on 22 December. Matilda did not give up her claim to England and Normandy, appealing at first to the Pope against the decision to allow the coronation of Stephen, and then invading England to start a prolonged civil war, known as the Anarchy, between 1135 and 1153.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Historians have drawn on a range of sources on Henry, including the accounts of chroniclers; other documentary evidence, including early pipe rolls; and surviving buildings and architecture. The three main chroniclers to describe the events of Henry's life were William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Henry of Huntingdon, but each incorporated extensive social and moral commentary into their accounts and borrowed a range of literary devices and stereotypical events from other popular works. Other chroniclers include Eadmer, Hugh the Chanter, Abbot Suger, and the authors of the Welsh Brut. Not all royal documents from the period have survived, but there are several royal acts, charters, writs, and letters, along with some early financial records. Some of these have since been discovered to be forgeries, and others had been subsequently amended or tampered with.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Late medieval historians seized on the accounts of selected chroniclers regarding Henry's education and gave him the title of Henry \"Beauclerc\", a theme echoed in the analysis of Victorian and Edwardian historians such as Francis Palgrave and Henry Davis. The historian Charles David dismissed this argument in 1929, showing the more extreme claims for Henry's education to be without foundation. Modern histories of Henry commenced with Richard Southern's work in the early 1960s, followed by extensive research during the rest of the 20th century into a wide variety of themes from his reign in England, and a much more limited number of studies of his rule in Normandy. Only two major, modern biographies of Henry have been produced, C. Warren Hollister's posthumous volume in 2001, and Judith Green's 2006 work.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Interpretation of Henry's personality by historians has altered over time. Earlier historians such as Austin Poole and Richard Southern considered Henry as a cruel, draconian ruler. More recent historians, such as Hollister and Green, view his implementation of justice much more sympathetically, particularly when set against the standards of the day, but even Green has noted that Henry was \"in many respects highly unpleasant\", and Alan Cooper has observed that many contemporary chroniclers were probably too scared of the King to voice much criticism. Historians have also debated the extent to which Henry's administrative reforms genuinely constituted an introduction of what Hollister and John Baldwin have termed systematic, \"administrative kingship\", or whether his outlook remained fundamentally traditional.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Henry's burial at Reading Abbey is marked by a local cross and a plaque, but Reading Abbey was slowly demolished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. The exact location is uncertain, but the most likely location of the tomb itself is now in a built-up area of central Reading, on the site of the former abbey choir. A plan to locate his remains was announced in March 2015, with support from English Heritage and Philippa Langley, who aided with the successful discovery and exhumation of Richard III.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In addition to Matilda and William, Henry possibly had a short-lived son, Richard, with his first wife, Matilda of Scotland. Henry and his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, had no children.",
"title": "Family and children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Henry had several illegitimate children by various mistresses.",
"title": "Family and children"
}
]
| Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, was King of England from 1100 to his death in 1135. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror and was educated in Latin and the liberal arts. On William's death in 1087, Henry's elder brothers Robert Curthose and William Rufus inherited Normandy and England, respectively, but Henry was left landless. He purchased the County of Cotentin in western Normandy from Robert, but his brothers deposed him in 1091. He gradually rebuilt his power base in the Cotentin and allied himself with William Rufus against Robert. Present in England with his brother William, who died in a hunting accident, Henry seized the English throne, promising at his coronation to correct many of William's less popular policies. He married Matilda of Scotland and they had two surviving children, Empress Matilda and William Adelin; he also had many illegitimate children by his numerous mistresses. Robert, who invaded from Normandy in 1101, disputed Henry's control of England; this military campaign ended in a negotiated settlement that confirmed Henry as king. The peace was short-lived, and Henry invaded the Duchy of Normandy in 1105 and 1106, finally defeating Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray. Henry kept Robert imprisoned for the rest of his life. Henry's control of Normandy was challenged by Louis VI of France, Baldwin VII of Flanders and Fulk V of Anjou, who promoted the rival claims of Robert's son, William Clito, and supported a major rebellion in the Duchy between 1116 and 1119. Following Henry's victory at the Battle of Brémule, a favourable peace settlement was agreed with Louis in 1120. Considered by contemporaries to be a harsh but effective ruler, Henry skilfully manipulated the barons in England and Normandy. In England, he drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxation, but also strengthened it with more institutions, including the royal exchequer and itinerant justices. Normandy was also governed through a growing system of justices and an exchequer. Many of the officials who ran Henry's system were "new men" of obscure backgrounds, rather than from families of high status, who rose through the ranks as administrators. Henry encouraged ecclesiastical reform, but became embroiled in a serious dispute in 1101 with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, which was resolved through a compromise solution in 1105. He supported the Cluniac order and played a major role in the selection of the senior clergy in England and Normandy. Henry's son William drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, throwing the royal succession into doubt. Henry took a second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. In response to this, he declared his daughter Matilda his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The relationship between Henry and the couple became strained, and fighting broke out along the border with Anjou. Henry died on 1 December 1135 after a week of illness. Despite his plans for Matilda, the King was succeeded by his nephew Stephen of Blois, resulting in a period of civil war known as the Anarchy. | 2001-10-02T00:58:23Z | 2023-12-04T18:05:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England |
14,183 | Hentai | Hentai is a style of Japanese pornographic anime and manga. A loanword from Japanese, the original term (変態 (listen)) does not describe a genre of media, but rather an abnormal sexual desire or act, as an abbreviation of hentai seiyoku (変態性欲, "sexual perversion"), and is also used to refer to persons who hold or do such desires and acts, often translated to English as "pervert". In addition to anime and manga, hentai works exist in a variety of media, including artwork and video games (commonly known as eroge).
The development of hentai has been influenced by Japanese cultural and historical attitudes toward sexuality. Hentai works, which are often self-published, form a significant portion of the market for doujin works, including doujinshi. Numerous subgenres exist depicting a variety of sexual acts and relationships, as well as novel fetishes.
Hentai is a kanji compound of 変 (hen; 'change' or 'weird') and 態 (tai; 'appearance' or 'condition'), and means "metamorphosis" or "transformation". In sexual contexts, it carries additional meanings of "perversion" or "abnormality", especially when used as an adjective; in these uses, it is the shortened form of the phrase hentai seiyoku (変態性欲) which means "sexual perversion". The character hen is a catch-all for queerness as a peculiarity—it does not carry an explicit sexual reference. While the term has expanded in use to cover a range of publications including homosexual publications, it remains primarily a heterosexual term, as terms indicating homosexuality entered Japan as foreign words. Japanese pornographic works are often simply tagged as 18-kin (18禁, "18-prohibited"), meaning "prohibited to those not yet 18 years old", and seijin manga (成人漫画, "adult manga"). Less official terms also in use include ero anime (エロアニメ), ero manga (エロ漫画), and the English initialism AV (for "adult video"). Usage of the term hentai does not define a genre in Japan.
Hentai is defined differently in English. The Oxford Dictionary Online defines it as "a subgenre of the Japanese genres of manga and anime, characterized by overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit images and plots." The origin of the word in English is unknown, but AnimeNation's John Oppliger points to the early 1990s, when a Dirty Pair erotic doujinshi (self-published work) titled H-Bomb was released, and when many websites sold access to images culled from Japanese erotic visual novels and games. The earliest English use of the term traces back to the rec.arts.anime boards; with a 1990 post concerning Happosai of Ranma ½ and the first discussion of the meaning in 1991. A 1995 glossary on the rec.arts.anime boards contained reference to the Japanese usage and the evolving definition of hentai as "pervert" or "perverted sex". The Anime Movie Guide, published in 1997, defines "ecchi" (エッチ, etchi) as the initial sound of hentai (i.e., the name of the letter H, as pronounced in Japanese); it included that ecchi was "milder than hentai". A year later it was defined as a genre in Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. At the beginning of 2000, "hentai" was listed as the 41st most-popular search term of the internet, while "anime" ranked 99th. The attribution has been applied retroactively to works such as Urotsukidōji, La Blue Girl, and Cool Devices. Urotsukidōji had previously been described with terms such as "Japornimation", and "erotic grotesque", prior to being identified as hentai.
The history of the word hentai has its origins in science and psychology. By the middle of the Meiji era, the term appeared in publications to describe unusual or abnormal traits, including paranormal abilities and psychological disorders. A translation of German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's text Psychopathia Sexualis originated the concept of hentai seiyoku, as a "perverse or abnormal sexual desire", though it was popularized outside psychology, as in the case of Mori Ōgai's 1909 novel Vita Sexualis. Continued interest in hentai seiyoku resulted in numerous journals and publications on sexual advice which circulated in the public, served to establish the sexual connotation of hentai as perverse. Any perverse or abnormal act could be hentai, such as committing shinjū (love suicide). It was Nakamura Kokyo's journal Abnormal Psychology which started the popular sexology boom in Japan which would see the rise of other popular journals like Sexuality and Human Nature, Sex Research and Sex. Originally, Tanaka Kogai wrote articles for Abnormal Psychology, but it would be Tanaka's own journal Modern Sexuality which would become one of the most popular sources of information about erotic and neurotic expression. Modern Sexuality was created to promote fetishism, S&M, and necrophilia as a facet of modern life. The ero guro movement and depiction of perverse, abnormal and often erotic undertones were a response to interest in hentai seiyoku.
Following World War II, Japan took a new interest in sexualization and public sexuality. Mark McLelland puts forth the observation that the term hentai found itself shortened to "H" and that the English pronunciation was "etchi", referring to lewdness and which did not carry the stronger connotation of abnormality or perversion. By the 1950s, the "hentai seiyoku" publications became their own genre and included fetish and homosexual topics. By the 1960s, the homosexual content was dropped in favor of subjects like sadomasochism and stories of lesbianism targeted to male readers. The late 1960s brought a sexual revolution which expanded and solidified the normalizing of the term's identity in Japan that continues to exist today through publications such as Bessatsu Takarajima's Hentai-san ga iku series.
With the usage of hentai as any erotic depiction, the history of these depictions is split into their media. Japanese artwork and comics serve as the first example of hentai material, coming to represent the iconic style after the publication of Azuma Hideo's Cybele [ja] in 1979. Hentai first appeared in animation in the 1932 film Suzumi-bune [ja] by Hakusan Kimura [ja], which was seized by police when it was half complete. The remnants of the film were donated to the National Film Center in the early 21st century. The film has never been viewed by the public. However, the 1984 release of Wonderkid's Lolita Anime was the first hentai to get a general release, overlooking the erotic and sexual depictions in 1969's One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the bare-breasted Cleopatra in 1970's Cleopatra film. Erotic games, another area of contention, has its first case of the art style depicting sexual acts in 1985's Tenshitachi no Gogo. In each of these mediums, the broad definition and usage of the term complicates its historic examination.
Depictions of sex and abnormal sex can be traced back through the ages, predating the term "hentai". Shunga, a Japanese term for erotic art, is thought to have existed in some form since the Heian period. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, shunga works were suppressed by the shogunate. A well-known example is The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hokusai, which depicts a woman being stimulated by two octopuses. Shunga production fell with the introduction of pornographic photographs in the late 19th century.
To define erotic manga, a definition for manga is needed. While the Hokusai Manga uses the term "manga" in its title, it does not depict the story-telling aspect common to modern manga, as the images are unrelated. Due to the influence of pornographic photographs in the 19th and 20th centuries, the manga artwork was depicted by realistic characters. Osamu Tezuka helped define the modern look and form of manga, and was later proclaimed as the "God of Manga". His debut work New Treasure Island was released in 1947 as a comic book through Ikuei Publishing and sold over 400,000 copies, though it was the popularity of Tezuka's Astro Boy, Metropolis, and Jungle Emperor manga that would come to define the media. This story-driven manga style is distinctly unique from comic strips like Sazae-san, and story-driven works came to dominate shōjo and shōnen magazines.
Adult themes in manga have existed since the 1940s, but some of these depictions were more realistic than the cartoon-cute characters popularized by Tezuka. In 1973, Manga Bestseller (later known as Manga Erotopia), which is considered to be the first hentai manga magazine published in Japan, would be responsible for creating a new genre known as ero-gekiga, where gekiga was taken, and the sexual and violent content was intensified. Other well-known "ero-gekiga" magazines were Erogenica (1975), and Alice (1977). The circulation of ero-gekiga magazines would peak in 1978, and it is believed that somewhere between eighty and one hundred different ero-gekiga magazines were being published annually.
The 1980s would see the decline of ero-gekiga in favor of the rising popularity of lolicon and bishōjo magazines, which grew from otaku fan culture. It has been theorized that the decline of ero-gekiga was due to the baby boomer readership beginning to start their own families, as well as migrating to seinen magazines such as Weekly Young Magazine, and when it came to sexual material, the readership was stolen by gravure and pornographic magazines. The distinct shift in the style of Japanese pornographic comics from realistic to cartoon-cute characters is accredited to Hideo Azuma, "The Father of Lolicon". In 1979, he penned Cybele [ja], which offered the first depictions of sexual acts between cute, unrealistic Tezuka-style characters. This would start a pornographic manga movement. The lolicon boom of the 1980s saw the rise of magazines such as the anthologies Lemon People and Petit Apple Pie. As the lolicon boom waned in the mid-1980s, the dominant form of representation for female characters became "baby faced and big chested" women. The shift in popularity from lolicon to bishōjo has been credited to Naoki Yamamoto (who wrote under the pen name of Tō Moriyama). Moriyama's manga had a style that had not been seen before at the time, and was different from the ero-gekiga and lolicon styles, and used bishōjo designs as a base to build upon. Moriyama's books sold well upon publication, creating even more fans for the genre. These new artists would then write for magazines such as Monthly Penguin Club Magazine (1986) and Manga Hot Milk (1986) which would become popular with their readership, drawing in new fans.
The publication of erotic materials in the United States can be traced back to at least 1990, when IANVS Publications printed its first Anime Shower Special. In March 1994, Antarctic Press released Bondage Fairies, an English translation of Insect Hunter, an "insect rape" manga which became popular in the American market, while it apparently had a poor showing in Japan. During this time, the one American publisher translating and publishing hentai was Fantagraphics on their adult comic imprint, Eros Comix, which was established around 1990.
Because there are fewer animation productions, most erotic works are retroactively tagged as hentai since the coining of the term in English. Hentai is typically defined as consisting of excessive nudity, and graphic sexual intercourse whether or not it is perverse. The term "ecchi" is typically related to fanservice, with no sexual intercourse being depicted.
The earliest pornographic anime was Suzumi-bune [ja], created in 1932 by Hakusan Kimura [ja]. It was the first part of a two-reeler film, which was half complete before it was seized by the police. The remnants of the film were donated to the National Film Center in the early 21st century by the Tokyo police, who were removing all silver nitrate film in their possession, as it is extremely flammable. The film has never been viewed by the public.
Two early works escape being defined as hentai, but contain erotic themes. This is likely due to the obscurity and unfamiliarity of the works, arriving in the United States and fading from public focus a full 20 years before importation and surging interests coined the Americanized term hentai. The first is the 1969 film One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which faithfully includes erotic elements of the original story. In 1970, Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, was the first animated film to carry an X rating, but it was mislabeled as erotica in the United States.
The Lolita Anime series is typically identified as the first erotic anime and original video animation (OVA); it was released in 1984 by Wonder Kids. Containing six episodes, the series focused on underage sex and rape, and included one episode containing BDSM bondage. Several sub-series were released in response, including a second Lolita Anime series released by Nikkatsu. It has not been officially licensed or distributed outside of its original release.
The Cream Lemon franchise of works ran from 1984 to 2005, with a number of them entering the American market in various forms. The Brothers Grime series released by Excalibur Films contained Cream Lemon works as early as 1986. However, they were not billed as anime and were introduced during the same time that the first underground distribution of erotic works began.
The American release of licensed erotic anime was first attempted in 1991 by Central Park Media, with I Give My All, but it never occurred. In December 1992, Devil Hunter Yohko was the first risque (ecchi) title that was released by A.D. Vision. While it contains no sexual intercourse, it pushes the limits of the ecchi category with sexual dialogue, nudity and one scene in which the heroine is about to be raped.
It was Central Park Media's 1993 release of Urotsukidōji which brought the first hentai film to American viewers. Often cited for inventing the tentacle rape subgenre, it contains extreme depictions of violence and monster sex. As such, it is acknowledged for being the first to depict tentacle sex on screen. When the film premiered in the United States, it was described as being "drenched in graphic scenes of perverse sex and ultra-violence".
Following this release, a wealth of pornographic content began to arrive in the United States, with companies such as A.D. Vision, Central Park Media and Media Blasters releasing licensed titles under various labels. A.D. Vision's label SoftCel Pictures released 19 titles in 1995 alone. Another label, Critical Mass, was created in 1996 to release an unedited edition of Violence Jack. When A.D. Vision's hentai label SoftCel Pictures shut down in 2005, most of its titles were acquired by Critical Mass. Following the bankruptcy of Central Park Media in 2009, the licenses for all Anime 18-related products and movies were transferred to Critical Mass.
The term eroge (erotic game) literally defines any erotic game, but has become synonymous with video games depicting the artistic styles of anime and manga. The origins of eroge began in the early 1980s, while the computer industry in Japan was struggling to define a computer standard with makers like NEC, Sharp, and Fujitsu competing against one another. The PC98 series, despite lacking in processing power, CD drives and limited graphics, came to dominate the market, with the popularity of eroge games contributing to its success.
Because of vague definitions of what constitutes an "erotic game", there are several possible candidates for the first eroge. If the definition applies to adult themes, the first game was Softporn Adventure. Released in America in 1981 for the Apple II, this was a text-based comedic game from On-Line Systems. If eroge is defined as the first graphical depictions of Japanese adult themes, it would be Koei's 1982 release of Night Life. Sexual intercourse is depicted through simple graphic outlines. Notably, Night Life was not intended to be erotic so much as an instructional guide "to support married life". A series of "undressing" games appeared as early as 1983, such as "Strip Mahjong". The first anime-styled erotic game was Tenshitachi no Gogo, released in 1985 by JAST. In 1988, ASCII released the first erotic role-playing game, Chaos Angel. In 1989, AliceSoft released the turn-based role-playing game Rance and ELF released Dragon Knight.
In the late 1980s, eroge began to stagnate under high prices and the majority of games containing uninteresting plots and mindless sex. ELF's 1992 release of Dōkyūsei came as customer frustration with eroge was mounting and spawned a new genre of games called dating sims. Dōkyūsei was unique because it had no defined plot and required the player to build a relationship with different girls in order to advance the story. Each girl had her own story, but the prospect of consummating a relationship required the girl growing to love the player; there was no easy sex.
The term "visual novel" is vague, with Japanese and English definitions classifying the genre as a type of interactive fiction game driven by narration and limited player interaction. While the term is often retroactively applied to many games, it was Leaf that coined the term with their "Leaf Visual Novel Series" (LVNS) and the 1996 release of Shizuku and Kizuato. The success of these two dark eroge games would be followed by the third and final installment of the LVNS, the 1997 romantic eroge To Heart. Eroge visual novels took a new emotional turn with Tactics' 1998 release One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e. Key's 1999 release of Kanon proved to be a major success and would go on to have numerous console ports, two manga series and two anime series.
Japanese laws have impacted depictions of works since the Meiji Restoration, but these predate the common definition of hentai material. Since becoming law in 1907, Article 175 of the Criminal Code of Japan forbids the publication of obscene materials. Specifically, depictions of male–female sexual intercourse and pubic hair are considered obscene, but bare genitalia is not. As censorship is required for published works, the most common representations are the blurring dots on pornographic videos and "bars" or "lights" on still images. In 1986, Toshio Maeda sought to get past censorship on depictions of sexual intercourse, by creating tentacle sex. This led to the large number of works containing sexual intercourse with monsters, demons, robots, and aliens, whose genitals look different from men's. While Western views attribute hentai to any explicit work, it was the products of this censorship which became not only the first titles legally imported to America and Europe, but the first successful ones. While uncut for American release, the United Kingdom's release of Urotsukidōji removed many scenes of the violence and tentacle rape scenes. Another technique used to evade regulation was the "sexual intercourse cross-section view", an imaginary view of intercourse resembling an anatomic drawing or an MRI, which would eventually evolve as a prevalent expression in hentai for its erotic appeal. This expression is known in the Western world as the "x-ray view".
It was also because of this law that the artists began to depict the characters with a minimum of anatomical details and without pubic hair, by law, prior to 1991. Part of the ban was lifted when Nagisa Oshima prevailed over the obscenity charges at his trial for his film In the Realm of the Senses. Though not enforced, the lifting of this ban did not apply to anime and manga as they were not deemed artistic exceptions.
Alterations of material or censorship and banning of works are common. The US release of La Blue Girl altered the age of the heroine from 16 to 18, removed sex scenes with a dwarf ninja named Nin-nin, and removed the Japanese blurring dots. La Blue Girl was outright rejected by UK censors who refused to classify it and prohibited its distribution. In 2011, members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan sought a ban on the subgenre lolicon but were unsuccessful. The last law proposed against it was introduced on May 27, 2013 by the Liberal Democratic Party, the New Komei Party and the Japan Restoration Party that would have made possession of sexual images of individuals under 18 illegal with a fine of 1 million yen (about US$10,437) and less than a year in jail. The Japanese Democratic Party, along with several industry associations involved in anime and manga protested against the bill saying "while they appreciate that the bill protects children, it will also restrict freedom of expression". The law was ultimately passed in June 2014 after the regulation of lolicon anime and manga was removed from the bill. This new law went into full effect in 2015 banning real life child pornography.
According to data from Pornhub in 2017, the most prolific consumers of hentai are men. However, Patrick W. Galbraith and Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto note that hentai manga attracts "a diverse readership, which of course includes women." Kathryn Hemmann also writes that "self-identified female otaku [...] readily admit to enjoying [hentai] dōjinshi catering to a male erotic gaze". When it comes to mediums of hentai, eroge games in particular combine three favored media—cartoons, pornography and gaming—into an experience. The hentai genre engages a wide audience that expands yearly, and desires better quality and storylines, or works which push the creative envelope. Nobuhiro Komiya, a manga censor, states that the unusual and extreme depictions in hentai are not about perversion so much as they are an example of the profit-oriented industry. Anime depicting normal sexual situations enjoy less market success than those that break social norms, such as sex at schools or bondage.
According to clinical psychologist Megha Hazuria Gorem, "Because toons are a kind of final fantasy, you can make the person look the way you want him or her to look. Every fetish can be fulfilled." Sexologist Narayan Reddy noted of eroge, "Animators make new games because there is a demand for them, and because they depict things that the gamers do not have the courage to do in real life, or that might just be illegal, these games are an outlet for suppressed desire."
The hentai genre can be divided into numerous subgenres, the broadest of which encompasses heterosexual and homosexual acts. Hentai that features mainly heterosexual interactions occur in both male-targeted (ero or dansei-muke) and female-targeted ("ladies' comics") form. Those that feature mainly homosexual interactions are known as yaoi or Boys' Love (male–male) and yuri (female–female). Both yaoi and, to a lesser extent, yuri, are generally aimed at members of the opposite sex from the persons depicted. While yaoi and yuri are not always explicit, their pornographic history and association remain. Yaoi's pornographic usage has remained strong in textual form through fanfiction. The definition of yuri has begun to be replaced by the broader definitions of "lesbian-themed animation or comics".
Hentai is perceived as "dwelling" on sexual fetishes. These include dozens of fetish and paraphilia related subgenres, which can be further classified with additional terms, such as heterosexual or homosexual types.
Many works are focused on depicting the mundane and the impossible across every conceivable act and situation, no matter how fantastical. One subgenre of hentai is futanari (hermaphroditism), which most often features a woman with a penis or penis-like appendage in place of, or in addition to, a vulva. Futanari characters are often depicted as having sex with other women, but many other works feature sex with men or, as in Anal Justice, with both genders. Futanari can be dominant, submissive, or switch between the two roles in a single work. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hentai is a style of Japanese pornographic anime and manga. A loanword from Japanese, the original term (変態 (listen)) does not describe a genre of media, but rather an abnormal sexual desire or act, as an abbreviation of hentai seiyoku (変態性欲, \"sexual perversion\"), and is also used to refer to persons who hold or do such desires and acts, often translated to English as \"pervert\". In addition to anime and manga, hentai works exist in a variety of media, including artwork and video games (commonly known as eroge).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The development of hentai has been influenced by Japanese cultural and historical attitudes toward sexuality. Hentai works, which are often self-published, form a significant portion of the market for doujin works, including doujinshi. Numerous subgenres exist depicting a variety of sexual acts and relationships, as well as novel fetishes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hentai is a kanji compound of 変 (hen; 'change' or 'weird') and 態 (tai; 'appearance' or 'condition'), and means \"metamorphosis\" or \"transformation\". In sexual contexts, it carries additional meanings of \"perversion\" or \"abnormality\", especially when used as an adjective; in these uses, it is the shortened form of the phrase hentai seiyoku (変態性欲) which means \"sexual perversion\". The character hen is a catch-all for queerness as a peculiarity—it does not carry an explicit sexual reference. While the term has expanded in use to cover a range of publications including homosexual publications, it remains primarily a heterosexual term, as terms indicating homosexuality entered Japan as foreign words. Japanese pornographic works are often simply tagged as 18-kin (18禁, \"18-prohibited\"), meaning \"prohibited to those not yet 18 years old\", and seijin manga (成人漫画, \"adult manga\"). Less official terms also in use include ero anime (エロアニメ), ero manga (エロ漫画), and the English initialism AV (for \"adult video\"). Usage of the term hentai does not define a genre in Japan.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hentai is defined differently in English. The Oxford Dictionary Online defines it as \"a subgenre of the Japanese genres of manga and anime, characterized by overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit images and plots.\" The origin of the word in English is unknown, but AnimeNation's John Oppliger points to the early 1990s, when a Dirty Pair erotic doujinshi (self-published work) titled H-Bomb was released, and when many websites sold access to images culled from Japanese erotic visual novels and games. The earliest English use of the term traces back to the rec.arts.anime boards; with a 1990 post concerning Happosai of Ranma ½ and the first discussion of the meaning in 1991. A 1995 glossary on the rec.arts.anime boards contained reference to the Japanese usage and the evolving definition of hentai as \"pervert\" or \"perverted sex\". The Anime Movie Guide, published in 1997, defines \"ecchi\" (エッチ, etchi) as the initial sound of hentai (i.e., the name of the letter H, as pronounced in Japanese); it included that ecchi was \"milder than hentai\". A year later it was defined as a genre in Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. At the beginning of 2000, \"hentai\" was listed as the 41st most-popular search term of the internet, while \"anime\" ranked 99th. The attribution has been applied retroactively to works such as Urotsukidōji, La Blue Girl, and Cool Devices. Urotsukidōji had previously been described with terms such as \"Japornimation\", and \"erotic grotesque\", prior to being identified as hentai.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The history of the word hentai has its origins in science and psychology. By the middle of the Meiji era, the term appeared in publications to describe unusual or abnormal traits, including paranormal abilities and psychological disorders. A translation of German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's text Psychopathia Sexualis originated the concept of hentai seiyoku, as a \"perverse or abnormal sexual desire\", though it was popularized outside psychology, as in the case of Mori Ōgai's 1909 novel Vita Sexualis. Continued interest in hentai seiyoku resulted in numerous journals and publications on sexual advice which circulated in the public, served to establish the sexual connotation of hentai as perverse. Any perverse or abnormal act could be hentai, such as committing shinjū (love suicide). It was Nakamura Kokyo's journal Abnormal Psychology which started the popular sexology boom in Japan which would see the rise of other popular journals like Sexuality and Human Nature, Sex Research and Sex. Originally, Tanaka Kogai wrote articles for Abnormal Psychology, but it would be Tanaka's own journal Modern Sexuality which would become one of the most popular sources of information about erotic and neurotic expression. Modern Sexuality was created to promote fetishism, S&M, and necrophilia as a facet of modern life. The ero guro movement and depiction of perverse, abnormal and often erotic undertones were a response to interest in hentai seiyoku.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Following World War II, Japan took a new interest in sexualization and public sexuality. Mark McLelland puts forth the observation that the term hentai found itself shortened to \"H\" and that the English pronunciation was \"etchi\", referring to lewdness and which did not carry the stronger connotation of abnormality or perversion. By the 1950s, the \"hentai seiyoku\" publications became their own genre and included fetish and homosexual topics. By the 1960s, the homosexual content was dropped in favor of subjects like sadomasochism and stories of lesbianism targeted to male readers. The late 1960s brought a sexual revolution which expanded and solidified the normalizing of the term's identity in Japan that continues to exist today through publications such as Bessatsu Takarajima's Hentai-san ga iku series.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "With the usage of hentai as any erotic depiction, the history of these depictions is split into their media. Japanese artwork and comics serve as the first example of hentai material, coming to represent the iconic style after the publication of Azuma Hideo's Cybele [ja] in 1979. Hentai first appeared in animation in the 1932 film Suzumi-bune [ja] by Hakusan Kimura [ja], which was seized by police when it was half complete. The remnants of the film were donated to the National Film Center in the early 21st century. The film has never been viewed by the public. However, the 1984 release of Wonderkid's Lolita Anime was the first hentai to get a general release, overlooking the erotic and sexual depictions in 1969's One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the bare-breasted Cleopatra in 1970's Cleopatra film. Erotic games, another area of contention, has its first case of the art style depicting sexual acts in 1985's Tenshitachi no Gogo. In each of these mediums, the broad definition and usage of the term complicates its historic examination.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Depictions of sex and abnormal sex can be traced back through the ages, predating the term \"hentai\". Shunga, a Japanese term for erotic art, is thought to have existed in some form since the Heian period. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, shunga works were suppressed by the shogunate. A well-known example is The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hokusai, which depicts a woman being stimulated by two octopuses. Shunga production fell with the introduction of pornographic photographs in the late 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "To define erotic manga, a definition for manga is needed. While the Hokusai Manga uses the term \"manga\" in its title, it does not depict the story-telling aspect common to modern manga, as the images are unrelated. Due to the influence of pornographic photographs in the 19th and 20th centuries, the manga artwork was depicted by realistic characters. Osamu Tezuka helped define the modern look and form of manga, and was later proclaimed as the \"God of Manga\". His debut work New Treasure Island was released in 1947 as a comic book through Ikuei Publishing and sold over 400,000 copies, though it was the popularity of Tezuka's Astro Boy, Metropolis, and Jungle Emperor manga that would come to define the media. This story-driven manga style is distinctly unique from comic strips like Sazae-san, and story-driven works came to dominate shōjo and shōnen magazines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Adult themes in manga have existed since the 1940s, but some of these depictions were more realistic than the cartoon-cute characters popularized by Tezuka. In 1973, Manga Bestseller (later known as Manga Erotopia), which is considered to be the first hentai manga magazine published in Japan, would be responsible for creating a new genre known as ero-gekiga, where gekiga was taken, and the sexual and violent content was intensified. Other well-known \"ero-gekiga\" magazines were Erogenica (1975), and Alice (1977). The circulation of ero-gekiga magazines would peak in 1978, and it is believed that somewhere between eighty and one hundred different ero-gekiga magazines were being published annually.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The 1980s would see the decline of ero-gekiga in favor of the rising popularity of lolicon and bishōjo magazines, which grew from otaku fan culture. It has been theorized that the decline of ero-gekiga was due to the baby boomer readership beginning to start their own families, as well as migrating to seinen magazines such as Weekly Young Magazine, and when it came to sexual material, the readership was stolen by gravure and pornographic magazines. The distinct shift in the style of Japanese pornographic comics from realistic to cartoon-cute characters is accredited to Hideo Azuma, \"The Father of Lolicon\". In 1979, he penned Cybele [ja], which offered the first depictions of sexual acts between cute, unrealistic Tezuka-style characters. This would start a pornographic manga movement. The lolicon boom of the 1980s saw the rise of magazines such as the anthologies Lemon People and Petit Apple Pie. As the lolicon boom waned in the mid-1980s, the dominant form of representation for female characters became \"baby faced and big chested\" women. The shift in popularity from lolicon to bishōjo has been credited to Naoki Yamamoto (who wrote under the pen name of Tō Moriyama). Moriyama's manga had a style that had not been seen before at the time, and was different from the ero-gekiga and lolicon styles, and used bishōjo designs as a base to build upon. Moriyama's books sold well upon publication, creating even more fans for the genre. These new artists would then write for magazines such as Monthly Penguin Club Magazine (1986) and Manga Hot Milk (1986) which would become popular with their readership, drawing in new fans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The publication of erotic materials in the United States can be traced back to at least 1990, when IANVS Publications printed its first Anime Shower Special. In March 1994, Antarctic Press released Bondage Fairies, an English translation of Insect Hunter, an \"insect rape\" manga which became popular in the American market, while it apparently had a poor showing in Japan. During this time, the one American publisher translating and publishing hentai was Fantagraphics on their adult comic imprint, Eros Comix, which was established around 1990.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Because there are fewer animation productions, most erotic works are retroactively tagged as hentai since the coining of the term in English. Hentai is typically defined as consisting of excessive nudity, and graphic sexual intercourse whether or not it is perverse. The term \"ecchi\" is typically related to fanservice, with no sexual intercourse being depicted.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The earliest pornographic anime was Suzumi-bune [ja], created in 1932 by Hakusan Kimura [ja]. It was the first part of a two-reeler film, which was half complete before it was seized by the police. The remnants of the film were donated to the National Film Center in the early 21st century by the Tokyo police, who were removing all silver nitrate film in their possession, as it is extremely flammable. The film has never been viewed by the public.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Two early works escape being defined as hentai, but contain erotic themes. This is likely due to the obscurity and unfamiliarity of the works, arriving in the United States and fading from public focus a full 20 years before importation and surging interests coined the Americanized term hentai. The first is the 1969 film One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which faithfully includes erotic elements of the original story. In 1970, Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, was the first animated film to carry an X rating, but it was mislabeled as erotica in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Lolita Anime series is typically identified as the first erotic anime and original video animation (OVA); it was released in 1984 by Wonder Kids. Containing six episodes, the series focused on underage sex and rape, and included one episode containing BDSM bondage. Several sub-series were released in response, including a second Lolita Anime series released by Nikkatsu. It has not been officially licensed or distributed outside of its original release.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Cream Lemon franchise of works ran from 1984 to 2005, with a number of them entering the American market in various forms. The Brothers Grime series released by Excalibur Films contained Cream Lemon works as early as 1986. However, they were not billed as anime and were introduced during the same time that the first underground distribution of erotic works began.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The American release of licensed erotic anime was first attempted in 1991 by Central Park Media, with I Give My All, but it never occurred. In December 1992, Devil Hunter Yohko was the first risque (ecchi) title that was released by A.D. Vision. While it contains no sexual intercourse, it pushes the limits of the ecchi category with sexual dialogue, nudity and one scene in which the heroine is about to be raped.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "It was Central Park Media's 1993 release of Urotsukidōji which brought the first hentai film to American viewers. Often cited for inventing the tentacle rape subgenre, it contains extreme depictions of violence and monster sex. As such, it is acknowledged for being the first to depict tentacle sex on screen. When the film premiered in the United States, it was described as being \"drenched in graphic scenes of perverse sex and ultra-violence\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Following this release, a wealth of pornographic content began to arrive in the United States, with companies such as A.D. Vision, Central Park Media and Media Blasters releasing licensed titles under various labels. A.D. Vision's label SoftCel Pictures released 19 titles in 1995 alone. Another label, Critical Mass, was created in 1996 to release an unedited edition of Violence Jack. When A.D. Vision's hentai label SoftCel Pictures shut down in 2005, most of its titles were acquired by Critical Mass. Following the bankruptcy of Central Park Media in 2009, the licenses for all Anime 18-related products and movies were transferred to Critical Mass.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The term eroge (erotic game) literally defines any erotic game, but has become synonymous with video games depicting the artistic styles of anime and manga. The origins of eroge began in the early 1980s, while the computer industry in Japan was struggling to define a computer standard with makers like NEC, Sharp, and Fujitsu competing against one another. The PC98 series, despite lacking in processing power, CD drives and limited graphics, came to dominate the market, with the popularity of eroge games contributing to its success.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Because of vague definitions of what constitutes an \"erotic game\", there are several possible candidates for the first eroge. If the definition applies to adult themes, the first game was Softporn Adventure. Released in America in 1981 for the Apple II, this was a text-based comedic game from On-Line Systems. If eroge is defined as the first graphical depictions of Japanese adult themes, it would be Koei's 1982 release of Night Life. Sexual intercourse is depicted through simple graphic outlines. Notably, Night Life was not intended to be erotic so much as an instructional guide \"to support married life\". A series of \"undressing\" games appeared as early as 1983, such as \"Strip Mahjong\". The first anime-styled erotic game was Tenshitachi no Gogo, released in 1985 by JAST. In 1988, ASCII released the first erotic role-playing game, Chaos Angel. In 1989, AliceSoft released the turn-based role-playing game Rance and ELF released Dragon Knight.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the late 1980s, eroge began to stagnate under high prices and the majority of games containing uninteresting plots and mindless sex. ELF's 1992 release of Dōkyūsei came as customer frustration with eroge was mounting and spawned a new genre of games called dating sims. Dōkyūsei was unique because it had no defined plot and required the player to build a relationship with different girls in order to advance the story. Each girl had her own story, but the prospect of consummating a relationship required the girl growing to love the player; there was no easy sex.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The term \"visual novel\" is vague, with Japanese and English definitions classifying the genre as a type of interactive fiction game driven by narration and limited player interaction. While the term is often retroactively applied to many games, it was Leaf that coined the term with their \"Leaf Visual Novel Series\" (LVNS) and the 1996 release of Shizuku and Kizuato. The success of these two dark eroge games would be followed by the third and final installment of the LVNS, the 1997 romantic eroge To Heart. Eroge visual novels took a new emotional turn with Tactics' 1998 release One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e. Key's 1999 release of Kanon proved to be a major success and would go on to have numerous console ports, two manga series and two anime series.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Japanese laws have impacted depictions of works since the Meiji Restoration, but these predate the common definition of hentai material. Since becoming law in 1907, Article 175 of the Criminal Code of Japan forbids the publication of obscene materials. Specifically, depictions of male–female sexual intercourse and pubic hair are considered obscene, but bare genitalia is not. As censorship is required for published works, the most common representations are the blurring dots on pornographic videos and \"bars\" or \"lights\" on still images. In 1986, Toshio Maeda sought to get past censorship on depictions of sexual intercourse, by creating tentacle sex. This led to the large number of works containing sexual intercourse with monsters, demons, robots, and aliens, whose genitals look different from men's. While Western views attribute hentai to any explicit work, it was the products of this censorship which became not only the first titles legally imported to America and Europe, but the first successful ones. While uncut for American release, the United Kingdom's release of Urotsukidōji removed many scenes of the violence and tentacle rape scenes. Another technique used to evade regulation was the \"sexual intercourse cross-section view\", an imaginary view of intercourse resembling an anatomic drawing or an MRI, which would eventually evolve as a prevalent expression in hentai for its erotic appeal. This expression is known in the Western world as the \"x-ray view\".",
"title": "Censorship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "It was also because of this law that the artists began to depict the characters with a minimum of anatomical details and without pubic hair, by law, prior to 1991. Part of the ban was lifted when Nagisa Oshima prevailed over the obscenity charges at his trial for his film In the Realm of the Senses. Though not enforced, the lifting of this ban did not apply to anime and manga as they were not deemed artistic exceptions.",
"title": "Censorship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Alterations of material or censorship and banning of works are common. The US release of La Blue Girl altered the age of the heroine from 16 to 18, removed sex scenes with a dwarf ninja named Nin-nin, and removed the Japanese blurring dots. La Blue Girl was outright rejected by UK censors who refused to classify it and prohibited its distribution. In 2011, members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan sought a ban on the subgenre lolicon but were unsuccessful. The last law proposed against it was introduced on May 27, 2013 by the Liberal Democratic Party, the New Komei Party and the Japan Restoration Party that would have made possession of sexual images of individuals under 18 illegal with a fine of 1 million yen (about US$10,437) and less than a year in jail. The Japanese Democratic Party, along with several industry associations involved in anime and manga protested against the bill saying \"while they appreciate that the bill protects children, it will also restrict freedom of expression\". The law was ultimately passed in June 2014 after the regulation of lolicon anime and manga was removed from the bill. This new law went into full effect in 2015 banning real life child pornography.",
"title": "Censorship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "According to data from Pornhub in 2017, the most prolific consumers of hentai are men. However, Patrick W. Galbraith and Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto note that hentai manga attracts \"a diverse readership, which of course includes women.\" Kathryn Hemmann also writes that \"self-identified female otaku [...] readily admit to enjoying [hentai] dōjinshi catering to a male erotic gaze\". When it comes to mediums of hentai, eroge games in particular combine three favored media—cartoons, pornography and gaming—into an experience. The hentai genre engages a wide audience that expands yearly, and desires better quality and storylines, or works which push the creative envelope. Nobuhiro Komiya, a manga censor, states that the unusual and extreme depictions in hentai are not about perversion so much as they are an example of the profit-oriented industry. Anime depicting normal sexual situations enjoy less market success than those that break social norms, such as sex at schools or bondage.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "According to clinical psychologist Megha Hazuria Gorem, \"Because toons are a kind of final fantasy, you can make the person look the way you want him or her to look. Every fetish can be fulfilled.\" Sexologist Narayan Reddy noted of eroge, \"Animators make new games because there is a demand for them, and because they depict things that the gamers do not have the courage to do in real life, or that might just be illegal, these games are an outlet for suppressed desire.\"",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The hentai genre can be divided into numerous subgenres, the broadest of which encompasses heterosexual and homosexual acts. Hentai that features mainly heterosexual interactions occur in both male-targeted (ero or dansei-muke) and female-targeted (\"ladies' comics\") form. Those that feature mainly homosexual interactions are known as yaoi or Boys' Love (male–male) and yuri (female–female). Both yaoi and, to a lesser extent, yuri, are generally aimed at members of the opposite sex from the persons depicted. While yaoi and yuri are not always explicit, their pornographic history and association remain. Yaoi's pornographic usage has remained strong in textual form through fanfiction. The definition of yuri has begun to be replaced by the broader definitions of \"lesbian-themed animation or comics\".",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Hentai is perceived as \"dwelling\" on sexual fetishes. These include dozens of fetish and paraphilia related subgenres, which can be further classified with additional terms, such as heterosexual or homosexual types.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Many works are focused on depicting the mundane and the impossible across every conceivable act and situation, no matter how fantastical. One subgenre of hentai is futanari (hermaphroditism), which most often features a woman with a penis or penis-like appendage in place of, or in addition to, a vulva. Futanari characters are often depicted as having sex with other women, but many other works feature sex with men or, as in Anal Justice, with both genders. Futanari can be dominant, submissive, or switch between the two roles in a single work.",
"title": "Classification"
}
]
| Hentai is a style of Japanese pornographic anime and manga. A loanword from Japanese, the original term) does not describe a genre of media, but rather an abnormal sexual desire or act, as an abbreviation of hentai seiyoku, and is also used to refer to persons who hold or do such desires and acts, often translated to English as "pervert". In addition to anime and manga, hentai works exist in a variety of media, including artwork and video games. The development of hentai has been influenced by Japanese cultural and historical attitudes toward sexuality. Hentai works, which are often self-published, form a significant portion of the market for doujin works, including doujinshi. Numerous subgenres exist depicting a variety of sexual acts and relationships, as well as novel fetishes. | 2001-11-23T07:14:46Z | 2023-11-29T13:09:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai |
14,186 | Henry VII of England | Henry VII (28 January 1457 – 21 April 1509) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizure of the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death in 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor.
Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of John of Gaunt, founder of the House of Lancaster and son of King Edward III. Henry's father, Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, a half-brother of Henry VI of England and a member of the Welsh Tudors of Penmynydd, died three months before his son Henry was born. During Henry's early years, his uncle Henry VI was fighting against Edward IV, a member of the Yorkist branch of the House of Plantagenet. After Edward retook the throne in 1471, Henry Tudor spent 14 years in exile in Brittany. He attained the throne when his forces, supported by France, Scotland, and Wales, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the culmination of the Wars of the Roses. He was the last king of England to win his throne on the field of battle. He cemented his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.
Henry restored power and stability to the English monarchy following the civil war. He is credited with many administrative, economic and diplomatic initiatives. His supportive policy toward England's wool industry and his standoff with the Low Countries had long-lasting benefits to the English economy. He paid very close attention to detail, and instead of spending lavishly he concentrated on raising new revenues. He stabilised the government's finances by introducing several new taxes. After his death, a commission found widespread abuses in the tax collection process. Henry reigned for nearly 24 years and was peacefully succeeded by his son, Henry VIII.
Henry VII was born on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle, in the English-speaking portion of Pembrokeshire known as Little England beyond Wales. He was the only child of Lady Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond. He was probably baptised at St Mary's Church, Pembroke, though no documentation of the event exists. His father died three months before his birth. Henry's paternal grandfather, Owen Tudor, originally from the Tudors of Penmynydd, Isle of Anglesey in Wales, had been a page in the court of King Henry V. He rose to become one of the "Squires to the Body to the King" after military service at the Battle of Agincourt. Owen is said to have secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois. One of their sons was Edmund, Henry's father. Edmund was created Earl of Richmond in 1452, and "formally declared legitimate by Parliament".
The descent of Henry's mother, Margaret, through the legitimised House of Beaufort bolstered Henry's claim to the English throne. She was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster (fourth son of Edward III), and his third wife Katherine Swynford. Swynford was Gaunt's mistress for about 25 years. When they married in 1396 they already had four children, including Henry's great-grandfather John Beaufort. Gaunt's nephew Richard II legitimised Gaunt's children by Swynford by Letters Patent in 1397. In 1407, Henry IV, Gaunt's son by his first wife, issued new Letters Patent confirming the legitimacy of his half-siblings but also declaring them ineligible for the throne. Henry IV's action was of doubtful legality, as the Beauforts were previously legitimised by an Act of Parliament, but it weakened Henry's claim. Nonetheless, by 1483 Henry was the senior male claimant heir to the House of Lancaster remaining after the deaths in battle, by murder or execution of Henry VI (son of Henry V and Catherine of Valois), his son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, and the other Beaufort line of descent through Lady Margaret's uncle, Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset.
Henry also made some political capital out of his Welsh ancestry in attracting military support and safeguarding his army's passage through Wales on its way to the Battle of Bosworth. He came from an old, established Anglesey family that claimed descent from Cadwaladr, in legend, the last ancient British king.
On occasion Henry displayed the red dragon. He took it, as well as the standard of St. George, on his procession through London after the victory at Bosworth. A contemporary writer and Henry's biographer, Bernard André, also made much of Henry's Welsh descent.
In 1456, Henry's father Edmund Tudor was captured while fighting for Henry VI in South Wales against the Yorkists. He died shortly afterwards in Carmarthen Castle. His younger brother, Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, undertook to protect Edmund's widow Margaret, who was 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry. When Edward IV became King in 1461, Jasper Tudor went into exile abroad. Pembroke Castle, and later the Earldom of Pembroke, were granted to the Yorkist William Herbert, who also assumed the guardianship of Margaret Beaufort and the young Henry.
Henry lived in the Herbert household until 1469, when Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the "Kingmaker"), went over to the Lancastrians. Herbert was captured fighting for the Yorkists and executed by Warwick. When Warwick restored Henry VI in 1470, Jasper Tudor returned from exile and brought Henry to court. When the Yorkist Edward IV regained the throne in 1471, Henry fled with other Lancastrians to Brittany. He spent most of the next 14 years under the protection of Francis II, Duke of Brittany. In November 1476, Francis fell ill and his principal advisers were more amenable to negotiating with King Edward. Henry was thus handed over to English envoys and escorted to the Breton port of Saint-Malo. While there, he feigned stomach cramps and delayed his departure long enough to miss the tides. An ally of Henry's, Viscount Jean du Quélennec [fr], soon arrived, bringing news that Francis had recovered, and in the confusion Henry was able to flee to a monastery. There he claimed sanctuary until the envoys were forced to depart.
By 1483, Henry's mother was actively promoting him as an alternative to Richard III, despite her being married to Lord Stanley, a Yorkist. At Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, Henry pledged to marry Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV. She was Edward's heir since the presumed death of her brothers, the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II of Brittany, Henry tried to land in England, but his conspiracy unravelled resulting in the execution of his primary co-conspirator, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Now supported by Francis II's prime minister, Pierre Landais, Richard III attempted to extradite Henry from Brittany, but Henry escaped to France. He was welcomed by the French, who readily supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion. Henry gained the support of the Woodvilles, in-laws of the late Edward IV, and sailed with a small French and Scottish force, landing at Mill Bay near Dale, Pembrokeshire. He marched toward England accompanied by his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Wales was historically a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his Welsh birth and ancestry, being agnatically descended from Rhys ap Gruffydd. He amassed an army of about 5,000–6,000 soldiers.
Henry devised a plan to seize the throne by engaging Richard quickly because Richard had reinforcements in Nottingham and Leicester. Though outnumbered, Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively defeated Richard's Yorkist army at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. Several of Richard's key allies, such as Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, and also Lord Stanley and his brother William, crucially switched sides or left the battlefield. Richard III's death at Bosworth Field effectively ended the Wars of the Roses.
To secure his hold on the throne, Henry declared himself king by right of conquest retroactively from 21 August 1485, the day before Bosworth Field. Thus, anyone who had fought for Richard against him would be guilty of treason and Henry could legally confiscate the lands and property of Richard III, while restoring his own. Henry spared Richard's nephew and designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and made the Yorkist heiress Margaret Plantagenet Countess of Salisbury suo jure. He took care not to address the baronage or summon Parliament until after his coronation, which took place in Westminster Abbey on 30 October 1485. After his coronation Henry issued an edict that any gentleman who swore fealty to him would, notwithstanding any previous attainder, be secure in his property and person.
Henry honoured his pledge of December 1483 to marry Elizabeth of York and the wedding took place in 1486 at Westminster Abbey. He was 29 years old, she was 20. They were third cousins, as both were great-great-grandchildren of John of Gaunt. Henry married Elizabeth of York with the hope of uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian sides of the Plantagenet dynastic disputes, and he was largely successful. However, such a level of paranoia persisted that anyone (John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, for example) with blood ties to the Plantagenets was suspected of coveting the throne.
Henry had Parliament repeal Titulus Regius, the statute that declared Edward IV's marriage invalid and his children illegitimate, thus legitimising his wife. Amateur historians Bertram Fields and Sir Clements Markham have claimed that he may have been involved in the murder of the Princes in the Tower, as the repeal of Titulus Regius gave the Princes a stronger claim to the throne than his own. Alison Weir points out that the Rennes ceremony, two years earlier, was plausible only if Henry and his supporters were certain that the Princes were already dead. Henry secured his crown principally by dividing and undermining the power of the nobility, especially through the aggressive use of bonds and recognisances to secure loyalty. He also enacted laws against livery and maintenance, the great lords' practice of having large numbers of "retainers" who wore their lord's badge or uniform and formed a potential private army.
Henry began taking precautions against rebellion while still in Leicester after Bosworth Field. Edward, Earl of Warwick, the ten-year-old son of Edward IV's brother George, Duke of Clarence, was the senior surviving male of the House of York. Before departing for London, Henry sent Robert Willoughby to Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, to arrest Warwick and take him to the Tower of London. Despite such precautions, Henry faced several rebellions over the next twelve years. The first was the 1486 rebellion of the Stafford brothers, abetted by Viscount Lovell, which collapsed without fighting.
Next, in 1487, Yorkists led by Lincoln rebelled in support of Lambert Simnel, a boy they claimed to be Edward of Warwick (who was actually a prisoner in the Tower). The rebellion began in Ireland, where the historically Yorkist nobility, headed by the powerful Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, proclaimed Simnel king and provided troops for his invasion of England. The rebellion was defeated and Lincoln killed at the Battle of Stoke. Henry showed remarkable clemency to the surviving rebels: he pardoned Kildare and the other Irish nobles, and he made the boy, Simnel, a servant in the royal kitchen where he was in charge of roasting meats on a spit.
In 1490, a young Fleming, Perkin Warbeck, appeared and claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of the "Princes in the Tower". Warbeck won the support of Edward IV's sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. He led attempted invasions of Ireland in 1491 and England in 1495, and persuaded James IV of Scotland to invade England in 1496. In 1497 Warbeck landed in Cornwall with a few thousand troops, but was soon captured and executed.
When the King's agents searched the property of William Stanley (Chamberlain of the Household, with direct access to Henry VII) they found a bag of coins amounting to around £10,000 and a collar of livery with Yorkist garnishings. Stanley was accused of supporting Warbeck's cause, arrested and later executed. In response to this threat within his own household, the King instituted more rigid security for access to his person. In 1499, Henry had the Earl of Warwick executed. However, he spared Warwick's elder sister Margaret, who survived until 1541 when she was executed by Henry VIII.
For most of Henry VII's reign Edward Story was Bishop of Chichester. Story's register still exists and, according to the 19th-century historian W.R.W. Stephens, "affords some illustrations of the avaricious and parsimonious character of the king". It seems that Henry was skilful at extracting money from his subjects on many pretexts, including that of war with France or war with Scotland. The money so extracted added to the King's personal fortune rather than being used for the stated purpose.
Unlike his predecessors, Henry VII came to the throne without personal experience in estate management or financial administration. Despite this, during his reign he became a fiscally prudent monarch who restored the fortunes of an effectively bankrupt exchequer. Henry VII introduced stability to the financial administration of England by keeping the same financial advisors throughout his reign. For instance, except for the first few months of the reign, the Baron Dynham and the Earl of Surrey were the only Lord High Treasurers throughout his reign.
Henry VII improved tax collection in the realm by introducing ruthlessly efficient mechanisms of taxation. He was supported in this effort by his chancellor, Archbishop John Morton, whose "Morton's Fork" was a catch-22 method of ensuring that nobles paid increased taxes: those nobles who spent little must have saved much, and thus could afford the increased taxes; in contrast, those nobles who spent much obviously had the means to pay the increased taxes. Henry also increased wealth by acquiring land through the act of resumption of 1486 which had been delayed as he focused on defence of the Church, his person and his realm.
The capriciousness and lack of due process that indebted many would tarnish his legacy and were soon ended upon Henry VII's death, after a commission revealed widespread abuses. According to the contemporary historian Polydore Vergil, simple "greed" underscored the means by which royal control was over-asserted in Henry's final years. Following Henry VII's death, Henry VIII executed Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, his two most hated tax collectors, on trumped-up charges of treason.
Henry VII established the pound avoirdupois as a standard of weight; it later became part of the Imperial and customary systems of units. In 1506 he resumed the construction of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, started under Henry VI, guaranteeing finances which would continue even after his death.
Henry VII's policy was to maintain peace and to create economic prosperity. Up to a point, he succeeded. The Treaty of Redon was signed in February 1489 between Henry and representatives of Brittany. Based on the terms of the accord, Henry sent 6,000 troops to fight (at the expense of Brittany) under the command of Lord Daubeney. The purpose of the agreement was to prevent France from annexing Brittany. According to John M. Currin, the treaty redefined Anglo-Breton relations. Henry started a new policy to recover Guyenne and other lost Plantagenet claims in France. The treaty marks a shift from neutrality over the French invasion of Brittany to active intervention against it.
Henry later concluded a treaty with France at Etaples that brought money into the coffers of England, and ensured the French would not support pretenders to the English throne, such as Perkin Warbeck. However, this treaty came at a price, as Henry mounted a minor invasion of Brittany in November 1492. Henry decided to keep Brittany out of French hands, signed an alliance with Spain to that end, and sent 6,000 troops to France. The confused, fractious nature of Breton politics undermined his efforts, which finally failed after three sizeable expeditions, at a cost of £24,000. However, as France was becoming more concerned with the Italian Wars, the French were happy to agree to the Peace of Étaples. Henry had pressured the French by laying siege to Boulogne in October 1492. Henry had been under the financial and physical protection of the French throne or its vassals for most of his life before becoming king. To strengthen his position, however, he subsidised shipbuilding, so strengthening the navy (he commissioned Europe's first ever – and the world's oldest surviving – dry dock at Portsmouth in 1495) and improving trading opportunities. John Cabot, originally from Genoa and Venice, had heard that ships from Bristol had discovered uncharted newfound territory far west of Ireland. Having secured financial backing from Florentine bankers in London, Cabot was granted carefully phrased letters patent from Henry in March 1496, permitting him to embark on an exploratory voyage westerly. It is not known precisely where Cabot landed, but he was eventually rewarded with a pension from the king; it is presumed that Cabot perished at sea after a later unsuccessful expedition.
Henry VII was one of the first European monarchs to recognise the importance of the newly united Spanish kingdom; he concluded the Treaty of Medina del Campo, by which his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, was married to Catherine of Aragon. He also concluded the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with Scotland (the first treaty between England and Scotland for almost two centuries), which betrothed his daughter Margaret Tudor to King James IV of Scotland. By this marriage, Henry VII hoped to break the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. Though this was not achieved during his reign, the marriage eventually led to the union of the English and Scottish crowns under Margaret's great-grandson, James VI and I, following the death of Henry's granddaughter Elizabeth I. Henry also formed an alliance with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519) and persuaded Pope Innocent VIII to issue a papal bull of excommunication against all pretenders to Henry's throne.
In 1506, Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller Emery d'Amboise asked Henry VII to become the protector and patron of the Order, as he had an interest in the crusade. Later on, Henry had exchanged letters with Pope Julius II in 1507, in which he encouraged him to establish peace among Christian realms, and to organise an expedition against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.
Henry VII was much enriched by trading alum, which was used in the wool and cloth trades as a chemical fixative for dyeing fabrics. Since alum was mined in only one area in Europe (Tolfa, Italy), it was a scarce commodity and therefore especially valuable to its landholder, the Pope. With the English economy heavily invested in wool production, Henry VII became involved in the alum trade in 1486. With the assistance of the Italian merchant banker Lodovico della Fava and the Italian banker Girolamo Frescobaldi, Henry VII became deeply involved in the trade by licensing ships, obtaining alum from the Ottoman Empire, and selling it to the Low Countries and in England. This trade made an expensive commodity cheaper, which raised opposition from Pope Julius II, since the Tolfa mine was a part of papal territory and had given the Pope monopoly control over alum.
Henry's most successful diplomatic achievement as regards the economy was the Magnus Intercursus ("great agreement") of 1496. In 1494, Henry embargoed trade (mainly in wool) with the Burgundian Netherlands in retaliation for Margaret of Burgundy's support for Perkin Warbeck. The Merchant Adventurers, the company which enjoyed the monopoly of the Flemish wool trade, relocated from Antwerp to Calais. At the same time, Flemish merchants were ejected from England. The dispute eventually paid off for Henry. Both parties realised they were mutually disadvantaged by the reduction in commerce. Its restoration by the Magnus Intercursus was very much to England's benefit in removing taxation for English merchants and significantly increasing England's wealth. In turn, Antwerp became an extremely important trade entrepôt (transhipment port), through which, for example, goods from the Baltic, spices from the east and Italian silks were exchanged for English cloth.
In 1506, Henry extorted the Treaty of Windsor from Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy. Philip had been shipwrecked on the English coast, and while Henry's guest, was bullied into an agreement so favourable to England at the expense of the Netherlands that it was dubbed the Malus Intercursus ("evil agreement"). France, Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and the Hanseatic League all rejected the treaty, which was never in force. Philip died shortly after the negotiations.
Henry's principal problem was to restore royal authority in a realm recovering from the Wars of the Roses. There were too many powerful noblemen and, as a consequence of the system of so-called bastard feudalism, each had what amounted to private armies of indentured retainers (mercenaries masquerading as servants). Following the example of Edward IV, Henry VII created a Council of Wales and the Marches for his son Arthur, which was intended to govern Wales and the Marches, Cheshire and Cornwall.
He was content to allow the nobles their regional influence if they were loyal to him. For instance, the Stanley family had control of Lancashire and Cheshire, upholding the peace on the condition that they stayed within the law. In other cases, he brought his over-powerful subjects to heel by decree. He passed laws against "livery" (the upper classes' flaunting of their adherents by giving them badges and emblems) and "maintenance" (the keeping of too many male "servants"). These laws were used shrewdly in levying fines upon those that he perceived as threats.
However, his principal weapon was the Court of Star Chamber. This revived an earlier practice of using a small (and trusted) group of the Privy Council as a personal or Prerogative Court, able to cut through the cumbersome legal system and act swiftly. Serious disputes involving the use of personal power, or threats to royal authority, were thus dealt with.
Henry VII used justices of the peace on a large, nationwide scale. They were appointed for every shire and served for a year at a time. Their chief task was to see that the laws of the country were obeyed in their area. Their powers and numbers steadily increased during the time of the Tudors, never more so than under Henry's reign. Despite this, Henry was keen to constrain their power and influence, applying the same principles to the justices of the peace as he did to the nobility: a similar system of bonds and recognisances to that which applied to both the gentry and the nobles who tried to exert their elevated influence over these local officials.
All Acts of Parliament were overseen by the justices of the peace. For example, they could replace suspect jurors in accordance with the 1495 act preventing the corruption of juries. They were also in charge of various administrative duties, such as the checking of weights and measures.
By 1509, justices of the peace were key enforcers of law and order for Henry VII. They were unpaid, which, in comparison with modern standards, meant a smaller tax bill for law enforcement. Local gentry saw the office as one of local influence and prestige and were therefore willing to serve. Overall, this was a successful area of policy for Henry, both in terms of efficiency and as a method of reducing the corruption endemic within the nobility of the Middle Ages.
In 1502, Henry VII's life took a difficult and personal turn in which many people he was close to died in quick succession. His first son and heir apparent, Arthur, Prince of Wales, died suddenly at Ludlow Castle, very likely from a viral respiratory illness known at the time as the "English sweating sickness". This made Henry VII's second son, Henry, Duke of York, heir apparent to the throne. The King, normally a reserved man who rarely showed much emotion in public unless angry, surprised his courtiers by his intense grief and sobbing at his son's death, while his concern for the Queen is evidence that the marriage was a happy one, as is his reaction to Queen Elizabeth's death the following year, when he shut himself away for several days, refusing to speak to anyone. Henry VII was shattered by the loss of Elizabeth, and her death impacted him severely.
Henry wanted to maintain the Spanish alliance. Accordingly, he arranged a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II for Prince Henry to marry his brother's widow Catherine, a relationship that would have otherwise precluded marriage in the Church. Elizabeth had died in childbirth, so Henry had the dispensation also permit him to marry Catherine himself. After obtaining the dispensation, Henry had second thoughts about the marriage of his son and Catherine. Catherine's mother Isabella I of Castile had died and Catherine's sister Joanna had succeeded her; Catherine was, therefore, daughter of only one reigning monarch and so less desirable as a spouse for Henry VII's heir-apparent. The marriage did not take place during his lifetime. Otherwise, at the time of his father's arranging of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the future Henry VIII was too young to contract the marriage according to Canon Law and would be ineligible until age fourteen.
Henry made half-hearted plans to remarry and beget more heirs, but these never came to anything. He entertained thoughts of remarriage to renew the alliance with Spain – Joanna, Dowager Queen of Naples (a niece of Queen Isabella of Castile), Queen Joanna of Castile, and Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Savoy (sister-in-law of Joanna of Castile), were all considered. In 1505 he was sufficiently interested in a potential marriage to Joanna of Naples that he sent ambassadors to Naples to report on the 27-year-old Joanna's physical suitability. The wedding never took place, and the physical description Henry sent with his ambassadors of what he desired in a new wife matched the description of his wife Elizabeth.
After 1503, records show the Tower of London was never again used as a royal residence by Henry VII, and all royal births under Henry VIII took place in palaces. Henry VII falls among the minority of British monarchs that never had any known mistresses, and for the times, it is very unusual that he did not remarry: his son Henry was the only male heir left after the death of his wife, thus the death of Arthur created a precarious political position for the House of Tudor.
During his lifetime the nobility often criticised Henry VII for re-centralizing power in London, and later the 16th-century historian Francis Bacon was ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law, but it is equally true that Henry VII was diligent about keeping detailed records of his personal finances, down to the last halfpenny; these and one account book detailing the expenses of his queen survive in the British National Archives, as do accounts of courtiers and many of the king's own letters. Until the death of his wife, the evidence is clear from these accounting books that Henry was a more doting father and husband than was widely known and there is evidence that his outwardly austere personality belied a devotion to his family. Letters to relatives have an affectionate tone not captured by official state business, as evidenced by many written to his mother Margaret. Many of the entries show a man who loosened his purse strings generously for his wife and children, and not just on necessities: in spring 1491 he spent a great amount of gold on a lute for his daughter Mary; the following year he spent money on a lion for Elizabeth's menagerie. With Elizabeth's death, the possibilities for such family indulgences greatly diminished. Immediately afterwards, Henry became very sick and nearly died himself, allowing only his mother Margaret Beaufort near him: "privily departed to a solitary place, and would that no man should resort unto him." Further compounding Henry's distress, his older daughter Margaret had previously been betrothed to King James IV of Scotland and within months of her mother's death she had to be escorted to the border by her father: he would never see her again. Margaret Tudor wrote letters to her father declaring her homesickness, but Henry could do nothing but mourn the loss of his family and honour the terms of the peace treaty he had agreed to with the King of Scotland.
Henry VII died of tuberculosis at Richmond Palace on 21 April 1509 and was buried in the chapel he commissioned in Westminster Abbey next to his wife, Elizabeth. He was succeeded by his second son, Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47), who would initiate the Protestant Reformation in England. His mother died two months later on 29 June 1509.
Amiable and high-spirited, Henry was friendly if dignified in manner, and it was clear that he was extremely intelligent. His biographer, Professor Stanley Chrimes, credits him – even before he had become king – with "a high degree of personal magnetism, ability to inspire confidence, and a growing reputation for shrewd decisiveness". On the debit side, he may have looked a little delicate as he suffered from poor health.
Historians have always compared Henry VII with his continental contemporaries, especially Louis XI of France and Ferdinand II of Aragon. By 1600 historians emphasised Henry's wisdom in drawing lessons in statecraft from other monarchs. In 1622 Francis Bacon published his History of the Reign of King Henry VII. By 1900 the "New Monarchy" interpretation stressed the common factors that in each country led to the revival of monarchical power. This approach raised puzzling questions about similarities and differences in the development of national states. In the late 20th century a model of European state formation was prominent in which Henry less resembles Louis and Ferdinand.
Henry VII and Elizabeth had seven children: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry VII (28 January 1457 – 21 April 1509) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizure of the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death in 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of John of Gaunt, founder of the House of Lancaster and son of King Edward III. Henry's father, Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, a half-brother of Henry VI of England and a member of the Welsh Tudors of Penmynydd, died three months before his son Henry was born. During Henry's early years, his uncle Henry VI was fighting against Edward IV, a member of the Yorkist branch of the House of Plantagenet. After Edward retook the throne in 1471, Henry Tudor spent 14 years in exile in Brittany. He attained the throne when his forces, supported by France, Scotland, and Wales, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the culmination of the Wars of the Roses. He was the last king of England to win his throne on the field of battle. He cemented his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Henry restored power and stability to the English monarchy following the civil war. He is credited with many administrative, economic and diplomatic initiatives. His supportive policy toward England's wool industry and his standoff with the Low Countries had long-lasting benefits to the English economy. He paid very close attention to detail, and instead of spending lavishly he concentrated on raising new revenues. He stabilised the government's finances by introducing several new taxes. After his death, a commission found widespread abuses in the tax collection process. Henry reigned for nearly 24 years and was peacefully succeeded by his son, Henry VIII.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henry VII was born on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle, in the English-speaking portion of Pembrokeshire known as Little England beyond Wales. He was the only child of Lady Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond. He was probably baptised at St Mary's Church, Pembroke, though no documentation of the event exists. His father died three months before his birth. Henry's paternal grandfather, Owen Tudor, originally from the Tudors of Penmynydd, Isle of Anglesey in Wales, had been a page in the court of King Henry V. He rose to become one of the \"Squires to the Body to the King\" after military service at the Battle of Agincourt. Owen is said to have secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois. One of their sons was Edmund, Henry's father. Edmund was created Earl of Richmond in 1452, and \"formally declared legitimate by Parliament\".",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The descent of Henry's mother, Margaret, through the legitimised House of Beaufort bolstered Henry's claim to the English throne. She was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster (fourth son of Edward III), and his third wife Katherine Swynford. Swynford was Gaunt's mistress for about 25 years. When they married in 1396 they already had four children, including Henry's great-grandfather John Beaufort. Gaunt's nephew Richard II legitimised Gaunt's children by Swynford by Letters Patent in 1397. In 1407, Henry IV, Gaunt's son by his first wife, issued new Letters Patent confirming the legitimacy of his half-siblings but also declaring them ineligible for the throne. Henry IV's action was of doubtful legality, as the Beauforts were previously legitimised by an Act of Parliament, but it weakened Henry's claim. Nonetheless, by 1483 Henry was the senior male claimant heir to the House of Lancaster remaining after the deaths in battle, by murder or execution of Henry VI (son of Henry V and Catherine of Valois), his son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, and the other Beaufort line of descent through Lady Margaret's uncle, Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset.",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Henry also made some political capital out of his Welsh ancestry in attracting military support and safeguarding his army's passage through Wales on its way to the Battle of Bosworth. He came from an old, established Anglesey family that claimed descent from Cadwaladr, in legend, the last ancient British king.",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "On occasion Henry displayed the red dragon. He took it, as well as the standard of St. George, on his procession through London after the victory at Bosworth. A contemporary writer and Henry's biographer, Bernard André, also made much of Henry's Welsh descent.",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1456, Henry's father Edmund Tudor was captured while fighting for Henry VI in South Wales against the Yorkists. He died shortly afterwards in Carmarthen Castle. His younger brother, Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, undertook to protect Edmund's widow Margaret, who was 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry. When Edward IV became King in 1461, Jasper Tudor went into exile abroad. Pembroke Castle, and later the Earldom of Pembroke, were granted to the Yorkist William Herbert, who also assumed the guardianship of Margaret Beaufort and the young Henry.",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Henry lived in the Herbert household until 1469, when Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the \"Kingmaker\"), went over to the Lancastrians. Herbert was captured fighting for the Yorkists and executed by Warwick. When Warwick restored Henry VI in 1470, Jasper Tudor returned from exile and brought Henry to court. When the Yorkist Edward IV regained the throne in 1471, Henry fled with other Lancastrians to Brittany. He spent most of the next 14 years under the protection of Francis II, Duke of Brittany. In November 1476, Francis fell ill and his principal advisers were more amenable to negotiating with King Edward. Henry was thus handed over to English envoys and escorted to the Breton port of Saint-Malo. While there, he feigned stomach cramps and delayed his departure long enough to miss the tides. An ally of Henry's, Viscount Jean du Quélennec [fr], soon arrived, bringing news that Francis had recovered, and in the confusion Henry was able to flee to a monastery. There he claimed sanctuary until the envoys were forced to depart.",
"title": "Ancestry and early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "By 1483, Henry's mother was actively promoting him as an alternative to Richard III, despite her being married to Lord Stanley, a Yorkist. At Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, Henry pledged to marry Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV. She was Edward's heir since the presumed death of her brothers, the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II of Brittany, Henry tried to land in England, but his conspiracy unravelled resulting in the execution of his primary co-conspirator, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Now supported by Francis II's prime minister, Pierre Landais, Richard III attempted to extradite Henry from Brittany, but Henry escaped to France. He was welcomed by the French, who readily supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion. Henry gained the support of the Woodvilles, in-laws of the late Edward IV, and sailed with a small French and Scottish force, landing at Mill Bay near Dale, Pembrokeshire. He marched toward England accompanied by his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Wales was historically a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his Welsh birth and ancestry, being agnatically descended from Rhys ap Gruffydd. He amassed an army of about 5,000–6,000 soldiers.",
"title": "Rise to the throne"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Henry devised a plan to seize the throne by engaging Richard quickly because Richard had reinforcements in Nottingham and Leicester. Though outnumbered, Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively defeated Richard's Yorkist army at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. Several of Richard's key allies, such as Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, and also Lord Stanley and his brother William, crucially switched sides or left the battlefield. Richard III's death at Bosworth Field effectively ended the Wars of the Roses.",
"title": "Rise to the throne"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "To secure his hold on the throne, Henry declared himself king by right of conquest retroactively from 21 August 1485, the day before Bosworth Field. Thus, anyone who had fought for Richard against him would be guilty of treason and Henry could legally confiscate the lands and property of Richard III, while restoring his own. Henry spared Richard's nephew and designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and made the Yorkist heiress Margaret Plantagenet Countess of Salisbury suo jure. He took care not to address the baronage or summon Parliament until after his coronation, which took place in Westminster Abbey on 30 October 1485. After his coronation Henry issued an edict that any gentleman who swore fealty to him would, notwithstanding any previous attainder, be secure in his property and person.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Henry honoured his pledge of December 1483 to marry Elizabeth of York and the wedding took place in 1486 at Westminster Abbey. He was 29 years old, she was 20. They were third cousins, as both were great-great-grandchildren of John of Gaunt. Henry married Elizabeth of York with the hope of uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian sides of the Plantagenet dynastic disputes, and he was largely successful. However, such a level of paranoia persisted that anyone (John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, for example) with blood ties to the Plantagenets was suspected of coveting the throne.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Henry had Parliament repeal Titulus Regius, the statute that declared Edward IV's marriage invalid and his children illegitimate, thus legitimising his wife. Amateur historians Bertram Fields and Sir Clements Markham have claimed that he may have been involved in the murder of the Princes in the Tower, as the repeal of Titulus Regius gave the Princes a stronger claim to the throne than his own. Alison Weir points out that the Rennes ceremony, two years earlier, was plausible only if Henry and his supporters were certain that the Princes were already dead. Henry secured his crown principally by dividing and undermining the power of the nobility, especially through the aggressive use of bonds and recognisances to secure loyalty. He also enacted laws against livery and maintenance, the great lords' practice of having large numbers of \"retainers\" who wore their lord's badge or uniform and formed a potential private army.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Henry began taking precautions against rebellion while still in Leicester after Bosworth Field. Edward, Earl of Warwick, the ten-year-old son of Edward IV's brother George, Duke of Clarence, was the senior surviving male of the House of York. Before departing for London, Henry sent Robert Willoughby to Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, to arrest Warwick and take him to the Tower of London. Despite such precautions, Henry faced several rebellions over the next twelve years. The first was the 1486 rebellion of the Stafford brothers, abetted by Viscount Lovell, which collapsed without fighting.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Next, in 1487, Yorkists led by Lincoln rebelled in support of Lambert Simnel, a boy they claimed to be Edward of Warwick (who was actually a prisoner in the Tower). The rebellion began in Ireland, where the historically Yorkist nobility, headed by the powerful Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, proclaimed Simnel king and provided troops for his invasion of England. The rebellion was defeated and Lincoln killed at the Battle of Stoke. Henry showed remarkable clemency to the surviving rebels: he pardoned Kildare and the other Irish nobles, and he made the boy, Simnel, a servant in the royal kitchen where he was in charge of roasting meats on a spit.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1490, a young Fleming, Perkin Warbeck, appeared and claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of the \"Princes in the Tower\". Warbeck won the support of Edward IV's sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. He led attempted invasions of Ireland in 1491 and England in 1495, and persuaded James IV of Scotland to invade England in 1496. In 1497 Warbeck landed in Cornwall with a few thousand troops, but was soon captured and executed.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "When the King's agents searched the property of William Stanley (Chamberlain of the Household, with direct access to Henry VII) they found a bag of coins amounting to around £10,000 and a collar of livery with Yorkist garnishings. Stanley was accused of supporting Warbeck's cause, arrested and later executed. In response to this threat within his own household, the King instituted more rigid security for access to his person. In 1499, Henry had the Earl of Warwick executed. However, he spared Warwick's elder sister Margaret, who survived until 1541 when she was executed by Henry VIII.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "For most of Henry VII's reign Edward Story was Bishop of Chichester. Story's register still exists and, according to the 19th-century historian W.R.W. Stephens, \"affords some illustrations of the avaricious and parsimonious character of the king\". It seems that Henry was skilful at extracting money from his subjects on many pretexts, including that of war with France or war with Scotland. The money so extracted added to the King's personal fortune rather than being used for the stated purpose.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Unlike his predecessors, Henry VII came to the throne without personal experience in estate management or financial administration. Despite this, during his reign he became a fiscally prudent monarch who restored the fortunes of an effectively bankrupt exchequer. Henry VII introduced stability to the financial administration of England by keeping the same financial advisors throughout his reign. For instance, except for the first few months of the reign, the Baron Dynham and the Earl of Surrey were the only Lord High Treasurers throughout his reign.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Henry VII improved tax collection in the realm by introducing ruthlessly efficient mechanisms of taxation. He was supported in this effort by his chancellor, Archbishop John Morton, whose \"Morton's Fork\" was a catch-22 method of ensuring that nobles paid increased taxes: those nobles who spent little must have saved much, and thus could afford the increased taxes; in contrast, those nobles who spent much obviously had the means to pay the increased taxes. Henry also increased wealth by acquiring land through the act of resumption of 1486 which had been delayed as he focused on defence of the Church, his person and his realm.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The capriciousness and lack of due process that indebted many would tarnish his legacy and were soon ended upon Henry VII's death, after a commission revealed widespread abuses. According to the contemporary historian Polydore Vergil, simple \"greed\" underscored the means by which royal control was over-asserted in Henry's final years. Following Henry VII's death, Henry VIII executed Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, his two most hated tax collectors, on trumped-up charges of treason.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Henry VII established the pound avoirdupois as a standard of weight; it later became part of the Imperial and customary systems of units. In 1506 he resumed the construction of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, started under Henry VI, guaranteeing finances which would continue even after his death.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Henry VII's policy was to maintain peace and to create economic prosperity. Up to a point, he succeeded. The Treaty of Redon was signed in February 1489 between Henry and representatives of Brittany. Based on the terms of the accord, Henry sent 6,000 troops to fight (at the expense of Brittany) under the command of Lord Daubeney. The purpose of the agreement was to prevent France from annexing Brittany. According to John M. Currin, the treaty redefined Anglo-Breton relations. Henry started a new policy to recover Guyenne and other lost Plantagenet claims in France. The treaty marks a shift from neutrality over the French invasion of Brittany to active intervention against it.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Henry later concluded a treaty with France at Etaples that brought money into the coffers of England, and ensured the French would not support pretenders to the English throne, such as Perkin Warbeck. However, this treaty came at a price, as Henry mounted a minor invasion of Brittany in November 1492. Henry decided to keep Brittany out of French hands, signed an alliance with Spain to that end, and sent 6,000 troops to France. The confused, fractious nature of Breton politics undermined his efforts, which finally failed after three sizeable expeditions, at a cost of £24,000. However, as France was becoming more concerned with the Italian Wars, the French were happy to agree to the Peace of Étaples. Henry had pressured the French by laying siege to Boulogne in October 1492. Henry had been under the financial and physical protection of the French throne or its vassals for most of his life before becoming king. To strengthen his position, however, he subsidised shipbuilding, so strengthening the navy (he commissioned Europe's first ever – and the world's oldest surviving – dry dock at Portsmouth in 1495) and improving trading opportunities. John Cabot, originally from Genoa and Venice, had heard that ships from Bristol had discovered uncharted newfound territory far west of Ireland. Having secured financial backing from Florentine bankers in London, Cabot was granted carefully phrased letters patent from Henry in March 1496, permitting him to embark on an exploratory voyage westerly. It is not known precisely where Cabot landed, but he was eventually rewarded with a pension from the king; it is presumed that Cabot perished at sea after a later unsuccessful expedition.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Henry VII was one of the first European monarchs to recognise the importance of the newly united Spanish kingdom; he concluded the Treaty of Medina del Campo, by which his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, was married to Catherine of Aragon. He also concluded the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with Scotland (the first treaty between England and Scotland for almost two centuries), which betrothed his daughter Margaret Tudor to King James IV of Scotland. By this marriage, Henry VII hoped to break the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. Though this was not achieved during his reign, the marriage eventually led to the union of the English and Scottish crowns under Margaret's great-grandson, James VI and I, following the death of Henry's granddaughter Elizabeth I. Henry also formed an alliance with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519) and persuaded Pope Innocent VIII to issue a papal bull of excommunication against all pretenders to Henry's throne.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1506, Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller Emery d'Amboise asked Henry VII to become the protector and patron of the Order, as he had an interest in the crusade. Later on, Henry had exchanged letters with Pope Julius II in 1507, in which he encouraged him to establish peace among Christian realms, and to organise an expedition against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Henry VII was much enriched by trading alum, which was used in the wool and cloth trades as a chemical fixative for dyeing fabrics. Since alum was mined in only one area in Europe (Tolfa, Italy), it was a scarce commodity and therefore especially valuable to its landholder, the Pope. With the English economy heavily invested in wool production, Henry VII became involved in the alum trade in 1486. With the assistance of the Italian merchant banker Lodovico della Fava and the Italian banker Girolamo Frescobaldi, Henry VII became deeply involved in the trade by licensing ships, obtaining alum from the Ottoman Empire, and selling it to the Low Countries and in England. This trade made an expensive commodity cheaper, which raised opposition from Pope Julius II, since the Tolfa mine was a part of papal territory and had given the Pope monopoly control over alum.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Henry's most successful diplomatic achievement as regards the economy was the Magnus Intercursus (\"great agreement\") of 1496. In 1494, Henry embargoed trade (mainly in wool) with the Burgundian Netherlands in retaliation for Margaret of Burgundy's support for Perkin Warbeck. The Merchant Adventurers, the company which enjoyed the monopoly of the Flemish wool trade, relocated from Antwerp to Calais. At the same time, Flemish merchants were ejected from England. The dispute eventually paid off for Henry. Both parties realised they were mutually disadvantaged by the reduction in commerce. Its restoration by the Magnus Intercursus was very much to England's benefit in removing taxation for English merchants and significantly increasing England's wealth. In turn, Antwerp became an extremely important trade entrepôt (transhipment port), through which, for example, goods from the Baltic, spices from the east and Italian silks were exchanged for English cloth.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1506, Henry extorted the Treaty of Windsor from Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy. Philip had been shipwrecked on the English coast, and while Henry's guest, was bullied into an agreement so favourable to England at the expense of the Netherlands that it was dubbed the Malus Intercursus (\"evil agreement\"). France, Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and the Hanseatic League all rejected the treaty, which was never in force. Philip died shortly after the negotiations.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Henry's principal problem was to restore royal authority in a realm recovering from the Wars of the Roses. There were too many powerful noblemen and, as a consequence of the system of so-called bastard feudalism, each had what amounted to private armies of indentured retainers (mercenaries masquerading as servants). Following the example of Edward IV, Henry VII created a Council of Wales and the Marches for his son Arthur, which was intended to govern Wales and the Marches, Cheshire and Cornwall.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "He was content to allow the nobles their regional influence if they were loyal to him. For instance, the Stanley family had control of Lancashire and Cheshire, upholding the peace on the condition that they stayed within the law. In other cases, he brought his over-powerful subjects to heel by decree. He passed laws against \"livery\" (the upper classes' flaunting of their adherents by giving them badges and emblems) and \"maintenance\" (the keeping of too many male \"servants\"). These laws were used shrewdly in levying fines upon those that he perceived as threats.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "However, his principal weapon was the Court of Star Chamber. This revived an earlier practice of using a small (and trusted) group of the Privy Council as a personal or Prerogative Court, able to cut through the cumbersome legal system and act swiftly. Serious disputes involving the use of personal power, or threats to royal authority, were thus dealt with.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Henry VII used justices of the peace on a large, nationwide scale. They were appointed for every shire and served for a year at a time. Their chief task was to see that the laws of the country were obeyed in their area. Their powers and numbers steadily increased during the time of the Tudors, never more so than under Henry's reign. Despite this, Henry was keen to constrain their power and influence, applying the same principles to the justices of the peace as he did to the nobility: a similar system of bonds and recognisances to that which applied to both the gentry and the nobles who tried to exert their elevated influence over these local officials.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "All Acts of Parliament were overseen by the justices of the peace. For example, they could replace suspect jurors in accordance with the 1495 act preventing the corruption of juries. They were also in charge of various administrative duties, such as the checking of weights and measures.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "By 1509, justices of the peace were key enforcers of law and order for Henry VII. They were unpaid, which, in comparison with modern standards, meant a smaller tax bill for law enforcement. Local gentry saw the office as one of local influence and prestige and were therefore willing to serve. Overall, this was a successful area of policy for Henry, both in terms of efficiency and as a method of reducing the corruption endemic within the nobility of the Middle Ages.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1502, Henry VII's life took a difficult and personal turn in which many people he was close to died in quick succession. His first son and heir apparent, Arthur, Prince of Wales, died suddenly at Ludlow Castle, very likely from a viral respiratory illness known at the time as the \"English sweating sickness\". This made Henry VII's second son, Henry, Duke of York, heir apparent to the throne. The King, normally a reserved man who rarely showed much emotion in public unless angry, surprised his courtiers by his intense grief and sobbing at his son's death, while his concern for the Queen is evidence that the marriage was a happy one, as is his reaction to Queen Elizabeth's death the following year, when he shut himself away for several days, refusing to speak to anyone. Henry VII was shattered by the loss of Elizabeth, and her death impacted him severely.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Henry wanted to maintain the Spanish alliance. Accordingly, he arranged a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II for Prince Henry to marry his brother's widow Catherine, a relationship that would have otherwise precluded marriage in the Church. Elizabeth had died in childbirth, so Henry had the dispensation also permit him to marry Catherine himself. After obtaining the dispensation, Henry had second thoughts about the marriage of his son and Catherine. Catherine's mother Isabella I of Castile had died and Catherine's sister Joanna had succeeded her; Catherine was, therefore, daughter of only one reigning monarch and so less desirable as a spouse for Henry VII's heir-apparent. The marriage did not take place during his lifetime. Otherwise, at the time of his father's arranging of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the future Henry VIII was too young to contract the marriage according to Canon Law and would be ineligible until age fourteen.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Henry made half-hearted plans to remarry and beget more heirs, but these never came to anything. He entertained thoughts of remarriage to renew the alliance with Spain – Joanna, Dowager Queen of Naples (a niece of Queen Isabella of Castile), Queen Joanna of Castile, and Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Savoy (sister-in-law of Joanna of Castile), were all considered. In 1505 he was sufficiently interested in a potential marriage to Joanna of Naples that he sent ambassadors to Naples to report on the 27-year-old Joanna's physical suitability. The wedding never took place, and the physical description Henry sent with his ambassadors of what he desired in a new wife matched the description of his wife Elizabeth.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "After 1503, records show the Tower of London was never again used as a royal residence by Henry VII, and all royal births under Henry VIII took place in palaces. Henry VII falls among the minority of British monarchs that never had any known mistresses, and for the times, it is very unusual that he did not remarry: his son Henry was the only male heir left after the death of his wife, thus the death of Arthur created a precarious political position for the House of Tudor.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "During his lifetime the nobility often criticised Henry VII for re-centralizing power in London, and later the 16th-century historian Francis Bacon was ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law, but it is equally true that Henry VII was diligent about keeping detailed records of his personal finances, down to the last halfpenny; these and one account book detailing the expenses of his queen survive in the British National Archives, as do accounts of courtiers and many of the king's own letters. Until the death of his wife, the evidence is clear from these accounting books that Henry was a more doting father and husband than was widely known and there is evidence that his outwardly austere personality belied a devotion to his family. Letters to relatives have an affectionate tone not captured by official state business, as evidenced by many written to his mother Margaret. Many of the entries show a man who loosened his purse strings generously for his wife and children, and not just on necessities: in spring 1491 he spent a great amount of gold on a lute for his daughter Mary; the following year he spent money on a lion for Elizabeth's menagerie. With Elizabeth's death, the possibilities for such family indulgences greatly diminished. Immediately afterwards, Henry became very sick and nearly died himself, allowing only his mother Margaret Beaufort near him: \"privily departed to a solitary place, and would that no man should resort unto him.\" Further compounding Henry's distress, his older daughter Margaret had previously been betrothed to King James IV of Scotland and within months of her mother's death she had to be escorted to the border by her father: he would never see her again. Margaret Tudor wrote letters to her father declaring her homesickness, but Henry could do nothing but mourn the loss of his family and honour the terms of the peace treaty he had agreed to with the King of Scotland.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Henry VII died of tuberculosis at Richmond Palace on 21 April 1509 and was buried in the chapel he commissioned in Westminster Abbey next to his wife, Elizabeth. He was succeeded by his second son, Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47), who would initiate the Protestant Reformation in England. His mother died two months later on 29 June 1509.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Amiable and high-spirited, Henry was friendly if dignified in manner, and it was clear that he was extremely intelligent. His biographer, Professor Stanley Chrimes, credits him – even before he had become king – with \"a high degree of personal magnetism, ability to inspire confidence, and a growing reputation for shrewd decisiveness\". On the debit side, he may have looked a little delicate as he suffered from poor health.",
"title": "Appearance and character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Historians have always compared Henry VII with his continental contemporaries, especially Louis XI of France and Ferdinand II of Aragon. By 1600 historians emphasised Henry's wisdom in drawing lessons in statecraft from other monarchs. In 1622 Francis Bacon published his History of the Reign of King Henry VII. By 1900 the \"New Monarchy\" interpretation stressed the common factors that in each country led to the revival of monarchical power. This approach raised puzzling questions about similarities and differences in the development of national states. In the late 20th century a model of European state formation was prominent in which Henry less resembles Louis and Ferdinand.",
"title": "Legacy and memory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Henry VII and Elizabeth had seven children:",
"title": "Family"
}
]
| Henry VII was King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizure of the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death in 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor. Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of John of Gaunt, founder of the House of Lancaster and son of King Edward III. Henry's father, Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, a half-brother of Henry VI of England and a member of the Welsh Tudors of Penmynydd, died three months before his son Henry was born. During Henry's early years, his uncle Henry VI was fighting against Edward IV, a member of the Yorkist branch of the House of Plantagenet. After Edward retook the throne in 1471, Henry Tudor spent 14 years in exile in Brittany. He attained the throne when his forces, supported by France, Scotland, and Wales, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the culmination of the Wars of the Roses. He was the last king of England to win his throne on the field of battle. He cemented his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. Henry restored power and stability to the English monarchy following the civil war. He is credited with many administrative, economic and diplomatic initiatives. His supportive policy toward England's wool industry and his standoff with the Low Countries had long-lasting benefits to the English economy. He paid very close attention to detail, and instead of spending lavishly he concentrated on raising new revenues. He stabilised the government's finances by introducing several new taxes. After his death, a commission found widespread abuses in the tax collection process. Henry reigned for nearly 24 years and was peacefully succeeded by his son, Henry VIII. | 2001-11-23T10:54:11Z | 2023-12-20T08:41:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VII_of_England |
14,187 | Henry VIII | Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages and his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disagreement with Pope Clement VII about such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated by the pope.
Henry brought radical changes to the Constitution of England, expanding royal power and ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings in opposition to papal supremacy. He frequently used charges of treason and heresy to quell dissent, and those accused were often executed without a formal trial using bills of attainder. He achieved many of his political aims through the work of his chief ministers, some of whom were banished or executed when they fell out of his favour. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer all figured prominently in his administration.
Henry was an extravagant spender, using the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries and acts of the Reformation Parliament. He converted the money that was formerly paid to Rome into royal revenue. Despite the money from these sources, he was often on the verge of financial ruin due to personal extravagance as well as costly and largely unproductive wars, particularly with King Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King James V of Scotland and the Scottish regency under the Earl of Arran and Mary of Guise. He expanded the Royal Navy, oversaw the annexation of Wales to England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 and was the first English monarch to rule as King of Ireland following the Crown of Ireland Act 1542.
Henry's contemporaries considered him an attractive, educated and accomplished king. He has been described as "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne" and his reign described as the "most important" in English history. He was an author and composer. As he aged, he became severely overweight and his health suffered. He is frequently characterised in his later life as a lustful, egotistical, paranoid and tyrannical monarch. He was succeeded by his son Edward VI.
Born on 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Kent, Henry Tudor was the third child and second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Of the young Henry's six (or seven) siblings, only three – his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, and sisters Margaret and Mary – survived infancy. He was baptised by Richard Foxe, the Bishop of Exeter, at a church of the Observant Franciscans close to the palace. In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at age three and was made a Knight of the Bath soon after. The day after the ceremony, he was created Duke of York and a month or so later made Warden of the Scottish Marches. In May 1495, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter. The reason for giving such appointments to a small child was to enable his father to retain personal control of lucrative positions and not share them with established families. Not much is known about Henry's early life – save for his appointments – because he was not expected to become king, but it is known that he received a first-rate education from leading tutors. He became fluent in Latin and French and learned at least some Italian.
In November 1501, Henry played a considerable part in the ceremonies surrounding his brother Arthur's marriage to Catherine, the youngest child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. As Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father as king, differenced by a label of three points ermine. He was further honoured on 9 February 1506 by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who made him a Knight of the Golden Fleece.
In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15, possibly of sweating sickness, just 20 weeks after his marriage to Catherine. Arthur's death thrust all his duties upon his younger brother. The 10-year-old Henry became the new Duke of Cornwall, and the new Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester in February 1504. Henry VII gave his second son few responsibilities even after the death of Arthur. Young Henry was strictly supervised and did not appear in public. As a result, he ascended the throne "untrained in the exacting art of kingship".
Henry VII renewed his efforts to seal a marital alliance between England and Spain, by offering his son Henry in marriage to the widowed Catherine. Henry VII and Catherine's mother Queen Isabella were both keen on the idea, which had arisen very shortly after Arthur's death. On 23 June 1503, a treaty was signed for their marriage, and they were betrothed two days later. A papal dispensation was only needed for the "impediment of public honesty" if the marriage had not been consummated as Catherine and her duenna claimed, but Henry VII and the Spanish ambassador set out instead to obtain a dispensation for "affinity", which took account of the possibility of consummation. Cohabitation was not possible because Henry was too young. Isabella's death in 1504, and the ensuing problems of succession in Castile, complicated matters. Catherine's father Ferdinand preferred her to stay in England, but Henry VII's relations with Ferdinand had deteriorated. Catherine was therefore left in limbo for some time, culminating in Prince Henry's rejection of the marriage as soon he was able, at the age of 14. Ferdinand's solution was to make his daughter ambassador, allowing her to stay in England indefinitely. Devout, she began to believe that it was God's will that she marry the prince despite his opposition.
Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and the 17-year-old Henry succeeded him as king. Soon after his father's burial on 10 May, Henry suddenly declared that he would indeed marry Catherine, leaving unresolved several issues concerning the papal dispensation and a missing part of the marriage portion. The new King maintained that it had been his father's dying wish that he marry Catherine. Whether or not this was true, it was convenient. Emperor Maximilian I had been attempting to marry his granddaughter Eleanor, Catherine's niece, to Henry; she had now been jilted. Henry's wedding to Catherine was kept low-key and was held at the friar's church in Greenwich on 11 June 1509. Henry claimed descent from Constantine the Great and King Arthur and saw himself as their successor.
On 23 June 1509, Henry led the now 23-year-old Catherine from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey for their coronation, which took place the following day. It was a grand affair: the King's passage was lined with tapestries and laid with fine cloth. Following the ceremony, there was a grand banquet in Westminster Hall. As Catherine wrote to her father, "our time is spent in continuous festival".
Two days after his coronation, Henry arrested his father's two most unpopular ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. They were charged with high treason and were executed in 1510. Politically motivated executions would remain one of Henry's primary tactics for dealing with those who stood in his way. Henry returned some of the money supposedly extorted by the two ministers. By contrast, Henry's view of the House of York – potential rival claimants for the throne – was more moderate than his father's had been. Several who had been imprisoned by his father, including Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, were pardoned. Others went unreconciled; Edmund de la Pole was eventually beheaded in 1513, an execution prompted by his brother Richard siding against the King.
Soon after marrying Henry, Catherine conceived. She gave birth to a stillborn girl on 31 January 1510. About four months later, Catherine again became pregnant. On 1 January 1511, New Year's Day, a son Henry was born. After the grief of losing their first child, the couple were pleased to have a boy and festivities were held, including a two-day joust known as the Westminster Tournament. However, the child died seven weeks later. Catherine had two stillborn sons in 1513 and 1515, but gave birth in February 1516 to a girl, Mary. Relations between Henry and Catherine had been strained, but they eased slightly after Mary's birth.
Although Henry's marriage to Catherine has since been described as "unusually good", it is known that Henry took mistresses. It was revealed in 1510 that Henry had been conducting an affair with one of the sisters of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. The most significant mistress for about three years, starting in 1516, was Elizabeth Blount. Blount is one of only two completely undisputed mistresses, considered by some to be few for a virile young king. Exactly how many Henry had is disputed: David Loades believes Henry had mistresses "only to a very limited extent", whilst Alison Weir believes there were numerous other affairs. Catherine is not known to have protested. In 1518, she fell pregnant again with another girl, who was also stillborn.
Blount gave birth in June 1519 to Henry's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. The young boy was made Duke of Richmond in June 1525 in what some thought was one step on the path to his eventual legitimisation. In 1533, FitzRoy married Mary Howard, but died childless three years later. At the time of his death in June 1536, Parliament was considering the Second Succession Act, which could have allowed him to become king.
In 1510, France, with a fragile alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in the League of Cambrai, was winning a war against Venice. Henry renewed his father's friendship with Louis XII of France, an issue that divided his council. Certainly, war with the combined might of the two powers would have been exceedingly difficult. Shortly thereafter, however, Henry also signed a pact with Ferdinand II of Aragon. After Pope Julius II created the anti-French Holy League in October 1511, Henry followed Ferdinand's lead and brought England into the new League. An initial joint Anglo-Spanish attack was planned for the spring to recover Aquitaine for England, the start of making Henry's dreams of ruling France a reality. The attack, however, following a formal declaration of war in April 1512, was not led by Henry personally and was a considerable failure; Ferdinand used it simply to further his own ends, and it strained the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Nevertheless, the French were pushed out of Italy soon after, and the alliance survived, with both parties keen to win further victories over the French. Henry then pulled off a diplomatic coup by convincing Emperor Maximilian to join the Holy League. Remarkably, Henry had secured the promised title of "Most Christian King of France" from Julius and possibly coronation by the Pope himself in Paris, if only Louis could be defeated.
On 30 June 1513, Henry invaded France, and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs – a relatively minor result, but one which was seized on by the English for propaganda purposes. Soon after, the English took Thérouanne and handed it over to Maximillian; Tournai, a more significant settlement, followed. Henry had led the army personally, complete with a large entourage. His absence from the country, however, had prompted his brother-in-law James IV of Scotland to invade England at the behest of Louis. Nevertheless, the English army, overseen by Queen Catherine, decisively defeated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513. Among the dead was the Scottish King, thus ending Scotland's brief involvement in the war. These campaigns had given Henry a taste of the military success he so desired. However, despite initial indications, he decided not to pursue a 1514 campaign. He had been supporting Ferdinand and Maximilian financially during the campaign but had received little in return; England's coffers were now empty. With the replacement of Julius by Pope Leo X, who was inclined to negotiate for peace with France, Henry signed his own treaty with Louis: his sister Mary would become Louis' wife, having previously been pledged to the younger Charles, and peace was secured for eight years, a remarkably long time.
Charles V, the nephew of Henry's wife Catherine, inherited a large empire in Europe, becoming king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. When Louis XII of France died in 1515, he was succeeded by his cousin Francis I. These accessions left three relatively young rulers and an opportunity for a clean slate. The careful diplomacy of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey had resulted in the Treaty of London in 1518, aimed at uniting the kingdoms of western Europe in the wake of a new Ottoman threat, and it seemed that peace might be secured. Henry met the new French King, Francis, on 7 June 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais for a fortnight of lavish entertainment. Both hoped for friendly relations in place of the wars of the previous decade. The strong air of competition laid to rest any hopes of a renewal of the Treaty of London, however, and conflict was inevitable. Henry had more in common with Charles, whom he met once before and once after Francis. Charles brought his realm into war with France in 1521; Henry offered to mediate, but little was achieved and by the end of the year Henry had aligned England with Charles. He still clung to his previous aim of restoring English lands in France but sought to secure an alliance with Burgundy, then a territorial possession of Charles, and the continued support of the Emperor. A small English attack in the north of France made up little ground. Charles defeated and captured Francis at Pavia and could dictate peace, but he believed he owed Henry nothing. Sensing this, Henry decided to take England out of the war before his ally, signing the Treaty of the More on 30 August 1525.
During his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry conducted an affair with Mary Boleyn, Catherine's lady-in-waiting. There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Henry Carey and Catherine Carey, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved, and the King never acknowledged them as he did in the case of Henry FitzRoy. In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the male heir he desired, he became enamoured of Mary Boleyn's sister, Anne Boleyn, then a charismatic young woman of 25 in the queen's entourage. Anne, however, resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister had. It was in this context that Henry considered his three options for finding a dynastic successor and hence resolving what came to be described at court as the King's "great matter". These options were legitimising Henry FitzRoy, which would need the involvement of the Pope and would be open to challenge; marrying off Mary, his daughter with Catherine, as soon as possible and hoping for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary was considered unlikely to conceive before Henry's death, or somehow rejecting Catherine and marrying someone else of child-bearing age. Probably seeing the possibility of marrying Anne, the third was ultimately the most attractive possibility to the 34-year-old Henry, and it soon became the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to the now 40-year-old Catherine.
Henry's precise motivations and intentions over the coming years are not widely agreed on. Henry himself, at least in the early part of his reign, was a devout and well-informed Catholic to the extent that his 1521 publication Assertio Septem Sacramentorum ("Defence of the Seven Sacraments") earned him the title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) from Pope Leo X. The work represented a staunch defence of papal supremacy, albeit one couched in somewhat contingent terms. It is not clear exactly when Henry changed his mind on the issue as he grew more intent on a second marriage. Certainly, by 1527, he had convinced himself that Catherine had produced no male heir because their union was "blighted in the eyes of God". Indeed, in marrying Catherine, his brother's wife, he had acted contrary to Leviticus 20:21, a justification Thomas Cranmer used to declare the marriage null. Martin Luther, on the other hand, had initially argued against the annulment, stating that Henry VIII could take a second wife in accordance with his teaching that the Bible allowed for polygamy but not divorce. Henry now believed the Pope had lacked the authority to grant a dispensation from this impediment. It was this argument Henry took to Pope Clement VII in 1527 in the hope of having his marriage to Catherine annulled, forgoing at least one less openly defiant line of attack. In going public, all hope of tempting Catherine to retire to a nunnery or otherwise stay quiet was lost. Henry sent his secretary, William Knight, to appeal directly to the Holy See by way of a deceptively worded draft papal bull. Knight was unsuccessful; the Pope could not be misled so easily.
Other missions concentrated on arranging an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from Clement VII. Although Clement agreed to the creation of such a court, he never had any intention of empowering his legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to decide in Henry's favour. This bias was perhaps the result of pressure from Emperor Charles V, Catherine's nephew, but it is not clear how far this influenced either Campeggio or the Pope. After less than two months of hearing evidence, Clement called the case back to Rome in July 1529, from which it was clear that it would never re-emerge. With the chance for an annulment lost, Cardinal Wolsey bore the blame. He was charged with praemunire in October 1529, and his fall from grace was "sudden and total". Briefly reconciled with Henry (and officially pardoned) in the first half of 1530, he was charged once more in November 1530, this time for treason, but died while awaiting trial. After a short period in which Henry took government upon his own shoulders, Thomas More took on the role of Lord Chancellor and chief minister. Intelligent and able, but a devout Catholic and opponent of the annulment, More initially cooperated with the King's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament.
A year later, Catherine was banished from court, and her rooms were given to Anne Boleyn. Anne was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers, but the extent to which she herself was a committed Protestant is much debated. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne's influence and the need to find a trustworthy supporter of the annulment had Thomas Cranmer appointed to the vacant position. This was approved by the Pope, unaware of the king's nascent plans for the Church.
Henry was married to Catherine for 24 years. Their divorce has been described as a "deeply wounding and isolating" experience for Henry.
In the winter of 1532, Henry met with Francis I at Calais and enlisted the support of the French King for his new marriage. Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry, now 41, and Anne went through a secret wedding service. She soon became pregnant, and there was a second wedding service in London on 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid. Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen, becoming instead "princess dowager" as the widow of Arthur. In her place, Anne was crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth to a daughter slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. The child was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York.
Following the marriage, there was a period of consolidation, taking the form of a series of statutes of the Reformation Parliament aimed at finding solutions to any remaining issues, whilst protecting the new reforms from challenge, convincing the public of their legitimacy, and exposing and dealing with opponents. Although the canon law was dealt with at length by Cranmer and others, these acts were advanced by Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley and the Duke of Norfolk and indeed by Henry himself. With this process complete, in May 1532 More resigned as Lord Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister. With the Act of Succession 1533, Catherine's daughter, Mary, was declared illegitimate; Henry's marriage to Anne was declared legitimate; and Anne's issue declared to be next in the line of succession. With the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, Parliament recognised the King's status as head of the church in England and, together with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, abolished the right of appeal to Rome. It was only then that Pope Clement VII took the step of excommunicating the King and Cranmer, although the excommunication was not made official until some time later.
The King and Queen were not pleased with married life. The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Anne refused to play the submissive role expected of her. The vivacity and opinionated intellect that had made her so attractive as an illicit lover made her too independent for the largely ceremonial role of a royal wife and it made her many enemies. For his part, Henry disliked Anne's constant irritability and violent temper. After a false pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine. Henry is traditionally believed to have had an affair with Madge Shelton in 1535, although historian Antonia Fraser argues that Henry in fact had an affair with her sister Mary Shelton.
Opposition to Henry's religious policies was at first quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks, including the first Carthusian Martyrs, were executed and many more pilloried. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Thomas More, both of whom refused to take the oath to the King. Neither Henry nor Cromwell sought at that stage to have the men executed; rather, they hoped that the two might change their minds and save themselves. Fisher openly rejected Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church, but More was careful to avoid openly breaking the Treasons Act 1534, which (unlike later acts) did not forbid mere silence. Both men were subsequently convicted of high treason, however – More on the evidence of a single conversation with Richard Rich, the Solicitor General - and both were executed in the summer of 1535.
These suppressions, as well as the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535, in turn, contributed to a more general resistance to Henry's reforms, most notably in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large uprising in northern England in October 1536. Some 20,000 to 40,000 rebels were led by Robert Aske, together with parts of the northern nobility. Henry VIII promised the rebels he would pardon them and thanked them for raising the issues. Aske told the rebels they had been successful and they could disperse and go home. Henry saw the rebels as traitors and did not feel obliged to keep his promises to them, so when further violence occurred after Henry's offer of a pardon he was quick to break his promise of clemency. The leaders, including Aske, were arrested and executed for treason. In total, about 200 rebels were executed, and the disturbances ended.
On 8 January 1536, news reached the King and Queen that Catherine of Aragon had died. The following day, Henry dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet. Queen Anne was pregnant again, and she was aware of the consequences if she failed to give birth to a son. Later that month, the King was thrown from his horse in a tournament and was badly injured; it seemed for a time that his life was in danger. When news of this accident reached the queen, she was sent into shock and miscarried a male child at about 15 weeks' gestation, on the day of Catherine's funeral, 29 January 1536. For most observers, this personal loss was the beginning of the end of this royal marriage.
Although the Boleyn family still held important positions on the Privy Council, Anne had many enemies, including the Duke of Suffolk. Even her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had come to resent her attitude to her power. The Boleyns preferred France over the Emperor as a potential ally, but the King's favour had swung towards the latter (partly because of Cromwell), damaging the family's influence. Also opposed to Anne were supporters of reconciliation with Princess Mary (among them the former supporters of Catherine), who had reached maturity. A second annulment was now a real possibility, although it is commonly believed that it was Cromwell's anti-Boleyn influence that led opponents to look for a way of having her executed.
Anne's downfall came shortly after she had recovered from her final miscarriage. Whether it was primarily the result of allegations of conspiracy, adultery, or witchcraft remains a matter of debate among historians. Early signs of a fall from grace included the King's new mistress, the 28-year-old Jane Seymour, being moved into new quarters, and Anne's brother, George Boleyn, being refused the Order of the Garter, which was instead given to Nicholas Carew. Between 30 April and 2 May, five men, including George Boleyn, were arrested on charges of treasonable adultery and accused of having sexual relationships with the queen. Anne was arrested, accused of treasonous adultery and incest. Although the evidence against them was unconvincing, the accused were found guilty and condemned to death. The accused men were executed on 17 May 1536. Henry and Anne's marriage was annulled by Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth on the same day. Cranmer appears to have had difficulty finding grounds for an annulment and probably based it on the prior liaison between Henry and Anne's sister Mary, which in canon law meant that Henry's marriage to Anne was, like his first marriage, within a forbidden degree of affinity and therefore void. At 8 am on 19 May 1536, Anne was executed on Tower Green.
The day after Anne's execution the 45-year-old Henry became engaged to Seymour, who had been one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting. They were married ten days later at the Palace of Whitehall, Whitehall, London, in the queen's closet, by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. On 12 October 1537, Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, the future Edward VI. The birth was difficult, and Queen Jane died on 24 October 1537 from an infection and was buried in Windsor. The euphoria that had accompanied Edward's birth became sorrow, but it was only over time that Henry came to long for his wife. At the time, Henry recovered quickly from the shock. Measures were immediately put in place to find another wife for Henry, which, at the insistence of Cromwell and the Privy Council, were focused on the European continent.
With Charles V distracted by the internal politics of his many kingdoms and external threats, and Henry and Francis on relatively good terms, domestic and not foreign policy issues had been Henry's priority in the first half of the 1530s. In 1536, for example, Henry granted his assent to the Laws in Wales Act 1535, which legally annexed Wales, uniting England and Wales into a single nation. This was followed by the Second Succession Act (the Act of Succession 1536), which declared Henry's children by Jane to be next in the line of succession and declared both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate, thus excluding them from the throne. The King was granted the power to further determine the line of succession in his will, should he have no further issue.
In 1538, as part of the negotiation of a secret treaty by Cromwell with Charles V, a series of dynastic marriages were proposed: Mary would marry a son of the King of Portugal, Elizabeth marry one of the sons of the King of Hungary and the infant Edward marry one of the Emperor's daughters. The widowed King, it was suggested, might marry the Dowager Duchess of Milan. However, when Charles and Francis made peace in January 1539, Henry became increasingly paranoid, perhaps as a result of receiving a constant list of threats to the kingdom (real or imaginary, minor or serious) supplied by Cromwell in his role as spymaster. Enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry used some of his financial reserves to build a series of coastal defences and set some aside for use in the event of a Franco-German invasion.
Having considered the matter, Cromwell suggested Anne, the 25-year-old sister of the Duke of Cleves, who was seen as an important ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack on England, for the duke fell between Lutheranism and Catholicism. Other potential brides included Christina of Denmark, Anna of Lorraine, Louise of Guise and Amalia of Cleves. Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the King. Despite speculation that Holbein painted her in an overly flattering light, it is more likely that the portrait was accurate; Holbein remained in favour at court. After seeing Holbein's portrait, and urged on by the complimentary description of Anne given by his courtiers, the 49-year-old King agreed to wed Anne. The marriage took place in January 1540.
However, it was not long before Henry wished to annul the marriage so he could marry another. Anne did not argue, and confirmed that the marriage had never been consummated. Anne's previous betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine's son Francis provided further grounds for the annulment. The marriage was subsequently dissolved in July 1540, and Anne received the title of "The King's Sister", two houses, and a generous allowance. It was soon clear that Henry had fallen for the 17-year-old Catherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk's niece. This worried Cromwell, for Norfolk was his political opponent.
Shortly after, the religious reformers (and protégés of Cromwell) Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garret were burned as heretics. Cromwell, meanwhile, fell out of favour although it is unclear exactly why, for there is little evidence of differences in domestic or foreign policy. Despite his role, he was never formally accused of being responsible for Henry's failed marriage. Cromwell was now surrounded by enemies at court, with Norfolk also able to draw on his niece Catherine's position. Cromwell was charged with treason, selling export licences, granting passports, and drawing up commissions without permission, and may also have been blamed for the failure of the foreign policy that accompanied the attempted marriage to Anne. He was subsequently attainted and beheaded.
On 28 July 1540 (the same day Cromwell was executed), Henry married the young Catherine Howard, a first cousin and lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn. He was delighted with his new queen and awarded her the lands of Cromwell and a vast array of jewellery. Soon after the marriage, however, Queen Catherine had an affair with the courtier Thomas Culpeper. She also employed Francis Dereham, who had previously been informally engaged to her and had an affair with her prior to her marriage, as her secretary. The Privy Council was informed of her affair with Dereham whilst Henry was away; Thomas Cranmer was dispatched to investigate, and he brought evidence of Queen Catherine's previous affair with Dereham to the King's notice. Though Henry originally refused to believe the allegations, Dereham confessed. It took another meeting of the council, however, before Henry believed the accusations against Dereham and went into a rage, blaming the council before consoling himself in hunting. When questioned, the queen could have admitted a prior contract to marry Dereham, which would have made her subsequent marriage to Henry invalid, but she instead claimed that Dereham had forced her to enter into an adulterous relationship. Dereham, meanwhile, exposed Catherine's relationship with Culpeper. Culpeper and Dereham were both executed, and Catherine too was beheaded on 13 February 1542.
Henry married his last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, in July 1543. A reformer at heart, she argued with Henry over religion. Henry remained committed to an idiosyncratic mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism; the reactionary mood that had gained ground after Cromwell's fall had neither eliminated his Protestant streak nor been overcome by it. Parr helped reconcile Henry with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. In 1543, the Third Succession Act put them back in the line of succession after Edward. The same act allowed Henry to determine further succession to the throne in his will.
In 1538, the chief minister Thomas Cromwell pursued an extensive campaign against what the government termed "idolatry" practised under the old religion, culminating in September with the dismantling of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. As a consequence, the King was excommunicated by Pope Paul III on 17 December of the same year. In 1540, Henry sanctioned the complete destruction of shrines to saints. In 1542, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops remained. Consequently, the Lords Spiritual – as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known – were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal.
The 1539 alliance between Francis and Charles had soured, eventually degenerating into renewed war. With Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn dead, relations between Charles and Henry improved considerably, and Henry concluded a secret alliance with the Emperor and decided to enter the Italian War in favour of his new ally. An invasion of France was planned for 1543. In preparation for it, Henry moved to eliminate the potential threat of Scotland under the youthful James V. The Scots were defeated at Battle of Solway Moss on 24 November 1542, and James died on 15 December. Henry now hoped to unite the crowns of England and Scotland by marrying his son Edward to James's successor, Mary. The Scottish Regent Lord Arran agreed to the marriage in the Treaty of Greenwich on 1 July 1543, but it was rejected by the Parliament of Scotland on 11 December. The result was eight years of war between England and Scotland, a campaign later dubbed "the Rough Wooing". Despite several peace treaties, unrest continued in Scotland until Henry's death.
Despite the early success with Scotland, Henry hesitated to invade France, annoying Charles. Henry finally went to France in June 1544 with a two-pronged attack. One force under Norfolk ineffectively besieged Montreuil. The other, under Suffolk, laid siege to Boulogne. Henry later took personal command, and Boulogne fell on 18 September 1544. However, Henry had refused Charles's request to march against Paris. Charles's own campaign fizzled, and he made peace with France that same day. Henry was left alone against France, unable to make peace. Francis attempted to invade England in the summer of 1545 but his forces reached only the Isle of Wight before being repulsed in the Battle of the Solent. Financially exhausted, France and England signed the Treaty of Camp on 7 June 1546. Henry secured Boulogne for eight years. The city was then to be returned to France for 2 million crowns (£750,000). Henry needed the money; the 1544 campaign had cost £650,000, and England was once again facing bankruptcy.
Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical devices. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly had gout. His obesity and other medical problems can be traced to the jousting accident in 1536 in which he suffered a leg wound. The accident reopened and aggravated an injury he had sustained years earlier, to the extent that his doctors found it difficult to treat. The chronic wound festered for the remainder of his life and became ulcerated, preventing him from maintaining the level of physical activity he had previously enjoyed. The jousting accident is also believed to have caused Henry's mood swings, which may have had a dramatic effect on his personality and temperament.
The theory that Henry had syphilis has been dismissed by most historians. Historian Susan Maclean Kybett ascribes his demise to scurvy, which is caused by insufficient vitamin C most often due to a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in one's diet.
Henry's obesity hastened his death at the age of 55, on 28 January 1547 in the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. The tomb he had planned (with components taken from the tomb intended for Cardinal Wolsey) was only partly constructed and was never completed (the sarcophagus and its base were later removed and used for Lord Nelson's tomb in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral). Henry was interred in a vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, next to Jane Seymour. Over 100 years later, King Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) was buried in the same vault.
English historian and House of Tudor expert David Starkey describes Henry VIII as follows:
What is extraordinary is that Henry was usually a very good husband. And he liked women – that's why he married so many of them! He was very tender to them, we know that he addressed them as "sweetheart". He was a good lover, he was very generous: the wives were given huge settlements of land and jewels – they were loaded with jewels. He was immensely considerate when they were pregnant. But, once he had fallen out of love... he just cut them off. He just withdrew. He abandoned them. They didn't even know he'd left them.
Upon Henry's death, he was succeeded by his only surviving son, Edward VI. Since Edward was then only nine years old, he could not rule directly. Instead, Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a regency council until Edward reached 18. The executors chose Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, elder brother to Jane Seymour (Edward's mother), to be Lord Protector of the Realm. Under provisions of the will, was Edward to die childless, the throne was to pass to Mary, Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, and her heirs.
If Mary's issue failed, the crown was to go to Elizabeth, Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, and her heirs. Finally, if Elizabeth's line became extinct, the crown was to be inherited by the descendants of Henry VIII's deceased younger sister, Mary, the Greys.
The descendants of Henry's sister Margaret Tudor – the Stuarts, rulers of Scotland – were thereby excluded from the succession.
This provision ultimately failed when James VI of Scotland, Margaret's great-grandson, became King of England in 1603.
Edward VI himself would disregard the will and name Jane Grey his successor.
Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance man, and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamorous excess, epitomised by the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He scouted the country for choirboys, taking some directly from Wolsey's choir, and introduced Renaissance music into court. Musicians included Benedict de Opitiis, Richard Sampson, Ambrose Lupo, and Venetian organist Dionisio Memo, and Henry himself kept a considerable collection of instruments. He was skilled on the lute and played the organ, and was a talented player of the virginals. He could also sightread music and sing well. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best-known piece of music is "Pastime with Good Company" ("The Kynges Ballade"), and he is reputed to have written "Greensleeves" but probably did not.
Henry was an avid gambler and dice player, and excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was also known for his strong defence of conventional Christian piety. He was involved in the construction and improvement of several significant buildings, including Nonsuch Palace, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey in London. Many of the existing buildings which he improved were properties confiscated from Wolsey, such as Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, the Palace of Whitehall, and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Henry was an intellectual, the first English king with a modern humanist education. He read and wrote English, French, and Latin, and owned a large library. He annotated many books and published one of his own, and he had numerous pamphlets and lectures prepared to support the reformation of the church. Richard Sampson's Oratio (1534), for example, was an argument for absolute obedience to the monarchy and claimed that the English church had always been independent of Rome. At the popular level, theatre and minstrel troupes funded by the crown travelled around the land to promote the new religious practices; the Pope and Catholic priests and monks were mocked as foreign devils, while Henry was hailed as the glorious King of England and as a brave and heroic defender of the true faith. Henry worked hard to present an image of unchallengeable authority and irresistible power.
Henry was a large, well-built athlete, over 6 feet [1.8 m] tall, strong, and broad in proportion. His athletic activities were more than pastimes; they were political devices that served multiple goals, enhancing his image, impressing foreign emissaries and rulers, and conveying his ability to suppress any rebellion. He arranged a jousting tournament at Greenwich in 1517 where he wore gilded armour and gilded horse trappings, and outfits of velvet, satin, and cloth of gold with pearls and jewels. It suitably impressed foreign ambassadors, one of whom wrote home that "the wealth and civilisation of the world are here, and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such". Henry finally retired from jousting in 1536 after a heavy fall from his horse left him unconscious for two hours, but he continued to sponsor two lavish tournaments a year. He then started gaining weight and lost the trim, athletic figure that had made him so handsome, and his courtiers began dressing in heavily padded clothes to emulate and flatter him. His health rapidly declined near the end of his reign.
The power of Tudor monarchs, including Henry, was 'whole' and 'entire', ruling, as they claimed, by the grace of God alone. The crown could also rely on the exclusive use of those functions that constituted the royal prerogative. These included acts of diplomacy (including royal marriages), declarations of war, management of the coinage, the issue of royal pardons and the power to summon and dissolve parliament as and when required. Nevertheless, as evident during Henry's break with Rome, the monarch stayed within established limits, whether legal or financial, that forced him to work closely with both the nobility and parliament (representing the gentry).
In practice, Tudor monarchs used patronage to maintain a royal court that included formal institutions such as the Privy Council as well as more informal advisers and confidants. Both the rise and fall of court nobles could be swift: Henry did undoubtedly execute at will, burning or beheading two of his wives, 20 peers, four leading public servants, six close attendants and friends, one cardinal (John Fisher) and numerous abbots. Among those who were in favour at any given point in Henry's reign, one could usually be identified as a chief minister, though one of the enduring debates in the historiography of the period has been the extent to which those chief ministers controlled Henry rather than vice versa. In particular, historian G. R. Elton has argued that one such minister, Thomas Cromwell, led a "Tudor revolution in government" independently of the King, whom Elton presented as an opportunistic, essentially lazy participant in the nitty-gritty of politics. Where Henry did intervene personally in the running of the country, Elton argued, he mostly did so to its detriment. The prominence and influence of faction in Henry's court is similarly discussed in the context of at least five episodes of Henry's reign, including the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
From 1514 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal of the established Church, oversaw domestic and foreign policy for the King from his position as Lord Chancellor. Wolsey centralised the national government and extended the jurisdiction of the conciliar courts, particularly the Star Chamber. The Star Chamber's overall structure remained unchanged, but Wolsey used it to provide much-needed reform of the criminal law. The power of the court itself did not outlive Wolsey, however, since no serious administrative reform was undertaken and its role eventually devolved to the localities. Wolsey helped fill the gap left by Henry's declining participation in government (particularly in comparison to his father) but did so mostly by imposing himself in the King's place. His use of these courts to pursue personal grievances, and particularly to treat delinquents as mere examples of a whole class worthy of punishment, angered the rich, who were annoyed as well by his enormous wealth and ostentatious living. Following Wolsey's downfall, Henry took full control of his government, although at court numerous complex factions continued to try to ruin and destroy each other.
Thomas Cromwell also came to define Henry's government. Returning to England from the continent in 1514 or 1515, Cromwell soon entered Wolsey's service. He turned to law, also picking up a good knowledge of the Bible, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1524. He became Wolsey's "man of all work". Driven in part by his religious beliefs, Cromwell attempted to reform the body politic of the English government through discussion and consent, and through the vehicle of continuity, not outward change. Many saw him as the man they wanted to bring about their shared aims, including Thomas Audley. By 1531, Cromwell and his associates were already responsible for the drafting of much legislation. Cromwell's first office was that of the master of the King's jewels in 1532, from which he began to invigorate the government finances. By that point, Cromwell's power as an efficient administrator, in a Council full of politicians, exceeded what Wolsey had achieved.
Cromwell did much work through his many offices to remove the tasks of government from the Royal Household (and ideologically from the personal body of the King) and into a public state. But he did so in a haphazard fashion that left several remnants, not least because he needed to retain Henry's support, his own power, and the possibility of actually achieving the plan he set out. Cromwell made the various income streams Henry VII put in place more formal and assigned largely autonomous bodies for their administration. The role of the King's Council was transferred to a reformed Privy Council, much smaller and more efficient than its predecessor. A difference emerged between the King's financial health and the country's, although Cromwell's fall undermined much of his bureaucracy, which required him to keep order among the many new bodies and prevent profligate spending that strained relations as well as finances. Cromwell's reforms ground to a halt in 1539, the initiative lost, and he failed to secure the passage of an enabling act, the Proclamation by the Crown Act 1539. He was executed on 28 July 1540.
Henry inherited a vast fortune and a prosperous economy from his father, who had been frugal. This fortune is estimated at £1,250,000 (the equivalent of £375 million today). By comparison, Henry VIII's reign was a near disaster financially. He augmented the royal treasury by seizing church lands, but his heavy spending and long periods of mismanagement damaged the economy.
Henry spent much of his wealth on maintaining his court and household, including many of the building works he undertook on royal palaces. He hung 2,000 tapestries in his palaces; by comparison, James V of Scotland hung just 200. Henry took pride in showing off his collection of weapons, which included exotic archery equipment, 2,250 pieces of land ordnance and 6,500 handguns. Tudor monarchs had to fund all government expenses out of their own income. This income came from the Crown lands that Henry owned as well as from customs duties like tonnage and poundage, granted by parliament to the King for life. During Henry's reign the revenues of the Crown remained constant (around £100,000), but were eroded by inflation and rising prices brought about by war. Indeed, war and Henry's dynastic ambitions in Europe exhausted the surplus he had inherited from his father by the mid-1520s.
Henry VII had not involved Parliament in his affairs very much, but Henry VIII had to turn to Parliament during his reign for money, in particular for grants of subsidies to fund his wars. The dissolution of the monasteries provided a means to replenish the treasury, and as a result, the Crown took possession of monastic lands worth £120,000 (£36 million) a year. The Crown had profited by a small amount in 1526 when Wolsey put England onto a gold, rather than silver, standard, and had debased the currency slightly. Cromwell debased the currency more significantly, starting in Ireland in 1540. The English pound halved in value against the Flemish pound between 1540 and 1551 as a result. The nominal profit made was significant, helping to bring income and expenditure together, but it had a catastrophic effect on the country's economy. In part, it helped to bring about a period of very high inflation from 1544 onwards.
Henry is generally credited with initiating the English Reformation – the process of transforming England from a Catholic country to a Protestant one – though his progress at the elite and mass levels is disputed, and the precise narrative not widely agreed upon. Certainly, in 1527, Henry, until then an observant and well-informed Catholic, appealed to the Pope for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. No annulment was immediately forthcoming, since the papacy was now under the control of Charles V, Catherine's nephew. The traditional narrative gives this refusal as the trigger for Henry's rejection of papal supremacy, which he had previously defended. Yet as E. L. Woodward put it, Henry's determination to annul his marriage with Catherine was the occasion rather than the cause of the English Reformation so that "neither too much nor too little" should be made of the annulment. Historian A. F. Pollard has argued that even if Henry had not needed an annulment, he might have come to reject papal control over the governance of England purely for political reasons. Indeed, Henry needed a son to secure the Tudor Dynasty and avert the risk of civil war over disputed succession.
In any case, between 1532 and 1537, Henry instituted a number of statutes that dealt with the relationship between king and the Pope and hence the structure of the nascent Church of England. These included the Statute in Restraint of Appeals (passed 1533), which extended the charge of praemunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England, potentially exposing them to the death penalty if found guilty. Other acts included the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging the King as such. Similarly, following the passage of the Act of Succession 1533, all adults in the kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions (declaring Henry's marriage to Anne legitimate and his marriage to Catherine illegitimate) by oath; those who refused were subject to imprisonment for life, and any publisher or printer of any literature alleging that the marriage to Anne was invalid subject to the death penalty. Finally, the Peter's Pence Act was passed, and it reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope. The King had much support from the Church under Cranmer.
To Cromwell's annoyance, Henry insisted on parliamentary time to discuss questions of faith, which he achieved through the Duke of Norfolk. This led to the passing of the Act of Six Articles, whereby six major questions were all answered by asserting the religious orthodoxy, thus restraining the reform movement in England. It was followed by the beginnings of a reformed liturgy and of the Book of Common Prayer, which would take until 1549 to complete. But this victory for religious conservatives did not convert into much change in personnel, and Cranmer remained in his position. Overall, the rest of Henry's reign saw a subtle movement away from religious orthodoxy, helped in part by the deaths of prominent figures from before the break with Rome, especially the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher in 1535 for refusing to renounce papal authority. Henry established a new political theology of obedience to the crown that continued for the next decade. It reflected Martin Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment ("Honour thy father and mother"), brought to England by William Tyndale. The founding of royal authority on the Ten Commandments was another important shift: reformers within the Church used the Commandments' emphasis on faith and the word of God, while conservatives emphasised the need for dedication to God and doing good. The reformers' efforts lay behind the publication of the Great Bible in 1539 in English. Protestant Reformers still faced persecution, particularly over objections to Henry's annulment. Many fled abroad, including the influential Tyndale, who was eventually executed and his body burned at Henry's behest.
When taxes once payable to Rome were transferred to the Crown, Cromwell saw the need to assess the taxable value of the Church's extensive holdings as they stood in 1535. The result was an extensive compendium, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. In September 1535, Cromwell commissioned a more general visitation of religious institutions, to be undertaken by four appointee visitors. The visitation focussed almost exclusively on the country's religious houses, with largely negative conclusions. In addition to reporting back to Cromwell, the visitors made the lives of the monks more difficult by enforcing strict behavioural standards. The result was to encourage self-dissolution. In any case, the evidence Cromwell gathered led swiftly to the beginning of the state-enforced dissolution of the monasteries, with all religious houses worth less than £200 vested by statute in the crown in January 1536. After a short pause, surviving religious houses were transferred one by one to the Crown and new owners, and the dissolution confirmed by a further statute in 1539. By January 1540 no such houses remained; 800 had been dissolved. The process had been efficient, with minimal resistance, and brought the crown some £90,000 a year. The extent to which the dissolution of all houses was planned from the start is debated by historians; there is some evidence that major houses were originally intended only to be reformed. Cromwell's actions transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands. The programme was designed primarily to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown, which would use the lands much more efficiently. Although little opposition to the supremacy could be found in England's religious houses, they had links to the international church and were an obstacle to further religious reform.
Response to the reforms was mixed. The religious houses had been the only support of the impoverished, and the reforms alienated much of the populace outside London, helping to provoke the great northern rising of 1536–37, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Elsewhere the changes were accepted and welcomed, and those who clung to Catholic rites kept quiet or moved in secrecy. They reemerged during the reign of Henry's daughter Mary (1553–58).
Apart from permanent garrisons at Berwick, Calais, and Carlisle, England's standing army numbered only a few hundred men. This was increased only slightly by Henry. Henry's invasion force of 1513, some 30,000 men, was composed of billmen and longbowmen, at a time when the other European nations were moving to hand guns and pikemen but the difference in capability was at this stage not significant, and Henry's forces had new armour and weaponry. They were also supported by battlefield artillery and the war wagon, relatively new innovations, and several large and expensive siege guns. The invasion force of 1544 was similarly well-equipped and organised, although command on the battlefield was laid with the dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, which in the latter case produced disastrous results at Montreuil.
Henry's break with Rome incurred the threat of a large-scale French or Spanish invasion. To guard against this, in 1538 he began to build a chain of expensive, state-of-the-art defences along Britain's southern and eastern coasts, from Kent to Cornwall, largely built of material gained from the demolition of the monasteries. These were known as Henry VIII's Device Forts. He also strengthened existing coastal defence fortresses such as Dover Castle and, at Dover, Moat Bulwark and Archcliffe Fort, which he visited for a few months to supervise. Wolsey had many years before conducted the censuses required for an overhaul of the system of militia, but no reform resulted. In 1538–39, Cromwell overhauled the shire musters, but his work mainly served to demonstrate how inadequate they were in organisation. The building works, including that at Berwick, along with the reform of the militias and musters, were eventually finished under Queen Mary.
Henry is traditionally cited as one of the founders of the Royal Navy. Technologically, Henry invested in large cannon for his warships, an idea that had taken hold in other countries, to replace the smaller serpentines in use. He also flirted with designing ships personally. His contribution to larger vessels, if any, is unknown, but it is believed that he influenced the design of rowbarges and similar galleys. Henry was also responsible for the creation of a permanent navy, with the supporting anchorages and dockyards. Tactically, Henry's reign saw the Navy move away from boarding tactics to employ gunnery instead. The Tudor navy was enlarged from seven ships to up to 50 (the Mary Rose among them), and Henry was responsible for the establishment of the "council for marine causes" to oversee the maintenance and operation of the Navy, becoming the basis for the later Admiralty.
At the beginning of Henry's reign, Ireland was effectively divided into three zones: the Pale, where English rule was unchallenged; Leinster and Munster, the so-called "obedient land" of Anglo-Irish peers; and the Gaelic Connaught and Ulster, with merely nominal English rule. Until 1513, Henry continued the policy of his father, to allow Irish lords to rule in the King's name and accept steep divisions between the communities. However, upon the death of the 8th Earl of Kildare, governor of Ireland, fractious Irish politics combined with a more ambitious Henry to cause trouble. When Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond, died, Henry recognised one successor for Ormond's English, Welsh and Scottish lands, whilst in Ireland another took control. Kildare's successor, the 9th Earl, was replaced as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by the Earl of Surrey in 1520. Surrey's ambitious aims were costly but ineffective; English rule became trapped between winning the Irish lords over with diplomacy, as favoured by Henry and Wolsey, and a sweeping military occupation as proposed by Surrey. Surrey was recalled in 1521, with Piers Butler – one of the claimants to the Earldom of Ormond – appointed in his place. Butler proved unable to control opposition, including that of Kildare. Kildare was appointed chief governor in 1524, resuming his dispute with Butler, which had before been in a lull. Meanwhile, the Earl of Desmond, an Anglo-Irish peer, had turned his support to Richard de la Pole as pretender to the English throne; when in 1528 Kildare failed to take suitable actions against him, Kildare was once again removed from his post.
The Desmond situation was resolved on his death in 1529, which was followed by a period of uncertainty. This was effectively ended with the appointment of Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and the King's son, as lord lieutenant. Richmond had never before visited Ireland, his appointment a break with past policy. For a time it looked as if peace might be restored with the return of Kildare to Ireland to manage the tribes, but the effect was limited and the Irish parliament soon rendered ineffective. Ireland began to receive the attention of Cromwell, who had supporters of Ormond and Desmond promoted. Kildare, on the other hand, was summoned to London; after some hesitation, he departed for London in 1534, where he would face charges of treason. His son, Thomas, Lord Offaly, was more forthright, denouncing the king and leading a "Catholic crusade" against the King, who was by this time mired in marital problems. Offaly had the Archbishop of Dublin murdered and besieged Dublin. Offaly led a mixture of Pale gentry and Irish tribes, although he failed to secure the support of Lord Darcy, a sympathiser, or Charles V. What was effectively a civil war was ended with the intervention of 2,000 English troops – a large army by Irish standards – and the execution of Offaly (his father was already dead) and his uncles.
Although the Offaly revolt was followed by a determination to rule Ireland more closely, Henry was wary of drawn-out conflict with the tribes, and a royal commission recommended that the only relationship with the tribes was to be promises of peace, their land protected from English expansion. The man to lead this effort was Antony St Leger, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, who would remain in post past Henry's death. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a Papal possession granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king, so in 1541 Henry asserted England's claim to the Kingdom of Ireland free from the Papal overlordship. This change did, however, also allow a policy of peaceful reconciliation and expansion: the Lords of Ireland would grant their lands to the King, before being returned as fiefdoms. The incentive to comply with Henry's request was an accompanying barony, and thus a right to sit in the Irish House of Lords, which was to run in parallel with England's. The Irish law of the tribes did not suit such an arrangement, because the chieftain did not have the required rights; this made progress tortuous, and the plan was abandoned in 1543, not to be replaced.
The complexities and sheer scale of Henry's legacy ensured that, in the words of Betteridge and Freeman, "throughout the centuries, Henry has been praised and reviled, but he has never been ignored". Historian John D. Mackie sums up Henry's personality and its impact on his achievements and popularity:
The respect, nay even the popularity, which he had from his people was not unmerited.... He kept the development of England in line with some of the most vigorous, though not the noblest forces of the day. His high courage – highest when things went ill – his commanding intellect, his appreciation of fact, and his instinct for rule carried his country through a perilous time of change, and his very arrogance saved his people from the wars which afflicted other lands. Dimly remembering the wars of the Roses, vaguely informed as to the slaughters and sufferings in Europe, the people of England knew that in Henry they had a great king.
A particular focus of modern historiography has been the extent to which the events of Henry's life (including his marriages, foreign policy and religious changes) were the result of his own initiative and, if they were, whether they were the result of opportunism or of a principled undertaking by Henry. The traditional interpretation of those events was provided by historian A. F. Pollard, who in 1902 presented his own, largely positive, view of the King, lauding him, "as the King and statesman who, whatever his personal failings, led England down the road to parliamentary democracy and empire". Pollard's interpretation remained the dominant interpretation of Henry's life until the publication of the doctoral thesis of G. R. Elton in 1953.
Elton's book on The Tudor Revolution in Government maintained Pollard's positive interpretation of the Henrician period as a whole, but reinterpreted Henry himself as a follower rather than a leader. For Elton, it was Cromwell and not Henry who undertook the changes in government – Henry was shrewd but lacked the vision to follow a complex plan through. Henry was little more, in other words, than an "ego-centric monstrosity" whose reign "owed its successes and virtues to better and greater men about him; most of its horrors and failures sprang more directly from [the King]".
Although the central tenets of Elton's thesis have since been questioned, it has consistently provided the starting point for much later work, including that of J. J. Scarisbrick, his student. Scarisbrick largely kept Elton's regard for Cromwell's abilities but returned agency to Henry, who Scarisbrick considered to have ultimately directed and shaped policy. For Scarisbrick, Henry was a formidable, captivating man who "wore regality with a splendid conviction". The effect of endowing Henry with this ability, however, was largely negative in Scarisbrick's eyes: to Scarisbrick, the Henrician period was one of upheaval and destruction and those in charge worthy of blame more than praise. Even among more recent biographers, including David Loades, David Starkey, and John Guy, there has ultimately been little consensus on the extent to which Henry was responsible for the changes he oversaw or the assessment of those he did bring about.
This lack of clarity about Henry's control over events has contributed to the variation in the qualities ascribed to him: religious conservative or dangerous radical; lover of beauty or brutal destroyer of priceless artefacts; friend and patron or betrayer of those around him; chivalry incarnate or ruthless chauvinist. One traditional approach, favoured by Starkey and others, is to divide Henry's reign into two halves, the first Henry being dominated by positive qualities (politically inclusive, pious, athletic but also intellectual) who presided over a period of stability and calm, and the latter a "hulking tyrant" who presided over a period of dramatic, sometimes whimsical, change. Other writers have tried to merge Henry's disparate personality into a single whole; Lacey Baldwin Smith, for example, considered him an egotistical borderline neurotic given to great fits of temper and deep and dangerous suspicions, with a mechanical and conventional, but deeply held piety, and having at best a mediocre intellect.
Many changes were made to the royal style during his reign. Henry originally used the style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland". In 1521, pursuant to a grant from Pope Leo X rewarding Henry for his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, the royal style became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland". Following Henry's excommunication, Pope Paul III rescinded the grant of the title "Defender of the Faith", but an Act of Parliament (35 Hen. 8. c. 3) declared that it remained valid; and it continues in royal usage to the present day, as evidenced by the letters FID DEF or F.D. on all British coinage. Henry's motto was "Coeur Loyal" ("true heart"), and he had this embroidered on his clothes in the form of a heart symbol and with the word "loyal". His emblem was the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis. As king, Henry's arms were the same as those used by his predecessors since Henry IV: Quarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lys Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England).
In 1535, Henry added the "supremacy phrase" to the royal style, which became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head". In 1536, the phrase "of the Church of England" changed to "of the Church of England and also of Ireland". In 1541, Henry had the Irish Parliament change the title "Lord of Ireland" to "King of Ireland" with the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, after being advised that many Irish people regarded the Pope as the true head of their country, with the Lord acting as a mere representative. The reason the Irish regarded the Pope as their overlord was that Ireland had originally been given to King Henry II of England by Pope Adrian IV in the 12th century as a feudal territory under papal overlordship. The meeting of the Irish Parliament that proclaimed Henry VIII as King of Ireland was the first meeting attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Anglo-Irish aristocrats. The style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England and also of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head" remained in use until the end of Henry's reign. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages and his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disagreement with Pope Clement VII about such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated by the pope.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Henry brought radical changes to the Constitution of England, expanding royal power and ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings in opposition to papal supremacy. He frequently used charges of treason and heresy to quell dissent, and those accused were often executed without a formal trial using bills of attainder. He achieved many of his political aims through the work of his chief ministers, some of whom were banished or executed when they fell out of his favour. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer all figured prominently in his administration.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Henry was an extravagant spender, using the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries and acts of the Reformation Parliament. He converted the money that was formerly paid to Rome into royal revenue. Despite the money from these sources, he was often on the verge of financial ruin due to personal extravagance as well as costly and largely unproductive wars, particularly with King Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King James V of Scotland and the Scottish regency under the Earl of Arran and Mary of Guise. He expanded the Royal Navy, oversaw the annexation of Wales to England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 and was the first English monarch to rule as King of Ireland following the Crown of Ireland Act 1542.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henry's contemporaries considered him an attractive, educated and accomplished king. He has been described as \"one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne\" and his reign described as the \"most important\" in English history. He was an author and composer. As he aged, he became severely overweight and his health suffered. He is frequently characterised in his later life as a lustful, egotistical, paranoid and tyrannical monarch. He was succeeded by his son Edward VI.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Born on 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Kent, Henry Tudor was the third child and second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Of the young Henry's six (or seven) siblings, only three – his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, and sisters Margaret and Mary – survived infancy. He was baptised by Richard Foxe, the Bishop of Exeter, at a church of the Observant Franciscans close to the palace. In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at age three and was made a Knight of the Bath soon after. The day after the ceremony, he was created Duke of York and a month or so later made Warden of the Scottish Marches. In May 1495, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter. The reason for giving such appointments to a small child was to enable his father to retain personal control of lucrative positions and not share them with established families. Not much is known about Henry's early life – save for his appointments – because he was not expected to become king, but it is known that he received a first-rate education from leading tutors. He became fluent in Latin and French and learned at least some Italian.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In November 1501, Henry played a considerable part in the ceremonies surrounding his brother Arthur's marriage to Catherine, the youngest child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. As Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father as king, differenced by a label of three points ermine. He was further honoured on 9 February 1506 by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who made him a Knight of the Golden Fleece.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15, possibly of sweating sickness, just 20 weeks after his marriage to Catherine. Arthur's death thrust all his duties upon his younger brother. The 10-year-old Henry became the new Duke of Cornwall, and the new Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester in February 1504. Henry VII gave his second son few responsibilities even after the death of Arthur. Young Henry was strictly supervised and did not appear in public. As a result, he ascended the throne \"untrained in the exacting art of kingship\".",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Henry VII renewed his efforts to seal a marital alliance between England and Spain, by offering his son Henry in marriage to the widowed Catherine. Henry VII and Catherine's mother Queen Isabella were both keen on the idea, which had arisen very shortly after Arthur's death. On 23 June 1503, a treaty was signed for their marriage, and they were betrothed two days later. A papal dispensation was only needed for the \"impediment of public honesty\" if the marriage had not been consummated as Catherine and her duenna claimed, but Henry VII and the Spanish ambassador set out instead to obtain a dispensation for \"affinity\", which took account of the possibility of consummation. Cohabitation was not possible because Henry was too young. Isabella's death in 1504, and the ensuing problems of succession in Castile, complicated matters. Catherine's father Ferdinand preferred her to stay in England, but Henry VII's relations with Ferdinand had deteriorated. Catherine was therefore left in limbo for some time, culminating in Prince Henry's rejection of the marriage as soon he was able, at the age of 14. Ferdinand's solution was to make his daughter ambassador, allowing her to stay in England indefinitely. Devout, she began to believe that it was God's will that she marry the prince despite his opposition.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and the 17-year-old Henry succeeded him as king. Soon after his father's burial on 10 May, Henry suddenly declared that he would indeed marry Catherine, leaving unresolved several issues concerning the papal dispensation and a missing part of the marriage portion. The new King maintained that it had been his father's dying wish that he marry Catherine. Whether or not this was true, it was convenient. Emperor Maximilian I had been attempting to marry his granddaughter Eleanor, Catherine's niece, to Henry; she had now been jilted. Henry's wedding to Catherine was kept low-key and was held at the friar's church in Greenwich on 11 June 1509. Henry claimed descent from Constantine the Great and King Arthur and saw himself as their successor.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 23 June 1509, Henry led the now 23-year-old Catherine from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey for their coronation, which took place the following day. It was a grand affair: the King's passage was lined with tapestries and laid with fine cloth. Following the ceremony, there was a grand banquet in Westminster Hall. As Catherine wrote to her father, \"our time is spent in continuous festival\".",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Two days after his coronation, Henry arrested his father's two most unpopular ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. They were charged with high treason and were executed in 1510. Politically motivated executions would remain one of Henry's primary tactics for dealing with those who stood in his way. Henry returned some of the money supposedly extorted by the two ministers. By contrast, Henry's view of the House of York – potential rival claimants for the throne – was more moderate than his father's had been. Several who had been imprisoned by his father, including Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, were pardoned. Others went unreconciled; Edmund de la Pole was eventually beheaded in 1513, an execution prompted by his brother Richard siding against the King.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Soon after marrying Henry, Catherine conceived. She gave birth to a stillborn girl on 31 January 1510. About four months later, Catherine again became pregnant. On 1 January 1511, New Year's Day, a son Henry was born. After the grief of losing their first child, the couple were pleased to have a boy and festivities were held, including a two-day joust known as the Westminster Tournament. However, the child died seven weeks later. Catherine had two stillborn sons in 1513 and 1515, but gave birth in February 1516 to a girl, Mary. Relations between Henry and Catherine had been strained, but they eased slightly after Mary's birth.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Although Henry's marriage to Catherine has since been described as \"unusually good\", it is known that Henry took mistresses. It was revealed in 1510 that Henry had been conducting an affair with one of the sisters of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. The most significant mistress for about three years, starting in 1516, was Elizabeth Blount. Blount is one of only two completely undisputed mistresses, considered by some to be few for a virile young king. Exactly how many Henry had is disputed: David Loades believes Henry had mistresses \"only to a very limited extent\", whilst Alison Weir believes there were numerous other affairs. Catherine is not known to have protested. In 1518, she fell pregnant again with another girl, who was also stillborn.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Blount gave birth in June 1519 to Henry's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. The young boy was made Duke of Richmond in June 1525 in what some thought was one step on the path to his eventual legitimisation. In 1533, FitzRoy married Mary Howard, but died childless three years later. At the time of his death in June 1536, Parliament was considering the Second Succession Act, which could have allowed him to become king.",
"title": "Early reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1510, France, with a fragile alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in the League of Cambrai, was winning a war against Venice. Henry renewed his father's friendship with Louis XII of France, an issue that divided his council. Certainly, war with the combined might of the two powers would have been exceedingly difficult. Shortly thereafter, however, Henry also signed a pact with Ferdinand II of Aragon. After Pope Julius II created the anti-French Holy League in October 1511, Henry followed Ferdinand's lead and brought England into the new League. An initial joint Anglo-Spanish attack was planned for the spring to recover Aquitaine for England, the start of making Henry's dreams of ruling France a reality. The attack, however, following a formal declaration of war in April 1512, was not led by Henry personally and was a considerable failure; Ferdinand used it simply to further his own ends, and it strained the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Nevertheless, the French were pushed out of Italy soon after, and the alliance survived, with both parties keen to win further victories over the French. Henry then pulled off a diplomatic coup by convincing Emperor Maximilian to join the Holy League. Remarkably, Henry had secured the promised title of \"Most Christian King of France\" from Julius and possibly coronation by the Pope himself in Paris, if only Louis could be defeated.",
"title": "France and the Habsburgs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 30 June 1513, Henry invaded France, and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs – a relatively minor result, but one which was seized on by the English for propaganda purposes. Soon after, the English took Thérouanne and handed it over to Maximillian; Tournai, a more significant settlement, followed. Henry had led the army personally, complete with a large entourage. His absence from the country, however, had prompted his brother-in-law James IV of Scotland to invade England at the behest of Louis. Nevertheless, the English army, overseen by Queen Catherine, decisively defeated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513. Among the dead was the Scottish King, thus ending Scotland's brief involvement in the war. These campaigns had given Henry a taste of the military success he so desired. However, despite initial indications, he decided not to pursue a 1514 campaign. He had been supporting Ferdinand and Maximilian financially during the campaign but had received little in return; England's coffers were now empty. With the replacement of Julius by Pope Leo X, who was inclined to negotiate for peace with France, Henry signed his own treaty with Louis: his sister Mary would become Louis' wife, having previously been pledged to the younger Charles, and peace was secured for eight years, a remarkably long time.",
"title": "France and the Habsburgs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Charles V, the nephew of Henry's wife Catherine, inherited a large empire in Europe, becoming king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. When Louis XII of France died in 1515, he was succeeded by his cousin Francis I. These accessions left three relatively young rulers and an opportunity for a clean slate. The careful diplomacy of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey had resulted in the Treaty of London in 1518, aimed at uniting the kingdoms of western Europe in the wake of a new Ottoman threat, and it seemed that peace might be secured. Henry met the new French King, Francis, on 7 June 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais for a fortnight of lavish entertainment. Both hoped for friendly relations in place of the wars of the previous decade. The strong air of competition laid to rest any hopes of a renewal of the Treaty of London, however, and conflict was inevitable. Henry had more in common with Charles, whom he met once before and once after Francis. Charles brought his realm into war with France in 1521; Henry offered to mediate, but little was achieved and by the end of the year Henry had aligned England with Charles. He still clung to his previous aim of restoring English lands in France but sought to secure an alliance with Burgundy, then a territorial possession of Charles, and the continued support of the Emperor. A small English attack in the north of France made up little ground. Charles defeated and captured Francis at Pavia and could dictate peace, but he believed he owed Henry nothing. Sensing this, Henry decided to take England out of the war before his ally, signing the Treaty of the More on 30 August 1525.",
"title": "France and the Habsburgs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "During his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry conducted an affair with Mary Boleyn, Catherine's lady-in-waiting. There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Henry Carey and Catherine Carey, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved, and the King never acknowledged them as he did in the case of Henry FitzRoy. In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the male heir he desired, he became enamoured of Mary Boleyn's sister, Anne Boleyn, then a charismatic young woman of 25 in the queen's entourage. Anne, however, resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister had. It was in this context that Henry considered his three options for finding a dynastic successor and hence resolving what came to be described at court as the King's \"great matter\". These options were legitimising Henry FitzRoy, which would need the involvement of the Pope and would be open to challenge; marrying off Mary, his daughter with Catherine, as soon as possible and hoping for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary was considered unlikely to conceive before Henry's death, or somehow rejecting Catherine and marrying someone else of child-bearing age. Probably seeing the possibility of marrying Anne, the third was ultimately the most attractive possibility to the 34-year-old Henry, and it soon became the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to the now 40-year-old Catherine.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Henry's precise motivations and intentions over the coming years are not widely agreed on. Henry himself, at least in the early part of his reign, was a devout and well-informed Catholic to the extent that his 1521 publication Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (\"Defence of the Seven Sacraments\") earned him the title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) from Pope Leo X. The work represented a staunch defence of papal supremacy, albeit one couched in somewhat contingent terms. It is not clear exactly when Henry changed his mind on the issue as he grew more intent on a second marriage. Certainly, by 1527, he had convinced himself that Catherine had produced no male heir because their union was \"blighted in the eyes of God\". Indeed, in marrying Catherine, his brother's wife, he had acted contrary to Leviticus 20:21, a justification Thomas Cranmer used to declare the marriage null. Martin Luther, on the other hand, had initially argued against the annulment, stating that Henry VIII could take a second wife in accordance with his teaching that the Bible allowed for polygamy but not divorce. Henry now believed the Pope had lacked the authority to grant a dispensation from this impediment. It was this argument Henry took to Pope Clement VII in 1527 in the hope of having his marriage to Catherine annulled, forgoing at least one less openly defiant line of attack. In going public, all hope of tempting Catherine to retire to a nunnery or otherwise stay quiet was lost. Henry sent his secretary, William Knight, to appeal directly to the Holy See by way of a deceptively worded draft papal bull. Knight was unsuccessful; the Pope could not be misled so easily.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Other missions concentrated on arranging an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from Clement VII. Although Clement agreed to the creation of such a court, he never had any intention of empowering his legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to decide in Henry's favour. This bias was perhaps the result of pressure from Emperor Charles V, Catherine's nephew, but it is not clear how far this influenced either Campeggio or the Pope. After less than two months of hearing evidence, Clement called the case back to Rome in July 1529, from which it was clear that it would never re-emerge. With the chance for an annulment lost, Cardinal Wolsey bore the blame. He was charged with praemunire in October 1529, and his fall from grace was \"sudden and total\". Briefly reconciled with Henry (and officially pardoned) in the first half of 1530, he was charged once more in November 1530, this time for treason, but died while awaiting trial. After a short period in which Henry took government upon his own shoulders, Thomas More took on the role of Lord Chancellor and chief minister. Intelligent and able, but a devout Catholic and opponent of the annulment, More initially cooperated with the King's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A year later, Catherine was banished from court, and her rooms were given to Anne Boleyn. Anne was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers, but the extent to which she herself was a committed Protestant is much debated. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne's influence and the need to find a trustworthy supporter of the annulment had Thomas Cranmer appointed to the vacant position. This was approved by the Pope, unaware of the king's nascent plans for the Church.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Henry was married to Catherine for 24 years. Their divorce has been described as a \"deeply wounding and isolating\" experience for Henry.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the winter of 1532, Henry met with Francis I at Calais and enlisted the support of the French King for his new marriage. Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry, now 41, and Anne went through a secret wedding service. She soon became pregnant, and there was a second wedding service in London on 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid. Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen, becoming instead \"princess dowager\" as the widow of Arthur. In her place, Anne was crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth to a daughter slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. The child was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Following the marriage, there was a period of consolidation, taking the form of a series of statutes of the Reformation Parliament aimed at finding solutions to any remaining issues, whilst protecting the new reforms from challenge, convincing the public of their legitimacy, and exposing and dealing with opponents. Although the canon law was dealt with at length by Cranmer and others, these acts were advanced by Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley and the Duke of Norfolk and indeed by Henry himself. With this process complete, in May 1532 More resigned as Lord Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister. With the Act of Succession 1533, Catherine's daughter, Mary, was declared illegitimate; Henry's marriage to Anne was declared legitimate; and Anne's issue declared to be next in the line of succession. With the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, Parliament recognised the King's status as head of the church in England and, together with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, abolished the right of appeal to Rome. It was only then that Pope Clement VII took the step of excommunicating the King and Cranmer, although the excommunication was not made official until some time later.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The King and Queen were not pleased with married life. The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Anne refused to play the submissive role expected of her. The vivacity and opinionated intellect that had made her so attractive as an illicit lover made her too independent for the largely ceremonial role of a royal wife and it made her many enemies. For his part, Henry disliked Anne's constant irritability and violent temper. After a false pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine. Henry is traditionally believed to have had an affair with Madge Shelton in 1535, although historian Antonia Fraser argues that Henry in fact had an affair with her sister Mary Shelton.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Opposition to Henry's religious policies was at first quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks, including the first Carthusian Martyrs, were executed and many more pilloried. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Thomas More, both of whom refused to take the oath to the King. Neither Henry nor Cromwell sought at that stage to have the men executed; rather, they hoped that the two might change their minds and save themselves. Fisher openly rejected Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church, but More was careful to avoid openly breaking the Treasons Act 1534, which (unlike later acts) did not forbid mere silence. Both men were subsequently convicted of high treason, however – More on the evidence of a single conversation with Richard Rich, the Solicitor General - and both were executed in the summer of 1535.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "These suppressions, as well as the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535, in turn, contributed to a more general resistance to Henry's reforms, most notably in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large uprising in northern England in October 1536. Some 20,000 to 40,000 rebels were led by Robert Aske, together with parts of the northern nobility. Henry VIII promised the rebels he would pardon them and thanked them for raising the issues. Aske told the rebels they had been successful and they could disperse and go home. Henry saw the rebels as traitors and did not feel obliged to keep his promises to them, so when further violence occurred after Henry's offer of a pardon he was quick to break his promise of clemency. The leaders, including Aske, were arrested and executed for treason. In total, about 200 rebels were executed, and the disturbances ended.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On 8 January 1536, news reached the King and Queen that Catherine of Aragon had died. The following day, Henry dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet. Queen Anne was pregnant again, and she was aware of the consequences if she failed to give birth to a son. Later that month, the King was thrown from his horse in a tournament and was badly injured; it seemed for a time that his life was in danger. When news of this accident reached the queen, she was sent into shock and miscarried a male child at about 15 weeks' gestation, on the day of Catherine's funeral, 29 January 1536. For most observers, this personal loss was the beginning of the end of this royal marriage.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Although the Boleyn family still held important positions on the Privy Council, Anne had many enemies, including the Duke of Suffolk. Even her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had come to resent her attitude to her power. The Boleyns preferred France over the Emperor as a potential ally, but the King's favour had swung towards the latter (partly because of Cromwell), damaging the family's influence. Also opposed to Anne were supporters of reconciliation with Princess Mary (among them the former supporters of Catherine), who had reached maturity. A second annulment was now a real possibility, although it is commonly believed that it was Cromwell's anti-Boleyn influence that led opponents to look for a way of having her executed.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Anne's downfall came shortly after she had recovered from her final miscarriage. Whether it was primarily the result of allegations of conspiracy, adultery, or witchcraft remains a matter of debate among historians. Early signs of a fall from grace included the King's new mistress, the 28-year-old Jane Seymour, being moved into new quarters, and Anne's brother, George Boleyn, being refused the Order of the Garter, which was instead given to Nicholas Carew. Between 30 April and 2 May, five men, including George Boleyn, were arrested on charges of treasonable adultery and accused of having sexual relationships with the queen. Anne was arrested, accused of treasonous adultery and incest. Although the evidence against them was unconvincing, the accused were found guilty and condemned to death. The accused men were executed on 17 May 1536. Henry and Anne's marriage was annulled by Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth on the same day. Cranmer appears to have had difficulty finding grounds for an annulment and probably based it on the prior liaison between Henry and Anne's sister Mary, which in canon law meant that Henry's marriage to Anne was, like his first marriage, within a forbidden degree of affinity and therefore void. At 8 am on 19 May 1536, Anne was executed on Tower Green.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The day after Anne's execution the 45-year-old Henry became engaged to Seymour, who had been one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting. They were married ten days later at the Palace of Whitehall, Whitehall, London, in the queen's closet, by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. On 12 October 1537, Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, the future Edward VI. The birth was difficult, and Queen Jane died on 24 October 1537 from an infection and was buried in Windsor. The euphoria that had accompanied Edward's birth became sorrow, but it was only over time that Henry came to long for his wife. At the time, Henry recovered quickly from the shock. Measures were immediately put in place to find another wife for Henry, which, at the insistence of Cromwell and the Privy Council, were focused on the European continent.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "With Charles V distracted by the internal politics of his many kingdoms and external threats, and Henry and Francis on relatively good terms, domestic and not foreign policy issues had been Henry's priority in the first half of the 1530s. In 1536, for example, Henry granted his assent to the Laws in Wales Act 1535, which legally annexed Wales, uniting England and Wales into a single nation. This was followed by the Second Succession Act (the Act of Succession 1536), which declared Henry's children by Jane to be next in the line of succession and declared both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate, thus excluding them from the throne. The King was granted the power to further determine the line of succession in his will, should he have no further issue.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1538, as part of the negotiation of a secret treaty by Cromwell with Charles V, a series of dynastic marriages were proposed: Mary would marry a son of the King of Portugal, Elizabeth marry one of the sons of the King of Hungary and the infant Edward marry one of the Emperor's daughters. The widowed King, it was suggested, might marry the Dowager Duchess of Milan. However, when Charles and Francis made peace in January 1539, Henry became increasingly paranoid, perhaps as a result of receiving a constant list of threats to the kingdom (real or imaginary, minor or serious) supplied by Cromwell in his role as spymaster. Enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry used some of his financial reserves to build a series of coastal defences and set some aside for use in the event of a Franco-German invasion.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Having considered the matter, Cromwell suggested Anne, the 25-year-old sister of the Duke of Cleves, who was seen as an important ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack on England, for the duke fell between Lutheranism and Catholicism. Other potential brides included Christina of Denmark, Anna of Lorraine, Louise of Guise and Amalia of Cleves. Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the King. Despite speculation that Holbein painted her in an overly flattering light, it is more likely that the portrait was accurate; Holbein remained in favour at court. After seeing Holbein's portrait, and urged on by the complimentary description of Anne given by his courtiers, the 49-year-old King agreed to wed Anne. The marriage took place in January 1540.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "However, it was not long before Henry wished to annul the marriage so he could marry another. Anne did not argue, and confirmed that the marriage had never been consummated. Anne's previous betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine's son Francis provided further grounds for the annulment. The marriage was subsequently dissolved in July 1540, and Anne received the title of \"The King's Sister\", two houses, and a generous allowance. It was soon clear that Henry had fallen for the 17-year-old Catherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk's niece. This worried Cromwell, for Norfolk was his political opponent.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Shortly after, the religious reformers (and protégés of Cromwell) Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garret were burned as heretics. Cromwell, meanwhile, fell out of favour although it is unclear exactly why, for there is little evidence of differences in domestic or foreign policy. Despite his role, he was never formally accused of being responsible for Henry's failed marriage. Cromwell was now surrounded by enemies at court, with Norfolk also able to draw on his niece Catherine's position. Cromwell was charged with treason, selling export licences, granting passports, and drawing up commissions without permission, and may also have been blamed for the failure of the foreign policy that accompanied the attempted marriage to Anne. He was subsequently attainted and beheaded.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On 28 July 1540 (the same day Cromwell was executed), Henry married the young Catherine Howard, a first cousin and lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn. He was delighted with his new queen and awarded her the lands of Cromwell and a vast array of jewellery. Soon after the marriage, however, Queen Catherine had an affair with the courtier Thomas Culpeper. She also employed Francis Dereham, who had previously been informally engaged to her and had an affair with her prior to her marriage, as her secretary. The Privy Council was informed of her affair with Dereham whilst Henry was away; Thomas Cranmer was dispatched to investigate, and he brought evidence of Queen Catherine's previous affair with Dereham to the King's notice. Though Henry originally refused to believe the allegations, Dereham confessed. It took another meeting of the council, however, before Henry believed the accusations against Dereham and went into a rage, blaming the council before consoling himself in hunting. When questioned, the queen could have admitted a prior contract to marry Dereham, which would have made her subsequent marriage to Henry invalid, but she instead claimed that Dereham had forced her to enter into an adulterous relationship. Dereham, meanwhile, exposed Catherine's relationship with Culpeper. Culpeper and Dereham were both executed, and Catherine too was beheaded on 13 February 1542.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Henry married his last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, in July 1543. A reformer at heart, she argued with Henry over religion. Henry remained committed to an idiosyncratic mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism; the reactionary mood that had gained ground after Cromwell's fall had neither eliminated his Protestant streak nor been overcome by it. Parr helped reconcile Henry with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. In 1543, the Third Succession Act put them back in the line of succession after Edward. The same act allowed Henry to determine further succession to the throne in his will.",
"title": "Marriages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1538, the chief minister Thomas Cromwell pursued an extensive campaign against what the government termed \"idolatry\" practised under the old religion, culminating in September with the dismantling of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. As a consequence, the King was excommunicated by Pope Paul III on 17 December of the same year. In 1540, Henry sanctioned the complete destruction of shrines to saints. In 1542, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops remained. Consequently, the Lords Spiritual – as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known – were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal.",
"title": "Shrines destroyed and monasteries dissolved"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The 1539 alliance between Francis and Charles had soured, eventually degenerating into renewed war. With Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn dead, relations between Charles and Henry improved considerably, and Henry concluded a secret alliance with the Emperor and decided to enter the Italian War in favour of his new ally. An invasion of France was planned for 1543. In preparation for it, Henry moved to eliminate the potential threat of Scotland under the youthful James V. The Scots were defeated at Battle of Solway Moss on 24 November 1542, and James died on 15 December. Henry now hoped to unite the crowns of England and Scotland by marrying his son Edward to James's successor, Mary. The Scottish Regent Lord Arran agreed to the marriage in the Treaty of Greenwich on 1 July 1543, but it was rejected by the Parliament of Scotland on 11 December. The result was eight years of war between England and Scotland, a campaign later dubbed \"the Rough Wooing\". Despite several peace treaties, unrest continued in Scotland until Henry's death.",
"title": "Second invasion of France and the \"Rough Wooing\" of Scotland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Despite the early success with Scotland, Henry hesitated to invade France, annoying Charles. Henry finally went to France in June 1544 with a two-pronged attack. One force under Norfolk ineffectively besieged Montreuil. The other, under Suffolk, laid siege to Boulogne. Henry later took personal command, and Boulogne fell on 18 September 1544. However, Henry had refused Charles's request to march against Paris. Charles's own campaign fizzled, and he made peace with France that same day. Henry was left alone against France, unable to make peace. Francis attempted to invade England in the summer of 1545 but his forces reached only the Isle of Wight before being repulsed in the Battle of the Solent. Financially exhausted, France and England signed the Treaty of Camp on 7 June 1546. Henry secured Boulogne for eight years. The city was then to be returned to France for 2 million crowns (£750,000). Henry needed the money; the 1544 campaign had cost £650,000, and England was once again facing bankruptcy.",
"title": "Second invasion of France and the \"Rough Wooing\" of Scotland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical devices. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly had gout. His obesity and other medical problems can be traced to the jousting accident in 1536 in which he suffered a leg wound. The accident reopened and aggravated an injury he had sustained years earlier, to the extent that his doctors found it difficult to treat. The chronic wound festered for the remainder of his life and became ulcerated, preventing him from maintaining the level of physical activity he had previously enjoyed. The jousting accident is also believed to have caused Henry's mood swings, which may have had a dramatic effect on his personality and temperament.",
"title": "Physical decline and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The theory that Henry had syphilis has been dismissed by most historians. Historian Susan Maclean Kybett ascribes his demise to scurvy, which is caused by insufficient vitamin C most often due to a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in one's diet.",
"title": "Physical decline and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Henry's obesity hastened his death at the age of 55, on 28 January 1547 in the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. The tomb he had planned (with components taken from the tomb intended for Cardinal Wolsey) was only partly constructed and was never completed (the sarcophagus and its base were later removed and used for Lord Nelson's tomb in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral). Henry was interred in a vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, next to Jane Seymour. Over 100 years later, King Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) was buried in the same vault.",
"title": "Physical decline and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "English historian and House of Tudor expert David Starkey describes Henry VIII as follows:",
"title": "Wives, mistresses, and children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "What is extraordinary is that Henry was usually a very good husband. And he liked women – that's why he married so many of them! He was very tender to them, we know that he addressed them as \"sweetheart\". He was a good lover, he was very generous: the wives were given huge settlements of land and jewels – they were loaded with jewels. He was immensely considerate when they were pregnant. But, once he had fallen out of love... he just cut them off. He just withdrew. He abandoned them. They didn't even know he'd left them.",
"title": "Wives, mistresses, and children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Upon Henry's death, he was succeeded by his only surviving son, Edward VI. Since Edward was then only nine years old, he could not rule directly. Instead, Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a regency council until Edward reached 18. The executors chose Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, elder brother to Jane Seymour (Edward's mother), to be Lord Protector of the Realm. Under provisions of the will, was Edward to die childless, the throne was to pass to Mary, Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, and her heirs.",
"title": "Succession"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "If Mary's issue failed, the crown was to go to Elizabeth, Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, and her heirs. Finally, if Elizabeth's line became extinct, the crown was to be inherited by the descendants of Henry VIII's deceased younger sister, Mary, the Greys.",
"title": "Succession"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The descendants of Henry's sister Margaret Tudor – the Stuarts, rulers of Scotland – were thereby excluded from the succession.",
"title": "Succession"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "This provision ultimately failed when James VI of Scotland, Margaret's great-grandson, became King of England in 1603.",
"title": "Succession"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Edward VI himself would disregard the will and name Jane Grey his successor.",
"title": "Succession"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance man, and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamorous excess, epitomised by the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He scouted the country for choirboys, taking some directly from Wolsey's choir, and introduced Renaissance music into court. Musicians included Benedict de Opitiis, Richard Sampson, Ambrose Lupo, and Venetian organist Dionisio Memo, and Henry himself kept a considerable collection of instruments. He was skilled on the lute and played the organ, and was a talented player of the virginals. He could also sightread music and sing well. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best-known piece of music is \"Pastime with Good Company\" (\"The Kynges Ballade\"), and he is reputed to have written \"Greensleeves\" but probably did not.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Henry was an avid gambler and dice player, and excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was also known for his strong defence of conventional Christian piety. He was involved in the construction and improvement of several significant buildings, including Nonsuch Palace, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey in London. Many of the existing buildings which he improved were properties confiscated from Wolsey, such as Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, the Palace of Whitehall, and Trinity College, Cambridge.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Henry was an intellectual, the first English king with a modern humanist education. He read and wrote English, French, and Latin, and owned a large library. He annotated many books and published one of his own, and he had numerous pamphlets and lectures prepared to support the reformation of the church. Richard Sampson's Oratio (1534), for example, was an argument for absolute obedience to the monarchy and claimed that the English church had always been independent of Rome. At the popular level, theatre and minstrel troupes funded by the crown travelled around the land to promote the new religious practices; the Pope and Catholic priests and monks were mocked as foreign devils, while Henry was hailed as the glorious King of England and as a brave and heroic defender of the true faith. Henry worked hard to present an image of unchallengeable authority and irresistible power.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Henry was a large, well-built athlete, over 6 feet [1.8 m] tall, strong, and broad in proportion. His athletic activities were more than pastimes; they were political devices that served multiple goals, enhancing his image, impressing foreign emissaries and rulers, and conveying his ability to suppress any rebellion. He arranged a jousting tournament at Greenwich in 1517 where he wore gilded armour and gilded horse trappings, and outfits of velvet, satin, and cloth of gold with pearls and jewels. It suitably impressed foreign ambassadors, one of whom wrote home that \"the wealth and civilisation of the world are here, and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such\". Henry finally retired from jousting in 1536 after a heavy fall from his horse left him unconscious for two hours, but he continued to sponsor two lavish tournaments a year. He then started gaining weight and lost the trim, athletic figure that had made him so handsome, and his courtiers began dressing in heavily padded clothes to emulate and flatter him. His health rapidly declined near the end of his reign.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The power of Tudor monarchs, including Henry, was 'whole' and 'entire', ruling, as they claimed, by the grace of God alone. The crown could also rely on the exclusive use of those functions that constituted the royal prerogative. These included acts of diplomacy (including royal marriages), declarations of war, management of the coinage, the issue of royal pardons and the power to summon and dissolve parliament as and when required. Nevertheless, as evident during Henry's break with Rome, the monarch stayed within established limits, whether legal or financial, that forced him to work closely with both the nobility and parliament (representing the gentry).",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In practice, Tudor monarchs used patronage to maintain a royal court that included formal institutions such as the Privy Council as well as more informal advisers and confidants. Both the rise and fall of court nobles could be swift: Henry did undoubtedly execute at will, burning or beheading two of his wives, 20 peers, four leading public servants, six close attendants and friends, one cardinal (John Fisher) and numerous abbots. Among those who were in favour at any given point in Henry's reign, one could usually be identified as a chief minister, though one of the enduring debates in the historiography of the period has been the extent to which those chief ministers controlled Henry rather than vice versa. In particular, historian G. R. Elton has argued that one such minister, Thomas Cromwell, led a \"Tudor revolution in government\" independently of the King, whom Elton presented as an opportunistic, essentially lazy participant in the nitty-gritty of politics. Where Henry did intervene personally in the running of the country, Elton argued, he mostly did so to its detriment. The prominence and influence of faction in Henry's court is similarly discussed in the context of at least five episodes of Henry's reign, including the downfall of Anne Boleyn.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "From 1514 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal of the established Church, oversaw domestic and foreign policy for the King from his position as Lord Chancellor. Wolsey centralised the national government and extended the jurisdiction of the conciliar courts, particularly the Star Chamber. The Star Chamber's overall structure remained unchanged, but Wolsey used it to provide much-needed reform of the criminal law. The power of the court itself did not outlive Wolsey, however, since no serious administrative reform was undertaken and its role eventually devolved to the localities. Wolsey helped fill the gap left by Henry's declining participation in government (particularly in comparison to his father) but did so mostly by imposing himself in the King's place. His use of these courts to pursue personal grievances, and particularly to treat delinquents as mere examples of a whole class worthy of punishment, angered the rich, who were annoyed as well by his enormous wealth and ostentatious living. Following Wolsey's downfall, Henry took full control of his government, although at court numerous complex factions continued to try to ruin and destroy each other.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Thomas Cromwell also came to define Henry's government. Returning to England from the continent in 1514 or 1515, Cromwell soon entered Wolsey's service. He turned to law, also picking up a good knowledge of the Bible, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1524. He became Wolsey's \"man of all work\". Driven in part by his religious beliefs, Cromwell attempted to reform the body politic of the English government through discussion and consent, and through the vehicle of continuity, not outward change. Many saw him as the man they wanted to bring about their shared aims, including Thomas Audley. By 1531, Cromwell and his associates were already responsible for the drafting of much legislation. Cromwell's first office was that of the master of the King's jewels in 1532, from which he began to invigorate the government finances. By that point, Cromwell's power as an efficient administrator, in a Council full of politicians, exceeded what Wolsey had achieved.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Cromwell did much work through his many offices to remove the tasks of government from the Royal Household (and ideologically from the personal body of the King) and into a public state. But he did so in a haphazard fashion that left several remnants, not least because he needed to retain Henry's support, his own power, and the possibility of actually achieving the plan he set out. Cromwell made the various income streams Henry VII put in place more formal and assigned largely autonomous bodies for their administration. The role of the King's Council was transferred to a reformed Privy Council, much smaller and more efficient than its predecessor. A difference emerged between the King's financial health and the country's, although Cromwell's fall undermined much of his bureaucracy, which required him to keep order among the many new bodies and prevent profligate spending that strained relations as well as finances. Cromwell's reforms ground to a halt in 1539, the initiative lost, and he failed to secure the passage of an enabling act, the Proclamation by the Crown Act 1539. He was executed on 28 July 1540.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Henry inherited a vast fortune and a prosperous economy from his father, who had been frugal. This fortune is estimated at £1,250,000 (the equivalent of £375 million today). By comparison, Henry VIII's reign was a near disaster financially. He augmented the royal treasury by seizing church lands, but his heavy spending and long periods of mismanagement damaged the economy.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Henry spent much of his wealth on maintaining his court and household, including many of the building works he undertook on royal palaces. He hung 2,000 tapestries in his palaces; by comparison, James V of Scotland hung just 200. Henry took pride in showing off his collection of weapons, which included exotic archery equipment, 2,250 pieces of land ordnance and 6,500 handguns. Tudor monarchs had to fund all government expenses out of their own income. This income came from the Crown lands that Henry owned as well as from customs duties like tonnage and poundage, granted by parliament to the King for life. During Henry's reign the revenues of the Crown remained constant (around £100,000), but were eroded by inflation and rising prices brought about by war. Indeed, war and Henry's dynastic ambitions in Europe exhausted the surplus he had inherited from his father by the mid-1520s.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Henry VII had not involved Parliament in his affairs very much, but Henry VIII had to turn to Parliament during his reign for money, in particular for grants of subsidies to fund his wars. The dissolution of the monasteries provided a means to replenish the treasury, and as a result, the Crown took possession of monastic lands worth £120,000 (£36 million) a year. The Crown had profited by a small amount in 1526 when Wolsey put England onto a gold, rather than silver, standard, and had debased the currency slightly. Cromwell debased the currency more significantly, starting in Ireland in 1540. The English pound halved in value against the Flemish pound between 1540 and 1551 as a result. The nominal profit made was significant, helping to bring income and expenditure together, but it had a catastrophic effect on the country's economy. In part, it helped to bring about a period of very high inflation from 1544 onwards.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Henry is generally credited with initiating the English Reformation – the process of transforming England from a Catholic country to a Protestant one – though his progress at the elite and mass levels is disputed, and the precise narrative not widely agreed upon. Certainly, in 1527, Henry, until then an observant and well-informed Catholic, appealed to the Pope for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. No annulment was immediately forthcoming, since the papacy was now under the control of Charles V, Catherine's nephew. The traditional narrative gives this refusal as the trigger for Henry's rejection of papal supremacy, which he had previously defended. Yet as E. L. Woodward put it, Henry's determination to annul his marriage with Catherine was the occasion rather than the cause of the English Reformation so that \"neither too much nor too little\" should be made of the annulment. Historian A. F. Pollard has argued that even if Henry had not needed an annulment, he might have come to reject papal control over the governance of England purely for political reasons. Indeed, Henry needed a son to secure the Tudor Dynasty and avert the risk of civil war over disputed succession.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In any case, between 1532 and 1537, Henry instituted a number of statutes that dealt with the relationship between king and the Pope and hence the structure of the nascent Church of England. These included the Statute in Restraint of Appeals (passed 1533), which extended the charge of praemunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England, potentially exposing them to the death penalty if found guilty. Other acts included the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared that the King was \"the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England\" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging the King as such. Similarly, following the passage of the Act of Succession 1533, all adults in the kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions (declaring Henry's marriage to Anne legitimate and his marriage to Catherine illegitimate) by oath; those who refused were subject to imprisonment for life, and any publisher or printer of any literature alleging that the marriage to Anne was invalid subject to the death penalty. Finally, the Peter's Pence Act was passed, and it reiterated that England had \"no superior under God, but only your Grace\" and that Henry's \"imperial crown\" had been diminished by \"the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions\" of the Pope. The King had much support from the Church under Cranmer.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "To Cromwell's annoyance, Henry insisted on parliamentary time to discuss questions of faith, which he achieved through the Duke of Norfolk. This led to the passing of the Act of Six Articles, whereby six major questions were all answered by asserting the religious orthodoxy, thus restraining the reform movement in England. It was followed by the beginnings of a reformed liturgy and of the Book of Common Prayer, which would take until 1549 to complete. But this victory for religious conservatives did not convert into much change in personnel, and Cranmer remained in his position. Overall, the rest of Henry's reign saw a subtle movement away from religious orthodoxy, helped in part by the deaths of prominent figures from before the break with Rome, especially the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher in 1535 for refusing to renounce papal authority. Henry established a new political theology of obedience to the crown that continued for the next decade. It reflected Martin Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment (\"Honour thy father and mother\"), brought to England by William Tyndale. The founding of royal authority on the Ten Commandments was another important shift: reformers within the Church used the Commandments' emphasis on faith and the word of God, while conservatives emphasised the need for dedication to God and doing good. The reformers' efforts lay behind the publication of the Great Bible in 1539 in English. Protestant Reformers still faced persecution, particularly over objections to Henry's annulment. Many fled abroad, including the influential Tyndale, who was eventually executed and his body burned at Henry's behest.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "When taxes once payable to Rome were transferred to the Crown, Cromwell saw the need to assess the taxable value of the Church's extensive holdings as they stood in 1535. The result was an extensive compendium, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. In September 1535, Cromwell commissioned a more general visitation of religious institutions, to be undertaken by four appointee visitors. The visitation focussed almost exclusively on the country's religious houses, with largely negative conclusions. In addition to reporting back to Cromwell, the visitors made the lives of the monks more difficult by enforcing strict behavioural standards. The result was to encourage self-dissolution. In any case, the evidence Cromwell gathered led swiftly to the beginning of the state-enforced dissolution of the monasteries, with all religious houses worth less than £200 vested by statute in the crown in January 1536. After a short pause, surviving religious houses were transferred one by one to the Crown and new owners, and the dissolution confirmed by a further statute in 1539. By January 1540 no such houses remained; 800 had been dissolved. The process had been efficient, with minimal resistance, and brought the crown some £90,000 a year. The extent to which the dissolution of all houses was planned from the start is debated by historians; there is some evidence that major houses were originally intended only to be reformed. Cromwell's actions transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands. The programme was designed primarily to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown, which would use the lands much more efficiently. Although little opposition to the supremacy could be found in England's religious houses, they had links to the international church and were an obstacle to further religious reform.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Response to the reforms was mixed. The religious houses had been the only support of the impoverished, and the reforms alienated much of the populace outside London, helping to provoke the great northern rising of 1536–37, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Elsewhere the changes were accepted and welcomed, and those who clung to Catholic rites kept quiet or moved in secrecy. They reemerged during the reign of Henry's daughter Mary (1553–58).",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Apart from permanent garrisons at Berwick, Calais, and Carlisle, England's standing army numbered only a few hundred men. This was increased only slightly by Henry. Henry's invasion force of 1513, some 30,000 men, was composed of billmen and longbowmen, at a time when the other European nations were moving to hand guns and pikemen but the difference in capability was at this stage not significant, and Henry's forces had new armour and weaponry. They were also supported by battlefield artillery and the war wagon, relatively new innovations, and several large and expensive siege guns. The invasion force of 1544 was similarly well-equipped and organised, although command on the battlefield was laid with the dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, which in the latter case produced disastrous results at Montreuil.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Henry's break with Rome incurred the threat of a large-scale French or Spanish invasion. To guard against this, in 1538 he began to build a chain of expensive, state-of-the-art defences along Britain's southern and eastern coasts, from Kent to Cornwall, largely built of material gained from the demolition of the monasteries. These were known as Henry VIII's Device Forts. He also strengthened existing coastal defence fortresses such as Dover Castle and, at Dover, Moat Bulwark and Archcliffe Fort, which he visited for a few months to supervise. Wolsey had many years before conducted the censuses required for an overhaul of the system of militia, but no reform resulted. In 1538–39, Cromwell overhauled the shire musters, but his work mainly served to demonstrate how inadequate they were in organisation. The building works, including that at Berwick, along with the reform of the militias and musters, were eventually finished under Queen Mary.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Henry is traditionally cited as one of the founders of the Royal Navy. Technologically, Henry invested in large cannon for his warships, an idea that had taken hold in other countries, to replace the smaller serpentines in use. He also flirted with designing ships personally. His contribution to larger vessels, if any, is unknown, but it is believed that he influenced the design of rowbarges and similar galleys. Henry was also responsible for the creation of a permanent navy, with the supporting anchorages and dockyards. Tactically, Henry's reign saw the Navy move away from boarding tactics to employ gunnery instead. The Tudor navy was enlarged from seven ships to up to 50 (the Mary Rose among them), and Henry was responsible for the establishment of the \"council for marine causes\" to oversee the maintenance and operation of the Navy, becoming the basis for the later Admiralty.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "At the beginning of Henry's reign, Ireland was effectively divided into three zones: the Pale, where English rule was unchallenged; Leinster and Munster, the so-called \"obedient land\" of Anglo-Irish peers; and the Gaelic Connaught and Ulster, with merely nominal English rule. Until 1513, Henry continued the policy of his father, to allow Irish lords to rule in the King's name and accept steep divisions between the communities. However, upon the death of the 8th Earl of Kildare, governor of Ireland, fractious Irish politics combined with a more ambitious Henry to cause trouble. When Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond, died, Henry recognised one successor for Ormond's English, Welsh and Scottish lands, whilst in Ireland another took control. Kildare's successor, the 9th Earl, was replaced as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by the Earl of Surrey in 1520. Surrey's ambitious aims were costly but ineffective; English rule became trapped between winning the Irish lords over with diplomacy, as favoured by Henry and Wolsey, and a sweeping military occupation as proposed by Surrey. Surrey was recalled in 1521, with Piers Butler – one of the claimants to the Earldom of Ormond – appointed in his place. Butler proved unable to control opposition, including that of Kildare. Kildare was appointed chief governor in 1524, resuming his dispute with Butler, which had before been in a lull. Meanwhile, the Earl of Desmond, an Anglo-Irish peer, had turned his support to Richard de la Pole as pretender to the English throne; when in 1528 Kildare failed to take suitable actions against him, Kildare was once again removed from his post.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Desmond situation was resolved on his death in 1529, which was followed by a period of uncertainty. This was effectively ended with the appointment of Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and the King's son, as lord lieutenant. Richmond had never before visited Ireland, his appointment a break with past policy. For a time it looked as if peace might be restored with the return of Kildare to Ireland to manage the tribes, but the effect was limited and the Irish parliament soon rendered ineffective. Ireland began to receive the attention of Cromwell, who had supporters of Ormond and Desmond promoted. Kildare, on the other hand, was summoned to London; after some hesitation, he departed for London in 1534, where he would face charges of treason. His son, Thomas, Lord Offaly, was more forthright, denouncing the king and leading a \"Catholic crusade\" against the King, who was by this time mired in marital problems. Offaly had the Archbishop of Dublin murdered and besieged Dublin. Offaly led a mixture of Pale gentry and Irish tribes, although he failed to secure the support of Lord Darcy, a sympathiser, or Charles V. What was effectively a civil war was ended with the intervention of 2,000 English troops – a large army by Irish standards – and the execution of Offaly (his father was already dead) and his uncles.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Although the Offaly revolt was followed by a determination to rule Ireland more closely, Henry was wary of drawn-out conflict with the tribes, and a royal commission recommended that the only relationship with the tribes was to be promises of peace, their land protected from English expansion. The man to lead this effort was Antony St Leger, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, who would remain in post past Henry's death. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a Papal possession granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king, so in 1541 Henry asserted England's claim to the Kingdom of Ireland free from the Papal overlordship. This change did, however, also allow a policy of peaceful reconciliation and expansion: the Lords of Ireland would grant their lands to the King, before being returned as fiefdoms. The incentive to comply with Henry's request was an accompanying barony, and thus a right to sit in the Irish House of Lords, which was to run in parallel with England's. The Irish law of the tribes did not suit such an arrangement, because the chieftain did not have the required rights; this made progress tortuous, and the plan was abandoned in 1543, not to be replaced.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The complexities and sheer scale of Henry's legacy ensured that, in the words of Betteridge and Freeman, \"throughout the centuries, Henry has been praised and reviled, but he has never been ignored\". Historian John D. Mackie sums up Henry's personality and its impact on his achievements and popularity:",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The respect, nay even the popularity, which he had from his people was not unmerited.... He kept the development of England in line with some of the most vigorous, though not the noblest forces of the day. His high courage – highest when things went ill – his commanding intellect, his appreciation of fact, and his instinct for rule carried his country through a perilous time of change, and his very arrogance saved his people from the wars which afflicted other lands. Dimly remembering the wars of the Roses, vaguely informed as to the slaughters and sufferings in Europe, the people of England knew that in Henry they had a great king.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "A particular focus of modern historiography has been the extent to which the events of Henry's life (including his marriages, foreign policy and religious changes) were the result of his own initiative and, if they were, whether they were the result of opportunism or of a principled undertaking by Henry. The traditional interpretation of those events was provided by historian A. F. Pollard, who in 1902 presented his own, largely positive, view of the King, lauding him, \"as the King and statesman who, whatever his personal failings, led England down the road to parliamentary democracy and empire\". Pollard's interpretation remained the dominant interpretation of Henry's life until the publication of the doctoral thesis of G. R. Elton in 1953.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Elton's book on The Tudor Revolution in Government maintained Pollard's positive interpretation of the Henrician period as a whole, but reinterpreted Henry himself as a follower rather than a leader. For Elton, it was Cromwell and not Henry who undertook the changes in government – Henry was shrewd but lacked the vision to follow a complex plan through. Henry was little more, in other words, than an \"ego-centric monstrosity\" whose reign \"owed its successes and virtues to better and greater men about him; most of its horrors and failures sprang more directly from [the King]\".",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Although the central tenets of Elton's thesis have since been questioned, it has consistently provided the starting point for much later work, including that of J. J. Scarisbrick, his student. Scarisbrick largely kept Elton's regard for Cromwell's abilities but returned agency to Henry, who Scarisbrick considered to have ultimately directed and shaped policy. For Scarisbrick, Henry was a formidable, captivating man who \"wore regality with a splendid conviction\". The effect of endowing Henry with this ability, however, was largely negative in Scarisbrick's eyes: to Scarisbrick, the Henrician period was one of upheaval and destruction and those in charge worthy of blame more than praise. Even among more recent biographers, including David Loades, David Starkey, and John Guy, there has ultimately been little consensus on the extent to which Henry was responsible for the changes he oversaw or the assessment of those he did bring about.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "This lack of clarity about Henry's control over events has contributed to the variation in the qualities ascribed to him: religious conservative or dangerous radical; lover of beauty or brutal destroyer of priceless artefacts; friend and patron or betrayer of those around him; chivalry incarnate or ruthless chauvinist. One traditional approach, favoured by Starkey and others, is to divide Henry's reign into two halves, the first Henry being dominated by positive qualities (politically inclusive, pious, athletic but also intellectual) who presided over a period of stability and calm, and the latter a \"hulking tyrant\" who presided over a period of dramatic, sometimes whimsical, change. Other writers have tried to merge Henry's disparate personality into a single whole; Lacey Baldwin Smith, for example, considered him an egotistical borderline neurotic given to great fits of temper and deep and dangerous suspicions, with a mechanical and conventional, but deeply held piety, and having at best a mediocre intellect.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Many changes were made to the royal style during his reign. Henry originally used the style \"Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland\". In 1521, pursuant to a grant from Pope Leo X rewarding Henry for his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, the royal style became \"Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland\". Following Henry's excommunication, Pope Paul III rescinded the grant of the title \"Defender of the Faith\", but an Act of Parliament (35 Hen. 8. c. 3) declared that it remained valid; and it continues in royal usage to the present day, as evidenced by the letters FID DEF or F.D. on all British coinage. Henry's motto was \"Coeur Loyal\" (\"true heart\"), and he had this embroidered on his clothes in the form of a heart symbol and with the word \"loyal\". His emblem was the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis. As king, Henry's arms were the same as those used by his predecessors since Henry IV: Quarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lys Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England).",
"title": "Style and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In 1535, Henry added the \"supremacy phrase\" to the royal style, which became \"Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head\". In 1536, the phrase \"of the Church of England\" changed to \"of the Church of England and also of Ireland\". In 1541, Henry had the Irish Parliament change the title \"Lord of Ireland\" to \"King of Ireland\" with the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, after being advised that many Irish people regarded the Pope as the true head of their country, with the Lord acting as a mere representative. The reason the Irish regarded the Pope as their overlord was that Ireland had originally been given to King Henry II of England by Pope Adrian IV in the 12th century as a feudal territory under papal overlordship. The meeting of the Irish Parliament that proclaimed Henry VIII as King of Ireland was the first meeting attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Anglo-Irish aristocrats. The style \"Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England and also of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head\" remained in use until the end of Henry's reign.",
"title": "Style and arms"
}
]
| Henry VIII was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages and his efforts to have his first marriage annulled. His disagreement with Pope Clement VII about such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated by the pope. Henry brought radical changes to the Constitution of England, expanding royal power and ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings in opposition to papal supremacy. He frequently used charges of treason and heresy to quell dissent, and those accused were often executed without a formal trial using bills of attainder. He achieved many of his political aims through the work of his chief ministers, some of whom were banished or executed when they fell out of his favour. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer all figured prominently in his administration. Henry was an extravagant spender, using the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries and acts of the Reformation Parliament. He converted the money that was formerly paid to Rome into royal revenue. Despite the money from these sources, he was often on the verge of financial ruin due to personal extravagance as well as costly and largely unproductive wars, particularly with King Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King James V of Scotland and the Scottish regency under the Earl of Arran and Mary of Guise. He expanded the Royal Navy, oversaw the annexation of Wales to England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542 and was the first English monarch to rule as King of Ireland following the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. Henry's contemporaries considered him an attractive, educated and accomplished king. He has been described as "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne" and his reign described as the "most important" in English history. He was an author and composer. As he aged, he became severely overweight and his health suffered. He is frequently characterised in his later life as a lustful, egotistical, paranoid and tyrannical monarch. He was succeeded by his son Edward VI. | 2001-11-10T18:33:37Z | 2023-12-28T12:53:08Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII |
14,189 | Haryana | Haryana (/hʌriˈɑːnə/; Hindi: [ɦəɾɪˈjɑːɳɑː]) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 November 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% (44,212 km or 17,070 sq mi) of India's land area. The state capital is Chandigarh, which it shares with the neighbouring state of Punjab; and the most populous city is Faridabad, which is a part of the National Capital Region. The city of Gurgaon is among India's largest financial and technology hubs. Haryana has 6 administrative divisions, 22 districts, 72 sub-divisions, 93 revenue tehsils, 50 sub-tehsils, 140 community development blocks, 154 cities and towns, 7,356 villages, and 6,222 villages panchayats.
Haryana contains 32 special economic zones (SEZs), mainly located within the industrial corridor projects connecting the National Capital Region. Gurgaon is considered one of the major information technology and automobile hubs of India. Haryana ranks 11th among Indian states in human development index. The economy of Haryana is the 13th largest in India, with a gross state domestic product (GSDP) of ₹7.65 trillion (US$96 billion) and has the country's 5th-highest GSDP per capita of ₹240,000 (US$3,000).
The state is rich in history, monuments, heritage, flora and fauna and tourism, with a well-developed economy, national highways and state roads. It is bordered by Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to the north, by Rajasthan to the west and south, while river Yamuna forms its eastern border with Uttar Pradesh. Haryana surrounds the country's capital territory of Delhi on three sides (north, west and south), consequently, a large area of Haryana state is included in the economically important National Capital Region of India for the purposes of planning and development.
Anthropologists came up with the view that Haryana was known by this name because in the post-Mahabharata period, the Abhiras live here, who developed special skills in the art of agriculture. According to Pran Nath Chopra, Haryana got its name from Abhirayana-Ahirayana-Hirayana-Haryana.
The villages of Rakhigarhi in Hisar district and Bhirrana in Fatehabad district are home to ancient sites of the Indus Valley Civilization, which contain evidence of paved roads, a drainage system, a large-scale rainwater collection storage system, terracotta brick and statue production, and skilled metalworking (in both bronze and precious metals).
During the Vedic era, Haryana was the site of the Kuru Kingdom, one of India's great Mahajanapadas. The south of Haryana is the claimed location of Manu's state of Brahmavarta. The area surrounding Dhosi Hill, and districts of Rewari and Mahendragarh had Ashrams of several Rishis who made valuable contributions to important Hindu scriptures like Vedas, Upanishads, Manusmriti, Brahmanas and Puranas. As per Manusmriti, Manu was the king of Brahmavarta, the flood time state 10,000 years ago surrounded by oldest route of Sarasvati and Drishadwati rivers on the banks of which Sanatan-Vedic or present-day Hindu ethos evolved and scriptures were composed.
Ancient bronze and stone idols of Jain Tirthankara were found in archaeological expeditions in Badli, Bhiwani (Ranila, Charkhi Dadri and Badhra), Dadri, Gurgaon (Gurugram ), Hansi, Hisar, Kasan, Nahad, Narnaul, Pehowa, Rewari, Rohad, Rohtak (Asthal Bohar) and Sonepat in Haryana.
Pushyabhuti dynasty ruled parts of northern India in the 7th century with its capital at Thanesar. Harsha was a prominent king of the dynasty. Tomara dynasty ruled the south Haryana region in the 10th century. Anangpal Tomar was a prominent king among the Tomaras.
After the sack of Bhatner fort during the Timurid conquests of India in 1398, Timur attacked and sacked the cities of Sirsa, Fatehabad, Sunam, Kaithal and Panipat. When he reached the town of Sarsuti (Sirsa), the residents fled and were chased by a detachment of Timur's troops, with thousands of them being killed and looted by the troops. From there he travelled to Fatehabad, whose residents fled and a large number of those remaining in the town were massacred. The Ahirs resisted him at Ahruni but were defeated, with thousands being killed and many being taken prisoners while the town was burnt to ashes. From there he travelled to Tohana, whose Jat inhabitants were robbers according to Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi. They tried to resist but were defeated and fled. Timur's army pursued and killed 200 Jats, while taking many more as prisoners. He then sent a detachment to chase the fleeing Jats and killed 2,000 of them while their wives and children were enslaved and their property plundered. Timur proceeded to Kaithal whose residents were massacred and plundered, destroying all villages along the way. On the next day, he came to Assandh, whose residents were "fire-worshippers" according to Yazdi, and had fled to Delhi. Next, he travelled to and subdued Tughlaqpur fort and Salwan before reaching Panipat whose residents had already fled. He then marched on to Loni fort.
Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, also called Hemu, claimed royal status and the throne of Delhi after defeating Akbar's Mughal forces on 7 October 1556 in the Battle of Delhi, and assumed the ancient title of Vikramaditya. The area that is now Haryana has been ruled by some of the major empires of India. Panipat is known for three seminal battles in the history of India. In the First Battle of Panipat (1526), Babur defeated the Lodis. In the Second Battle of Panipat (1556), Akbar defeated the local Haryanvi Hindu Emperor of Delhi, who belonged to Rewari. Hem Chandra Vikramaditya had earlier won 22 battles across India from 1553 to 1556 from Punjab to Bengal, defeating the Mughals and Afghans. Hemu had defeated Akbar's forces twice at Agra and the Battle of Delhi in 1556 to become the last Hindu Emperor of India with a formal coronation at Purana Quila in Delhi on 7 October 1556. In the Third Battle of Panipat (1761), the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated the Marathas.
The state was part of the British Punjab province. The Delhi division of Punjab province formed the bulk of Haryana. Among the princely states that were located in the state were Jind, Kalsia, Loharu, Dujana and Pataudi, as well as parts of the Patiala State.
During the Partition of India, the Punjab province was one of two British Indian provinces, alongside Bengal, to be partitioned between India and Pakistan. Haryana, along with other Hindu and Sikh-dominated areas of Punjab province, became part of India as East Punjab state. As a result, a significant number of Muslims left for the newly formed country of Pakistan. Similarly, a huge number of Hindu and Sikh refugees poured into the state from West Punjab. Gopi Chand Bhargava, who hailed from Sirsa in present-day Haryana, became the first Chief Minister of East Punjab.
Haryana as a state came into existence on 1 November 1966 the Punjab Reorganisation Act (1966). The Indian government set up the Shah Commission under the chairmanship of Justice JC Shah on 23 April 1966 to divide the existing state of Punjab and determine the boundaries of the new state of Haryana after consideration of the languages spoken by the people. The commission delivered its report on 31 May 1966 whereby the then-districts of Hisar, Mahendragarh, Gurgaon, Rohtak and Karnal were to be a part of the new state of Haryana. Further, the tehsils of Jind and Narwana in the Sangrur district – along with Naraingarh, Ambala and Jagadhri – were to be included.
The commission recommended that the tehsil of Kharar, which includes Chandigarh, the state capital of Punjab, should be a part of Haryana. However, Kharar was given to Punjab. The city of Chandigarh was made a union territory, serving as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana.
Bhagwat Dayal Sharma became the first Chief Minister of Haryana.
Religion in Haryana (2011)
According to the 2011 census, of the total population of 25,351,462 in Haryana, Hindus (87.46%) constitute the majority of the state's population with Muslims (7.03%) (mainly Meos) and Sikhs (4.91%) being the largest minorities.
Muslims are mainly found in the Nuh district. Haryana has the second largest Sikh population in India after Punjab, and they mostly live in the districts adjoining Punjab, such as Sirsa, Jind, Fatehabad, Kaithal, Kurukshetra, Ambala and Panchkula.
Languages of Haryana (2011)
The official language of Haryana is Hindi. Several regional languages or dialects, often subsumed under Hindi, are spoken in the state. Predominant among them is Haryanvi (also known as Bangru), whose territory encompasses the central and eastern portions of Haryana. Hindi and Punjabi is spoken in the northeast, Bagri in the west, Deshwali in the East and Ahirwati, Mewati and Braj Bhasha in the south.
There are also significant numbers of speakers of Urdu and Punjabi, the latter of which was recognised as the second official language of Haryana for government and administrative purposes in 2010. After the state's formation, Telugu was made the state's "second language" – to be taught in schools – but it was not the "second official language" for official communication. Due to a lack of students, the language ultimately stopped being taught. Tamil was made the second language in 1969 by Bansi Lal to show the state's differences with Punjab although there were no Tamil speakers in Haryana at the time. In 2010, due to the lack of Tamil speakers, the language was removed from its status.
There are also some speakers of several major regional languages of neighbouring states or other parts of the subcontinent, like Bengali, Bhojpuri, Marwari, Mewari, and Nepali, as well as smaller communities of speakers of languages that are dispersed across larger regions, like Bauria, Bazigar, Gujari, Gade Lohar, Oadki, and Sansi.
Haryana has its own unique traditional folk music, folk dances, saang (folk theatre), cinema, belief system such as Jathera (ancestral worship), and arts such as Phulkari and Shisha embroidery.
Folk music and dances of Haryana are based on satisfying the cultural needs of primarily agrarian and martial natures of Haryanavi tribes.
Haryanvi musical folk theatre's main types are Saang, Rasa lila and Ragini. The Saang and Ragini form of theatre was popularised by Lakhmi Chand.
Haryanvi folk dances and music have fast energetic movements. Three popular categories of dance are festive-seasonal, devotional, and ceremonial-recreational. The festive-seasonal dances and songs are Gogaji/Gugga, Holi, Phaag, Sawan, Teej. The devotional dances and songs are Chaupaiya, Holi, Manjira, Ras Leela, Raginis). The ceremonial-recreational dances and songs are of following types: legendary bravery (Kissa and Ragini of male warriors and female Satis), love and romance (Been and its variant Nāginī dance, and Ragini), ceremonial (Dhamal Dance, Ghoomar, Jhoomar (male), Khoria, Loor, and Ragini).
Haryanvi folk music is based on day-to-day themes and injecting earthly humour enlivens the feel of the songs. Haryanvi music takes two main forms: "Classical folk music" and "Desi Folk music" (Country Music of Haryana), and sung in the form of ballads and love, valor and bravery, harvest, happiness and pangs of the parting of lovers.
Classical Haryanvi folk music is based on Indian classical music. Hindustani classical ragas, learnt in gharana parampara of guru–shishya tradition, are used to sing songs of heroic bravery (such as Alha-Khand (1163–1202 CE) about the bravery of Alha and Udal, Jaimal and Patta of Maharana Udai Singh II), Brahmas worship and festive seasonal songs (such as Teej, Holi and Phaag songs of Phalgun month near Holi). Bravery songs are sung in high pitch.
Desi Haryanvi folk music, is a form of Haryanvi music, based on Raag Bhairvi, Raag Bhairav, Raag Kafi, Raag Jaijaivanti, Raag Jhinjhoti and Raag Pahadi and used for celebrating community bonhomie to sing seasonal songs, ballads, ceremonial songs (wedding, etc.) and related religious legendary tales such as Puran Bhagat. Relationship and songs celebrating love and life are sung in medium pitch. Ceremonial and religious songs are sung in low pitch. Young girls and women usually sing entertaining and fast seasonal, love, relationship and friendship-related songs such as Phagan (song for eponymous season/month), Katak (songs for the eponymous season/month), Samman (songs for the eponymous season/month), bande-bandi (male-female duet songs), sathne (songs of sharing heartfelt feelings among female friends). Older women usually sing devotional Mangal Geet (auspicious songs) and ceremonial songs such as Bhajan, Bhat (wedding gift to the mother of bride or groom by her brother), Sagai, Ban (Hindu wedding ritual where pre-wedding festivities starts), Kuan-Poojan (a custom that is performed to welcome the birth of a child by worshiping the well or source of drinking water), Sanjhi and Holi festival.
Music and dance for Haryanvi people is a way of lessening societal differences as folk singers are highly esteemed and they are sought after and invited for events, ceremonies and special occasions regardless of their caste or status. These inter-caste songs are fluid in nature, and never personalised for any specific caste, and they are sung collectively by women from different strata, castes, and dialects. These songs transform fluidly in dialect, style, words, etc. This adoptive style can be seen in the adoption of tunes of Bollywood movie songs into Haryanvi songs. Despite this continuous fluid transforming nature, Haryanvi songs have a distinct style of their own as explained above.
With the coming up of a strongly socio-economic metropolitan culture in the emergence of urban Gurgaon Haryana is also witnessing community participation in public arts and city beautification. Several landmarks across Gurgaon are decorated with public murals and graffiti with cultural cohesive ideologies and stand the testimony of a lived sentiment in Haryana folk.
As per a survey, 13% of males and 7.8% of females of Haryana are non-vegetarian. The regional cuisine features the staples of roti, saag, vegetarian sabzi and milk products such as ghee, milk, lassi and kheer.
Haryanvi people have a concept of inclusive society involving the "36 Jātis" or communities. Castes such as Jat, Rajput, Gurjar, Saini, Pasi, Ahirs, Ror, Mev, Charan, Bishnoi, Harijan, Aggarwal, Brahmin, Khatri and Tyagi are some of the notable of these 36 Jātis.
Haryana is a landlocked state in northern India. It is between 27°39' to 30°35' N latitude and between 74°28' and 77°36' E longitude. The total geographical area of the state is 4.42 m ha, which is 1.4% of the geographical area of the country. The altitude of Haryana varies between 700 and 3600 ft (200 metres to 1200 metres) above sea level. Haryana has only 4% (compared with national 21.85%) area under forests. Karoh Peak, a 1,467-metre (4,813 ft) tall mountain peak in the Sivalik Hills range of the greater Himalayas range located near Morni Hills area of Panchkula district, is the highest point in Haryana. Most of the state sits atop the fertile Ghaggar Plain, a subsection of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Haryana has 4 states and 2 union territories on its border – Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, and Chandigarh.
Haryana has four main geographical features.
The Yamuna, a tributary of the Ganges, flows along the state's eastern boundary.
Northern Haryana has several northeast to west flowing rivers originating from the Sivalik Hills of Himalayas, such as Ghaggar (palaeochannel of vedic Sarasvati river), Chautang (paleochannel of vedic Drishadvati river, tributary of the Ghagghar), Tangri river (tributary of the Ghagghar), Kaushalya river (tributary of the Ghagghar), Markanda River (tributary of Ghagghar), Sarsuti, Dangri, Somb river. Haryana's main seasonal river, the Ghaggar-Hakra, known as Ghaggar before the Ottu barrage and as the Hakra downstream of the barrage, rises in the outer Himalayas, between the Yamuna and the Satluj and enters the state near Pinjore in the Panchkula district, passes through Ambala and Sirsa, it reaches Bikaner in Rajasthan and runs for 460 km (290 mi) before disappearing into the deserts of Rajasthan. The seasonal Markanda River, known as the Aruna in ancient times, originates from the lower Shivalik Hills and enters Haryana west of Ambala, and swells into a raging torrent during monsoon is notorious for its devastating power, carries its surplus water on to the Sanisa Lake where the Markanda joins the Sarasuti and later the Ghaggar.
Southern Haryana has several south-west to east flowing seasonal rivulets originating from the Aravalli Range in and around the hills in Mewat region, including Sahibi River (called Najafgarh drain in Delhi), Dohan river (tributary of Sahibi, originates at Mandoli village near Neem Ka Thana in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan and then disappears in Mahendragarh district), Krishnavati river (former tributary of Sahibi river, originates near Dariba and disappears in Mahendragarh district much before reaching Sahibi river) and Indori river (longest tributary of Sahibi River, originates in Sikar district of Rajasthan and flows to Rewari district of Haryana), these once were tributaries of the Drishadwati/Saraswati river.
Major canals are Western Yamuna Canal, Sutlej Yamuna link canal (from Sutlej river tributary of Indus), and Indira Gandhi Canal.
Major dams are Kaushalya Dam in Panchkula district, Hathnikund Barrage and Tajewala Barrage on Yamuna in Yamunanagar district, Pathrala barrage on Somb river in Yamunanagar district, ancient Anagpur Dam near Surajkund in Faridabad district, and Ottu barrage on Ghaggar-Hakra River in Sirsa district.
Major lakes are Dighal Wetland, Basai Wetland, Badkhal Lake in Faridabad, holy Brahma Sarovar and Sannihit Sarovar in Kurukshetra, Blue Bird Lake in Hisar, Damdama Lake at Sohna in Gurgram district, Hathni Kund in Yamunanagar district, Karna Lake at Karnal, ancient Surajkund in Faridabad, and Tilyar Lake in Rohtak.
The Haryana State Waterbody Management Board is responsible for the rejuvenation of 14,000 johads of Haryana and up to 60 lakes in National Capital Region falling within the Haryana state.
The only hot spring in Haryana is the Sohna Sulphur Hot Spring at Sohna in Gurgaon district. Tosham Hill range has several sacred sulphur ponds of religious significance that are revered for the healing impact of sulphur, such as Pandu Teerth Kund, Surya Kund, Kukkar Kund, Gyarasia Kund or Vyas Kund.
Seasonal waterfalls include Tikkar Taal twin lakes at Morni hiills, Dhosi Hill in Mahendragarh district and Pali village on the outskirts of Faridabad.
Haryana is hot in summer at around 45 °C (113 °F) and mild in winter. The hottest months are May and June and the coldest are December and January. The climate is arid to semi-arid with an average rainfall of 354.5 mm. Around 29% of rainfall is received during the months from July to September as a result of the monsoon, and the remaining rainfall is received during the period from December to February as a result of the western disturbance.
Forest cover in the state in 2013 was 3.59% (1586 km) and the Tree Cover in the state was 2.90% (1282 km), giving a total forest and tree cover of 6.49%. In 2016–17, 18,412 hectares were brought under tree cover by planting 14.1 million seedlings. Thorny, dry, deciduous forest and thorny shrubs can be found all over the state. During the monsoon, a carpet of grass covers the hills. Mulberry, eucalyptus, pine, kikar, shisham and babul are some of the trees found here. The species of fauna found in the state of Haryana include black buck, nilgai, panther, fox, mongoose, jackal and wild dog. More than 450 species of birds are found here.
Haryana has two national parks, eight wildlife sanctuaries, two wildlife conservation areas, four animal and bird breeding centers, one deer park and three zoos, all of which are managed by the Haryana Forest Department of the Government of Haryana. Sultanpur National Park is a notable Park located in Gurgaon District
Haryana Environment Protection Council is the advisory committee and the Department of Environment, Haryana is the department responsible for the administration of the environment. Areas of Haryana surrounding Delhi NCR are the most polluted. During the smog of November 2017, the air quality index of Gurgaon and Faridabad showed that the density of fine particulates (2.5 μm diameter) was an average a score of 400 and the monthly average of Haryana was 60. Other sources of pollution are exhaust gases from old vehicles, stone crushers and brick kilns. Haryana has 7.5 million vehicles, of which 40% are old, more polluting vehicles, and 500,000 new vehicles are added every year. Other majorly polluted cities are Bhiwani, Bahadurgarh, Dharuhera, Hisar and Yamunanagar.
The state is divided into 6 revenue divisions, 5 Police Ranges and 3 Police Commissionerates (c. January 2017). Six revenue divisions are: Ambala, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Hisar, Karnal and Faridabad. Haryana has 11 municipal corporations (Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ambala, Panchkula, Yamunanagar, Rohtak, Hisar, Panipat, Karnal, Sonepat, and Manesar), 18 municipal councils and 52 municipalities.
Within these, there are 22 districts, 72 sub-divisions, 93 tehsils, 50 sub-tehsils, 140 blocks, 154 cities and towns, 6,848 villages, 6,226 villages panchayats and numerous smaller dhanis.
The Haryana Police force is the law enforcement agency of Haryana. Five Police Ranges are Ambala, Hissar, Karnal, Rewari and Rohtak. Three Police Commissionerates are Faridabad, Gurgaon and Panchkula. Cybercrime investigation cell is based in Gurgaon's Sector 51.
The highest judicial authority in the state is the Punjab and Haryana High Court, with the next higher right of appeal being to the Supreme Court of India. Haryana uses an e-filing facility.
The Common Service Centres (CSCs) have been upgraded in all districts to offer hundreds of e-services to citizens, including applications for new water and sanitation connections, electricity bill collection, ration card member registration, the result of HBSE, admit cards for board examinations, online admission forms for government colleges, long route booking of buses, admission forms for Kurukshetra University and HUDA plots status inquiry. Haryana has become the first state to implement Aadhaar-enabled birth registration in all the districts. Thousands of all traditional offline state and central government services are also available 24/7 online through single unified UMANG app and portal as part of Digital India initiative.
Haryana's 14th placed 12.96% 2012-17 CAGR estimated a 2017-18 GSDP of US$95 billion split into 52% services, 30% industries and 18% agriculture.
The services sector is split across 45% in real estate and financial and professional services, 26% trade and hospitality, 15% state and central government employees, and 14% transport and logistics & warehousing. In IT services, Gurgaon ranks first in India in growth rate and existing technology infrastructure, and second in startup ecosystem, innovation and livability (Nov 2016).
The industrial sector is split across 69% manufacturing, 28% construction, 2% utilities and 1% mining. In industrial manufacturing, Haryana produces 67% of passenger cars, 60% of motorcycles, 50% of tractors and 50% of the refrigerators in India.
The service and industrial sectors are boosted by 7 operational SEZs and an additional 23 formally approved SEZs (20 already notified and 3 approved in-principle) that are mostly spread along the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Amritsar Delhi Kolkata Industrial Corridor and Western Peripheral Expressway.
The agricultural sector is split across 93% crops and livestock, 4% commercial forestry and logging, and 2% fisheries. Although Haryana has less than 1.4% of the total area of India, it contributes 15% of food grains to the central food security public distribution system, and makes up 7% of total national agricultural exports, including 60% of total national basmati rice exports.
Haryana is traditionally an agrarian society of zamindars (owner-cultivator farmers). About 70% of Haryana's residents are engaged in agriculture. The Green Revolution in Haryana of the 1960s combined with the completion of Bhakra Dam in 1963 and Western Yamuna Command Network canal system in 1970s resulted in the significantly increased food grain production. As a result, Haryana is self sufficient in food production and the second largest contributor to India's central pool of food grains In 2015–2016, Haryana produced the following principal crops: 13,352,000 tonnes of wheat, 4,145,000 tonnes of rice, 7,169,000 tonnes of sugarcane, 993,000 tonnes of cotton and 855,000 tonnes of oilseeds (mustard seed, sunflower, etc.).
Vegetable production was: potato 853,806 tonnes, onion 705,795 tonnes, tomato 675,384 tonnes, cauliflower 578,953 tonnes, leafy vegetables 370,646 tonnes, brinjal 331,169 tonnes, guard 307,793 tonnes, peas 111,081 tonnes and others 269,993 tonnes.
Fruits production was: citrus 301,764 tonnes, guava 152,184 tonnes, mango 89,965 tonnes, chikoo 16,022 tonnes, aonla 12,056 tonnes and other fruits 25,848 tonnes.
Spices production was: garlic 40,497 tonnes, fenugreek 9,348 tonnes, ginger 4,304 tonnes and others 840 tonnes.
Cut flowers production was: marigold 61,830 tonnes, gladiolus 2,448,620 million, rose 1,861,160 million and other 691,300 million.
Medicinal plants production was: aloe vera 1403 tonnes and stevia 13 tonnes.
Haryana is well known for its high-yield Murrah buffalo. Other breeds of cattle native to Haryana are Haryanvi, Mewati, Sahiwal and Nili-Ravi.
To support its agrarian economy, both the central government (Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes, Central Sheep Breeding Farm, National Research Centre on Equines, Central Institute of Fisheries, National Dairy Research Institute, Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research and National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources) and the state government (CCS HAU, LUVAS, Government Livestock Farm, Regional Fodder Station and Northern Region Farm Machinery Training and Testing Institute) have opened several institutes for research and education.
Haryana State has always given high priority to the expansion of electricity infrastructure, as it is one of the most important drivers of development for the state. Haryana was the first state in the country to achieve 100% rural electrification in 1970 as well as the first in the country to link all villages with all-weather roads and provide safe drinking water facilities throughout the state.
Sources of power in the state include:
Haryana has a total road length of 26,062 kilometres (16,194 mi), including 2,482 kilometres (1,542 mi) comprising 29 national highways, 1,801 kilometres (1,119 mi) of state highways, 1,395 kilometres (867 mi) of Major District Roads (MDR) and 20,344 kilometres (12,641 mi) of Other District Roads (ODR) (c. December 2017). A fleet of 3,864 Haryana Roadways buses covers a distance of 1.15 million km per day, and it was the first state in the country to introduce luxury video coaches.
Ancient Delhi Multan Road and Grand Trunk Road, South Asia's oldest and longest major roads, pass through Haryana. GT Road passes through the districts of Sonipat, Panipat, Karnal, Kurukshetra and Ambala in north Haryana where it enters Delhi and subsequently the industrial town of Faridabad on its way. The 135.6 kilometres (84.3 mi) Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway (KMP) will provide a high-speed link to northern Haryana with its southern districts such as Sonipat, Gurgaon, and Faridabad.
The Delhi-Agra Expressway (NH-2) that passes through Faridabad is being widened to six lanes from the current four lanes. It will further boost Faridabad's connectivity with Delhi.
The rail network in Haryana is covered by five rail divisions under three rail zones. Diamond Quadrilateral High-speed rail network, Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (72 km) and Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (177 km) pass through Haryana.
Bikaner railway division of the North Western Railway zone manages the rail network in western and southern Haryana covering Bhatinda-Dabwali-Hanumangarh line, Rewari-Bhiwani-Hisar-Bathinda line, Hisar-Sadulpur line and Rewari-Loharu-Sadulpur line. Jaipur railway division of North Western Railway zone manages the rail network in south-west Haryana covering Rewari-Reengas-Jaipur line, Delhi-Alwar-Jaipur line and Loharu-Sikar line.
The Delhi railway division of the Northern Railway zone manages the rail network in north and east-central Haryana, covering Delhi-Panipat-Ambala line, Delhi-Rohtak-Tohana line, Rewari–Rohtak line, Jind-Sonepat line and Delhi-Rewari line. Agra railway division of North Central Railway zone manages another very small part of the network in southeast Haryana covering only the Palwal-Mathura line.
Ambala railway division of Northern Railway zone manages a small part of the rail network in north-east Haryana covering Ambala-Yamunanagar line, Ambala-Kurukshetra line and UNESCO World Heritage Kalka–Shimla Railway.
Delhi Metro connects the national capital Delhi with the NCR cities of Faridabad, Gurgaon and Bahadurgarh. Faridabad has the longest metro network in the NCR Region consisting of 11 stations and a track length of 17 km.
The Haryana and Delhi governments have constructed the 4.5-kilometre (2.8 mi) international standard Delhi Faridabad Skyway, the first of its kind in North India, to connect Delhi and Faridabad.
Haryana has a statewide network of telecommunication facilities. Haryana Government has its own statewide area network by which all government offices of 22 districts and 126 blocks across the state are connected with each other, thus making it the first SWAN of the country. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited and most of the leading private sector players (such as Reliance Infocom, Tata Teleservices, Bharti Telecom, Idea Vodafone Essar, Aircel, Uninor and Videocon) have operations in the state. The two biggest cities of Haryana, Faridabad and Gurgaon, which are part of the National Capital Region, come under the local Delhi Mobile Telecommunication System. The rest of the cities of Haryana come under Haryana Telecommunication System.
Electronic media channels include MTV, 9XM, Star Group, SET Max, News Time, NDTV 24x7 and Zee Group. The radio stations include All India Radio and other FM stations.
Panipat, Hisar, Ambala and Rohtak are the cities in which the leading newspapers of Haryana are printed and circulated throughout Haryana, in which Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Punjab Kesari, The Tribune, Aaj Samaj, Hari Bhoomi and Amar Ujala are prominent.
The total fertility rate of Haryana is 2.3. The infant mortality rate is 41 (SRS 2012) and the maternal mortality ratio is 146 (SRS 2010–2012). The state of Haryana has various Medical Colleges including Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences Rohtak, Bhagat Phool Singh Medical College in District Sonipat, ESIC Medical College, Faridabad along with notable private medical institutes like Medanta, Max Hospital, Fortis Healthcare
The literacy rate in Haryana has seen an upward trend and is 76.64 per cent as per the 2011 population census. Male literacy stands at 85.38%, while female literacy is at 66.67%. In 2001, the literacy rate in Haryana stood at 67.91%, of which males and females were 78.49% and 55.73% literate respectively. As of 2013, Gurgaon city had the highest literacy rate in Haryana at 86.30% followed by Panchkula at 81.9% and Ambala at 81.7%. In terms of districts, as of 2012, Rewari had the highest literacy rate in Haryana at 74%, higher than the national average of 59.5%; male literacy was 79% and female literacy was 67%.
Haryana Board of School Education, established in September 1969 and shifted to Bhiwani in 1981, conducts public examinations at middle, matriculation, and senior secondary levels twice a year. Over 700,000 candidates attend annual examinations in February and March; 150,000 attend supplementary examinations each November. The Board also conducts examinations for Haryana Open School at senior and senior secondary levels twice a year. The Haryana government provides free education to women up to the bachelor's degree level.
In 2015–2016, there were nearly 20,000 schools, including 10,100 state government schools (36 Aarohi Schools, 11 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, 21 Model Sanskriti Schools, 8,744 government primary school, 3386 government middle school, 1,284 government high school and 1,967 government senior secondary schools), 7,635 private schools (200 aided, 6,612 recognised unaided, and 821 unrecognised unaided private schools) and several hundred other central government and private schools such as Kendriya Vidyalaya, Indian Army Public Schools, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya and DAV schools affiliated to central government's CBSE and ICSE school boards.
Haryana has 48 universities and 1,038 colleges, including 115 government colleges, 88 government-aided colleges and 96 self-finance colleges. Hisar has three universities: Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University – Asia's largest agricultural university, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Lala Lajpat Rai University of Veterinary & Animal Sciences); several national agricultural and veterinary research centres (National Research Centre on Equines), Central Sheep Breeding Farm, National Institute on Pig Breeding and Research, Northern Region Farm Machinery Training and Testing Institute and Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes (CIRB); and more than 20 colleges including Maharaja Agrasen Medical College, Agroha.
Demographically, Haryana has 471,000 women and 457,000 men pursuing post-secondary school higher education. There are more than 18,616 female teachers and 17,061 male teachers in higher education.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced on 27 February 2016 that the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT) would be set up in Kurukshetra to provide computer training to youth and a Software Technology Park of India (STPI) would be set up in Panchkula's existing HSIIDC IT Park in Sector 23. Hindi and English are compulsory languages in schools whereas Punjabi, Sanskrit and Urdu are chosen as optional languages.
In the 2010 Commonwealth Games at Delhi, 22 out of 38 gold medals that India won came from Haryana. During the 33rd National Games held in Assam in 2007, Haryana stood first in the nation with a medal tally of 80, including 30 gold, 22 silver and 28 bronze medals.
The 1983 World Cup winning captain Kapil Dev made his domestic-cricket debut playing for Haryana. Nahar Singh Stadium was built in Faridabad in the year 1981 for international cricket. This ground has the capacity to hold around 25,000 people as spectators. Tejli Sports Complex is an ultra-modern sports complex in Yamuna Nagar. Tau Devi Lal Stadium in Gurgaon is a multi-sport complex.
Chief Minister of Haryana Manohar Lal Khattar announced the "Haryana Sports and Physical Fitness Policy", a policy to support 26 Olympic sports, on 12 January 2015 with the words "We will develop Haryana as the sports hub of the country."
Haryana is home to Haryana Gold, one of India's eight professional basketball teams that compete in the country's UBA Pro Basketball League.
At the 2016 Summer Olympics, Sakshi Malik won the bronze medal in the 58 kg category, becoming the first Indian female wrestler to win a medal at the Olympics and the fourth female Olympic medalist from the country.
Notable badminton player Saina Nehwal is from Hisar in Haryana.
Notable athlete Neeraj Chopra, who competes in Javelin Throw and won the first track and field gold medal in 2020 Tokyo Olympics for India, was born and raised in Panipat, Haryana. Wrestling is also very prominent in Haryana, as 2 medals won in wrestling at 2020 Tokyo Olympics were from Haryana.
Notable athlete Ravi Dahiya, who was born in Nahri village of Sonipat District, won silver medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for India.
Ravi Kumar is an Indian freestyle wrestler who won a silver medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the 57 kg category. Dahiya is also a bronze medalist from 2019 World Wrestling Championships and a two-time Asian champion. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Haryana (/hʌriˈɑːnə/; Hindi: [ɦəɾɪˈjɑːɳɑː]) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 November 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% (44,212 km or 17,070 sq mi) of India's land area. The state capital is Chandigarh, which it shares with the neighbouring state of Punjab; and the most populous city is Faridabad, which is a part of the National Capital Region. The city of Gurgaon is among India's largest financial and technology hubs. Haryana has 6 administrative divisions, 22 districts, 72 sub-divisions, 93 revenue tehsils, 50 sub-tehsils, 140 community development blocks, 154 cities and towns, 7,356 villages, and 6,222 villages panchayats.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Haryana contains 32 special economic zones (SEZs), mainly located within the industrial corridor projects connecting the National Capital Region. Gurgaon is considered one of the major information technology and automobile hubs of India. Haryana ranks 11th among Indian states in human development index. The economy of Haryana is the 13th largest in India, with a gross state domestic product (GSDP) of ₹7.65 trillion (US$96 billion) and has the country's 5th-highest GSDP per capita of ₹240,000 (US$3,000).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The state is rich in history, monuments, heritage, flora and fauna and tourism, with a well-developed economy, national highways and state roads. It is bordered by Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to the north, by Rajasthan to the west and south, while river Yamuna forms its eastern border with Uttar Pradesh. Haryana surrounds the country's capital territory of Delhi on three sides (north, west and south), consequently, a large area of Haryana state is included in the economically important National Capital Region of India for the purposes of planning and development.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Anthropologists came up with the view that Haryana was known by this name because in the post-Mahabharata period, the Abhiras live here, who developed special skills in the art of agriculture. According to Pran Nath Chopra, Haryana got its name from Abhirayana-Ahirayana-Hirayana-Haryana.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The villages of Rakhigarhi in Hisar district and Bhirrana in Fatehabad district are home to ancient sites of the Indus Valley Civilization, which contain evidence of paved roads, a drainage system, a large-scale rainwater collection storage system, terracotta brick and statue production, and skilled metalworking (in both bronze and precious metals).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During the Vedic era, Haryana was the site of the Kuru Kingdom, one of India's great Mahajanapadas. The south of Haryana is the claimed location of Manu's state of Brahmavarta. The area surrounding Dhosi Hill, and districts of Rewari and Mahendragarh had Ashrams of several Rishis who made valuable contributions to important Hindu scriptures like Vedas, Upanishads, Manusmriti, Brahmanas and Puranas. As per Manusmriti, Manu was the king of Brahmavarta, the flood time state 10,000 years ago surrounded by oldest route of Sarasvati and Drishadwati rivers on the banks of which Sanatan-Vedic or present-day Hindu ethos evolved and scriptures were composed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ancient bronze and stone idols of Jain Tirthankara were found in archaeological expeditions in Badli, Bhiwani (Ranila, Charkhi Dadri and Badhra), Dadri, Gurgaon (Gurugram ), Hansi, Hisar, Kasan, Nahad, Narnaul, Pehowa, Rewari, Rohad, Rohtak (Asthal Bohar) and Sonepat in Haryana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Pushyabhuti dynasty ruled parts of northern India in the 7th century with its capital at Thanesar. Harsha was a prominent king of the dynasty. Tomara dynasty ruled the south Haryana region in the 10th century. Anangpal Tomar was a prominent king among the Tomaras.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After the sack of Bhatner fort during the Timurid conquests of India in 1398, Timur attacked and sacked the cities of Sirsa, Fatehabad, Sunam, Kaithal and Panipat. When he reached the town of Sarsuti (Sirsa), the residents fled and were chased by a detachment of Timur's troops, with thousands of them being killed and looted by the troops. From there he travelled to Fatehabad, whose residents fled and a large number of those remaining in the town were massacred. The Ahirs resisted him at Ahruni but were defeated, with thousands being killed and many being taken prisoners while the town was burnt to ashes. From there he travelled to Tohana, whose Jat inhabitants were robbers according to Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi. They tried to resist but were defeated and fled. Timur's army pursued and killed 200 Jats, while taking many more as prisoners. He then sent a detachment to chase the fleeing Jats and killed 2,000 of them while their wives and children were enslaved and their property plundered. Timur proceeded to Kaithal whose residents were massacred and plundered, destroying all villages along the way. On the next day, he came to Assandh, whose residents were \"fire-worshippers\" according to Yazdi, and had fled to Delhi. Next, he travelled to and subdued Tughlaqpur fort and Salwan before reaching Panipat whose residents had already fled. He then marched on to Loni fort.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, also called Hemu, claimed royal status and the throne of Delhi after defeating Akbar's Mughal forces on 7 October 1556 in the Battle of Delhi, and assumed the ancient title of Vikramaditya. The area that is now Haryana has been ruled by some of the major empires of India. Panipat is known for three seminal battles in the history of India. In the First Battle of Panipat (1526), Babur defeated the Lodis. In the Second Battle of Panipat (1556), Akbar defeated the local Haryanvi Hindu Emperor of Delhi, who belonged to Rewari. Hem Chandra Vikramaditya had earlier won 22 battles across India from 1553 to 1556 from Punjab to Bengal, defeating the Mughals and Afghans. Hemu had defeated Akbar's forces twice at Agra and the Battle of Delhi in 1556 to become the last Hindu Emperor of India with a formal coronation at Purana Quila in Delhi on 7 October 1556. In the Third Battle of Panipat (1761), the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated the Marathas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The state was part of the British Punjab province. The Delhi division of Punjab province formed the bulk of Haryana. Among the princely states that were located in the state were Jind, Kalsia, Loharu, Dujana and Pataudi, as well as parts of the Patiala State.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the Partition of India, the Punjab province was one of two British Indian provinces, alongside Bengal, to be partitioned between India and Pakistan. Haryana, along with other Hindu and Sikh-dominated areas of Punjab province, became part of India as East Punjab state. As a result, a significant number of Muslims left for the newly formed country of Pakistan. Similarly, a huge number of Hindu and Sikh refugees poured into the state from West Punjab. Gopi Chand Bhargava, who hailed from Sirsa in present-day Haryana, became the first Chief Minister of East Punjab.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Haryana as a state came into existence on 1 November 1966 the Punjab Reorganisation Act (1966). The Indian government set up the Shah Commission under the chairmanship of Justice JC Shah on 23 April 1966 to divide the existing state of Punjab and determine the boundaries of the new state of Haryana after consideration of the languages spoken by the people. The commission delivered its report on 31 May 1966 whereby the then-districts of Hisar, Mahendragarh, Gurgaon, Rohtak and Karnal were to be a part of the new state of Haryana. Further, the tehsils of Jind and Narwana in the Sangrur district – along with Naraingarh, Ambala and Jagadhri – were to be included.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The commission recommended that the tehsil of Kharar, which includes Chandigarh, the state capital of Punjab, should be a part of Haryana. However, Kharar was given to Punjab. The city of Chandigarh was made a union territory, serving as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Bhagwat Dayal Sharma became the first Chief Minister of Haryana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Religion in Haryana (2011)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "According to the 2011 census, of the total population of 25,351,462 in Haryana, Hindus (87.46%) constitute the majority of the state's population with Muslims (7.03%) (mainly Meos) and Sikhs (4.91%) being the largest minorities.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Muslims are mainly found in the Nuh district. Haryana has the second largest Sikh population in India after Punjab, and they mostly live in the districts adjoining Punjab, such as Sirsa, Jind, Fatehabad, Kaithal, Kurukshetra, Ambala and Panchkula.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Languages of Haryana (2011)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The official language of Haryana is Hindi. Several regional languages or dialects, often subsumed under Hindi, are spoken in the state. Predominant among them is Haryanvi (also known as Bangru), whose territory encompasses the central and eastern portions of Haryana. Hindi and Punjabi is spoken in the northeast, Bagri in the west, Deshwali in the East and Ahirwati, Mewati and Braj Bhasha in the south.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "There are also significant numbers of speakers of Urdu and Punjabi, the latter of which was recognised as the second official language of Haryana for government and administrative purposes in 2010. After the state's formation, Telugu was made the state's \"second language\" – to be taught in schools – but it was not the \"second official language\" for official communication. Due to a lack of students, the language ultimately stopped being taught. Tamil was made the second language in 1969 by Bansi Lal to show the state's differences with Punjab although there were no Tamil speakers in Haryana at the time. In 2010, due to the lack of Tamil speakers, the language was removed from its status.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "There are also some speakers of several major regional languages of neighbouring states or other parts of the subcontinent, like Bengali, Bhojpuri, Marwari, Mewari, and Nepali, as well as smaller communities of speakers of languages that are dispersed across larger regions, like Bauria, Bazigar, Gujari, Gade Lohar, Oadki, and Sansi.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Haryana has its own unique traditional folk music, folk dances, saang (folk theatre), cinema, belief system such as Jathera (ancestral worship), and arts such as Phulkari and Shisha embroidery.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Folk music and dances of Haryana are based on satisfying the cultural needs of primarily agrarian and martial natures of Haryanavi tribes.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Haryanvi musical folk theatre's main types are Saang, Rasa lila and Ragini. The Saang and Ragini form of theatre was popularised by Lakhmi Chand.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Haryanvi folk dances and music have fast energetic movements. Three popular categories of dance are festive-seasonal, devotional, and ceremonial-recreational. The festive-seasonal dances and songs are Gogaji/Gugga, Holi, Phaag, Sawan, Teej. The devotional dances and songs are Chaupaiya, Holi, Manjira, Ras Leela, Raginis). The ceremonial-recreational dances and songs are of following types: legendary bravery (Kissa and Ragini of male warriors and female Satis), love and romance (Been and its variant Nāginī dance, and Ragini), ceremonial (Dhamal Dance, Ghoomar, Jhoomar (male), Khoria, Loor, and Ragini).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Haryanvi folk music is based on day-to-day themes and injecting earthly humour enlivens the feel of the songs. Haryanvi music takes two main forms: \"Classical folk music\" and \"Desi Folk music\" (Country Music of Haryana), and sung in the form of ballads and love, valor and bravery, harvest, happiness and pangs of the parting of lovers.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Classical Haryanvi folk music is based on Indian classical music. Hindustani classical ragas, learnt in gharana parampara of guru–shishya tradition, are used to sing songs of heroic bravery (such as Alha-Khand (1163–1202 CE) about the bravery of Alha and Udal, Jaimal and Patta of Maharana Udai Singh II), Brahmas worship and festive seasonal songs (such as Teej, Holi and Phaag songs of Phalgun month near Holi). Bravery songs are sung in high pitch.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Desi Haryanvi folk music, is a form of Haryanvi music, based on Raag Bhairvi, Raag Bhairav, Raag Kafi, Raag Jaijaivanti, Raag Jhinjhoti and Raag Pahadi and used for celebrating community bonhomie to sing seasonal songs, ballads, ceremonial songs (wedding, etc.) and related religious legendary tales such as Puran Bhagat. Relationship and songs celebrating love and life are sung in medium pitch. Ceremonial and religious songs are sung in low pitch. Young girls and women usually sing entertaining and fast seasonal, love, relationship and friendship-related songs such as Phagan (song for eponymous season/month), Katak (songs for the eponymous season/month), Samman (songs for the eponymous season/month), bande-bandi (male-female duet songs), sathne (songs of sharing heartfelt feelings among female friends). Older women usually sing devotional Mangal Geet (auspicious songs) and ceremonial songs such as Bhajan, Bhat (wedding gift to the mother of bride or groom by her brother), Sagai, Ban (Hindu wedding ritual where pre-wedding festivities starts), Kuan-Poojan (a custom that is performed to welcome the birth of a child by worshiping the well or source of drinking water), Sanjhi and Holi festival.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Music and dance for Haryanvi people is a way of lessening societal differences as folk singers are highly esteemed and they are sought after and invited for events, ceremonies and special occasions regardless of their caste or status. These inter-caste songs are fluid in nature, and never personalised for any specific caste, and they are sung collectively by women from different strata, castes, and dialects. These songs transform fluidly in dialect, style, words, etc. This adoptive style can be seen in the adoption of tunes of Bollywood movie songs into Haryanvi songs. Despite this continuous fluid transforming nature, Haryanvi songs have a distinct style of their own as explained above.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "With the coming up of a strongly socio-economic metropolitan culture in the emergence of urban Gurgaon Haryana is also witnessing community participation in public arts and city beautification. Several landmarks across Gurgaon are decorated with public murals and graffiti with cultural cohesive ideologies and stand the testimony of a lived sentiment in Haryana folk.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "As per a survey, 13% of males and 7.8% of females of Haryana are non-vegetarian. The regional cuisine features the staples of roti, saag, vegetarian sabzi and milk products such as ghee, milk, lassi and kheer.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Haryanvi people have a concept of inclusive society involving the \"36 Jātis\" or communities. Castes such as Jat, Rajput, Gurjar, Saini, Pasi, Ahirs, Ror, Mev, Charan, Bishnoi, Harijan, Aggarwal, Brahmin, Khatri and Tyagi are some of the notable of these 36 Jātis.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Haryana is a landlocked state in northern India. It is between 27°39' to 30°35' N latitude and between 74°28' and 77°36' E longitude. The total geographical area of the state is 4.42 m ha, which is 1.4% of the geographical area of the country. The altitude of Haryana varies between 700 and 3600 ft (200 metres to 1200 metres) above sea level. Haryana has only 4% (compared with national 21.85%) area under forests. Karoh Peak, a 1,467-metre (4,813 ft) tall mountain peak in the Sivalik Hills range of the greater Himalayas range located near Morni Hills area of Panchkula district, is the highest point in Haryana. Most of the state sits atop the fertile Ghaggar Plain, a subsection of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Haryana has 4 states and 2 union territories on its border – Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, and Chandigarh.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Haryana has four main geographical features.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Yamuna, a tributary of the Ganges, flows along the state's eastern boundary.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Northern Haryana has several northeast to west flowing rivers originating from the Sivalik Hills of Himalayas, such as Ghaggar (palaeochannel of vedic Sarasvati river), Chautang (paleochannel of vedic Drishadvati river, tributary of the Ghagghar), Tangri river (tributary of the Ghagghar), Kaushalya river (tributary of the Ghagghar), Markanda River (tributary of Ghagghar), Sarsuti, Dangri, Somb river. Haryana's main seasonal river, the Ghaggar-Hakra, known as Ghaggar before the Ottu barrage and as the Hakra downstream of the barrage, rises in the outer Himalayas, between the Yamuna and the Satluj and enters the state near Pinjore in the Panchkula district, passes through Ambala and Sirsa, it reaches Bikaner in Rajasthan and runs for 460 km (290 mi) before disappearing into the deserts of Rajasthan. The seasonal Markanda River, known as the Aruna in ancient times, originates from the lower Shivalik Hills and enters Haryana west of Ambala, and swells into a raging torrent during monsoon is notorious for its devastating power, carries its surplus water on to the Sanisa Lake where the Markanda joins the Sarasuti and later the Ghaggar.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Southern Haryana has several south-west to east flowing seasonal rivulets originating from the Aravalli Range in and around the hills in Mewat region, including Sahibi River (called Najafgarh drain in Delhi), Dohan river (tributary of Sahibi, originates at Mandoli village near Neem Ka Thana in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan and then disappears in Mahendragarh district), Krishnavati river (former tributary of Sahibi river, originates near Dariba and disappears in Mahendragarh district much before reaching Sahibi river) and Indori river (longest tributary of Sahibi River, originates in Sikar district of Rajasthan and flows to Rewari district of Haryana), these once were tributaries of the Drishadwati/Saraswati river.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Major canals are Western Yamuna Canal, Sutlej Yamuna link canal (from Sutlej river tributary of Indus), and Indira Gandhi Canal.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Major dams are Kaushalya Dam in Panchkula district, Hathnikund Barrage and Tajewala Barrage on Yamuna in Yamunanagar district, Pathrala barrage on Somb river in Yamunanagar district, ancient Anagpur Dam near Surajkund in Faridabad district, and Ottu barrage on Ghaggar-Hakra River in Sirsa district.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Major lakes are Dighal Wetland, Basai Wetland, Badkhal Lake in Faridabad, holy Brahma Sarovar and Sannihit Sarovar in Kurukshetra, Blue Bird Lake in Hisar, Damdama Lake at Sohna in Gurgram district, Hathni Kund in Yamunanagar district, Karna Lake at Karnal, ancient Surajkund in Faridabad, and Tilyar Lake in Rohtak.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Haryana State Waterbody Management Board is responsible for the rejuvenation of 14,000 johads of Haryana and up to 60 lakes in National Capital Region falling within the Haryana state.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The only hot spring in Haryana is the Sohna Sulphur Hot Spring at Sohna in Gurgaon district. Tosham Hill range has several sacred sulphur ponds of religious significance that are revered for the healing impact of sulphur, such as Pandu Teerth Kund, Surya Kund, Kukkar Kund, Gyarasia Kund or Vyas Kund.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Seasonal waterfalls include Tikkar Taal twin lakes at Morni hiills, Dhosi Hill in Mahendragarh district and Pali village on the outskirts of Faridabad.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Haryana is hot in summer at around 45 °C (113 °F) and mild in winter. The hottest months are May and June and the coldest are December and January. The climate is arid to semi-arid with an average rainfall of 354.5 mm. Around 29% of rainfall is received during the months from July to September as a result of the monsoon, and the remaining rainfall is received during the period from December to February as a result of the western disturbance.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Forest cover in the state in 2013 was 3.59% (1586 km) and the Tree Cover in the state was 2.90% (1282 km), giving a total forest and tree cover of 6.49%. In 2016–17, 18,412 hectares were brought under tree cover by planting 14.1 million seedlings. Thorny, dry, deciduous forest and thorny shrubs can be found all over the state. During the monsoon, a carpet of grass covers the hills. Mulberry, eucalyptus, pine, kikar, shisham and babul are some of the trees found here. The species of fauna found in the state of Haryana include black buck, nilgai, panther, fox, mongoose, jackal and wild dog. More than 450 species of birds are found here.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Haryana has two national parks, eight wildlife sanctuaries, two wildlife conservation areas, four animal and bird breeding centers, one deer park and three zoos, all of which are managed by the Haryana Forest Department of the Government of Haryana. Sultanpur National Park is a notable Park located in Gurgaon District",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Haryana Environment Protection Council is the advisory committee and the Department of Environment, Haryana is the department responsible for the administration of the environment. Areas of Haryana surrounding Delhi NCR are the most polluted. During the smog of November 2017, the air quality index of Gurgaon and Faridabad showed that the density of fine particulates (2.5 μm diameter) was an average a score of 400 and the monthly average of Haryana was 60. Other sources of pollution are exhaust gases from old vehicles, stone crushers and brick kilns. Haryana has 7.5 million vehicles, of which 40% are old, more polluting vehicles, and 500,000 new vehicles are added every year. Other majorly polluted cities are Bhiwani, Bahadurgarh, Dharuhera, Hisar and Yamunanagar.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The state is divided into 6 revenue divisions, 5 Police Ranges and 3 Police Commissionerates (c. January 2017). Six revenue divisions are: Ambala, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Hisar, Karnal and Faridabad. Haryana has 11 municipal corporations (Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ambala, Panchkula, Yamunanagar, Rohtak, Hisar, Panipat, Karnal, Sonepat, and Manesar), 18 municipal councils and 52 municipalities.",
"title": "Administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Within these, there are 22 districts, 72 sub-divisions, 93 tehsils, 50 sub-tehsils, 140 blocks, 154 cities and towns, 6,848 villages, 6,226 villages panchayats and numerous smaller dhanis.",
"title": "Administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Haryana Police force is the law enforcement agency of Haryana. Five Police Ranges are Ambala, Hissar, Karnal, Rewari and Rohtak. Three Police Commissionerates are Faridabad, Gurgaon and Panchkula. Cybercrime investigation cell is based in Gurgaon's Sector 51.",
"title": "Administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The highest judicial authority in the state is the Punjab and Haryana High Court, with the next higher right of appeal being to the Supreme Court of India. Haryana uses an e-filing facility.",
"title": "Administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The Common Service Centres (CSCs) have been upgraded in all districts to offer hundreds of e-services to citizens, including applications for new water and sanitation connections, electricity bill collection, ration card member registration, the result of HBSE, admit cards for board examinations, online admission forms for government colleges, long route booking of buses, admission forms for Kurukshetra University and HUDA plots status inquiry. Haryana has become the first state to implement Aadhaar-enabled birth registration in all the districts. Thousands of all traditional offline state and central government services are also available 24/7 online through single unified UMANG app and portal as part of Digital India initiative.",
"title": "Administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Haryana's 14th placed 12.96% 2012-17 CAGR estimated a 2017-18 GSDP of US$95 billion split into 52% services, 30% industries and 18% agriculture.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The services sector is split across 45% in real estate and financial and professional services, 26% trade and hospitality, 15% state and central government employees, and 14% transport and logistics & warehousing. In IT services, Gurgaon ranks first in India in growth rate and existing technology infrastructure, and second in startup ecosystem, innovation and livability (Nov 2016).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The industrial sector is split across 69% manufacturing, 28% construction, 2% utilities and 1% mining. In industrial manufacturing, Haryana produces 67% of passenger cars, 60% of motorcycles, 50% of tractors and 50% of the refrigerators in India.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The service and industrial sectors are boosted by 7 operational SEZs and an additional 23 formally approved SEZs (20 already notified and 3 approved in-principle) that are mostly spread along the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Amritsar Delhi Kolkata Industrial Corridor and Western Peripheral Expressway.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The agricultural sector is split across 93% crops and livestock, 4% commercial forestry and logging, and 2% fisheries. Although Haryana has less than 1.4% of the total area of India, it contributes 15% of food grains to the central food security public distribution system, and makes up 7% of total national agricultural exports, including 60% of total national basmati rice exports.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Haryana is traditionally an agrarian society of zamindars (owner-cultivator farmers). About 70% of Haryana's residents are engaged in agriculture. The Green Revolution in Haryana of the 1960s combined with the completion of Bhakra Dam in 1963 and Western Yamuna Command Network canal system in 1970s resulted in the significantly increased food grain production. As a result, Haryana is self sufficient in food production and the second largest contributor to India's central pool of food grains In 2015–2016, Haryana produced the following principal crops: 13,352,000 tonnes of wheat, 4,145,000 tonnes of rice, 7,169,000 tonnes of sugarcane, 993,000 tonnes of cotton and 855,000 tonnes of oilseeds (mustard seed, sunflower, etc.).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Vegetable production was: potato 853,806 tonnes, onion 705,795 tonnes, tomato 675,384 tonnes, cauliflower 578,953 tonnes, leafy vegetables 370,646 tonnes, brinjal 331,169 tonnes, guard 307,793 tonnes, peas 111,081 tonnes and others 269,993 tonnes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Fruits production was: citrus 301,764 tonnes, guava 152,184 tonnes, mango 89,965 tonnes, chikoo 16,022 tonnes, aonla 12,056 tonnes and other fruits 25,848 tonnes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Spices production was: garlic 40,497 tonnes, fenugreek 9,348 tonnes, ginger 4,304 tonnes and others 840 tonnes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Cut flowers production was: marigold 61,830 tonnes, gladiolus 2,448,620 million, rose 1,861,160 million and other 691,300 million.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Medicinal plants production was: aloe vera 1403 tonnes and stevia 13 tonnes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Haryana is well known for its high-yield Murrah buffalo. Other breeds of cattle native to Haryana are Haryanvi, Mewati, Sahiwal and Nili-Ravi.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "To support its agrarian economy, both the central government (Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes, Central Sheep Breeding Farm, National Research Centre on Equines, Central Institute of Fisheries, National Dairy Research Institute, Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research and National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources) and the state government (CCS HAU, LUVAS, Government Livestock Farm, Regional Fodder Station and Northern Region Farm Machinery Training and Testing Institute) have opened several institutes for research and education.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Haryana State has always given high priority to the expansion of electricity infrastructure, as it is one of the most important drivers of development for the state. Haryana was the first state in the country to achieve 100% rural electrification in 1970 as well as the first in the country to link all villages with all-weather roads and provide safe drinking water facilities throughout the state.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Sources of power in the state include:",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Haryana has a total road length of 26,062 kilometres (16,194 mi), including 2,482 kilometres (1,542 mi) comprising 29 national highways, 1,801 kilometres (1,119 mi) of state highways, 1,395 kilometres (867 mi) of Major District Roads (MDR) and 20,344 kilometres (12,641 mi) of Other District Roads (ODR) (c. December 2017). A fleet of 3,864 Haryana Roadways buses covers a distance of 1.15 million km per day, and it was the first state in the country to introduce luxury video coaches.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Ancient Delhi Multan Road and Grand Trunk Road, South Asia's oldest and longest major roads, pass through Haryana. GT Road passes through the districts of Sonipat, Panipat, Karnal, Kurukshetra and Ambala in north Haryana where it enters Delhi and subsequently the industrial town of Faridabad on its way. The 135.6 kilometres (84.3 mi) Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway (KMP) will provide a high-speed link to northern Haryana with its southern districts such as Sonipat, Gurgaon, and Faridabad.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Delhi-Agra Expressway (NH-2) that passes through Faridabad is being widened to six lanes from the current four lanes. It will further boost Faridabad's connectivity with Delhi.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The rail network in Haryana is covered by five rail divisions under three rail zones. Diamond Quadrilateral High-speed rail network, Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (72 km) and Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (177 km) pass through Haryana.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Bikaner railway division of the North Western Railway zone manages the rail network in western and southern Haryana covering Bhatinda-Dabwali-Hanumangarh line, Rewari-Bhiwani-Hisar-Bathinda line, Hisar-Sadulpur line and Rewari-Loharu-Sadulpur line. Jaipur railway division of North Western Railway zone manages the rail network in south-west Haryana covering Rewari-Reengas-Jaipur line, Delhi-Alwar-Jaipur line and Loharu-Sikar line.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The Delhi railway division of the Northern Railway zone manages the rail network in north and east-central Haryana, covering Delhi-Panipat-Ambala line, Delhi-Rohtak-Tohana line, Rewari–Rohtak line, Jind-Sonepat line and Delhi-Rewari line. Agra railway division of North Central Railway zone manages another very small part of the network in southeast Haryana covering only the Palwal-Mathura line.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Ambala railway division of Northern Railway zone manages a small part of the rail network in north-east Haryana covering Ambala-Yamunanagar line, Ambala-Kurukshetra line and UNESCO World Heritage Kalka–Shimla Railway.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Delhi Metro connects the national capital Delhi with the NCR cities of Faridabad, Gurgaon and Bahadurgarh. Faridabad has the longest metro network in the NCR Region consisting of 11 stations and a track length of 17 km.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Haryana and Delhi governments have constructed the 4.5-kilometre (2.8 mi) international standard Delhi Faridabad Skyway, the first of its kind in North India, to connect Delhi and Faridabad.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Haryana has a statewide network of telecommunication facilities. Haryana Government has its own statewide area network by which all government offices of 22 districts and 126 blocks across the state are connected with each other, thus making it the first SWAN of the country. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited and most of the leading private sector players (such as Reliance Infocom, Tata Teleservices, Bharti Telecom, Idea Vodafone Essar, Aircel, Uninor and Videocon) have operations in the state. The two biggest cities of Haryana, Faridabad and Gurgaon, which are part of the National Capital Region, come under the local Delhi Mobile Telecommunication System. The rest of the cities of Haryana come under Haryana Telecommunication System.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Electronic media channels include MTV, 9XM, Star Group, SET Max, News Time, NDTV 24x7 and Zee Group. The radio stations include All India Radio and other FM stations.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Panipat, Hisar, Ambala and Rohtak are the cities in which the leading newspapers of Haryana are printed and circulated throughout Haryana, in which Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Punjab Kesari, The Tribune, Aaj Samaj, Hari Bhoomi and Amar Ujala are prominent.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The total fertility rate of Haryana is 2.3. The infant mortality rate is 41 (SRS 2012) and the maternal mortality ratio is 146 (SRS 2010–2012). The state of Haryana has various Medical Colleges including Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences Rohtak, Bhagat Phool Singh Medical College in District Sonipat, ESIC Medical College, Faridabad along with notable private medical institutes like Medanta, Max Hospital, Fortis Healthcare",
"title": "Healthcare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The literacy rate in Haryana has seen an upward trend and is 76.64 per cent as per the 2011 population census. Male literacy stands at 85.38%, while female literacy is at 66.67%. In 2001, the literacy rate in Haryana stood at 67.91%, of which males and females were 78.49% and 55.73% literate respectively. As of 2013, Gurgaon city had the highest literacy rate in Haryana at 86.30% followed by Panchkula at 81.9% and Ambala at 81.7%. In terms of districts, as of 2012, Rewari had the highest literacy rate in Haryana at 74%, higher than the national average of 59.5%; male literacy was 79% and female literacy was 67%.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Haryana Board of School Education, established in September 1969 and shifted to Bhiwani in 1981, conducts public examinations at middle, matriculation, and senior secondary levels twice a year. Over 700,000 candidates attend annual examinations in February and March; 150,000 attend supplementary examinations each November. The Board also conducts examinations for Haryana Open School at senior and senior secondary levels twice a year. The Haryana government provides free education to women up to the bachelor's degree level.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In 2015–2016, there were nearly 20,000 schools, including 10,100 state government schools (36 Aarohi Schools, 11 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, 21 Model Sanskriti Schools, 8,744 government primary school, 3386 government middle school, 1,284 government high school and 1,967 government senior secondary schools), 7,635 private schools (200 aided, 6,612 recognised unaided, and 821 unrecognised unaided private schools) and several hundred other central government and private schools such as Kendriya Vidyalaya, Indian Army Public Schools, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya and DAV schools affiliated to central government's CBSE and ICSE school boards.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Haryana has 48 universities and 1,038 colleges, including 115 government colleges, 88 government-aided colleges and 96 self-finance colleges. Hisar has three universities: Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University – Asia's largest agricultural university, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Lala Lajpat Rai University of Veterinary & Animal Sciences); several national agricultural and veterinary research centres (National Research Centre on Equines), Central Sheep Breeding Farm, National Institute on Pig Breeding and Research, Northern Region Farm Machinery Training and Testing Institute and Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes (CIRB); and more than 20 colleges including Maharaja Agrasen Medical College, Agroha.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Demographically, Haryana has 471,000 women and 457,000 men pursuing post-secondary school higher education. There are more than 18,616 female teachers and 17,061 male teachers in higher education.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced on 27 February 2016 that the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT) would be set up in Kurukshetra to provide computer training to youth and a Software Technology Park of India (STPI) would be set up in Panchkula's existing HSIIDC IT Park in Sector 23. Hindi and English are compulsory languages in schools whereas Punjabi, Sanskrit and Urdu are chosen as optional languages.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In the 2010 Commonwealth Games at Delhi, 22 out of 38 gold medals that India won came from Haryana. During the 33rd National Games held in Assam in 2007, Haryana stood first in the nation with a medal tally of 80, including 30 gold, 22 silver and 28 bronze medals.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The 1983 World Cup winning captain Kapil Dev made his domestic-cricket debut playing for Haryana. Nahar Singh Stadium was built in Faridabad in the year 1981 for international cricket. This ground has the capacity to hold around 25,000 people as spectators. Tejli Sports Complex is an ultra-modern sports complex in Yamuna Nagar. Tau Devi Lal Stadium in Gurgaon is a multi-sport complex.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Chief Minister of Haryana Manohar Lal Khattar announced the \"Haryana Sports and Physical Fitness Policy\", a policy to support 26 Olympic sports, on 12 January 2015 with the words \"We will develop Haryana as the sports hub of the country.\"",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Haryana is home to Haryana Gold, one of India's eight professional basketball teams that compete in the country's UBA Pro Basketball League.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "At the 2016 Summer Olympics, Sakshi Malik won the bronze medal in the 58 kg category, becoming the first Indian female wrestler to win a medal at the Olympics and the fourth female Olympic medalist from the country.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Notable badminton player Saina Nehwal is from Hisar in Haryana.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Notable athlete Neeraj Chopra, who competes in Javelin Throw and won the first track and field gold medal in 2020 Tokyo Olympics for India, was born and raised in Panipat, Haryana. Wrestling is also very prominent in Haryana, as 2 medals won in wrestling at 2020 Tokyo Olympics were from Haryana.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Notable athlete Ravi Dahiya, who was born in Nahri village of Sonipat District, won silver medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for India.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Ravi Kumar is an Indian freestyle wrestler who won a silver medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the 57 kg category. Dahiya is also a bronze medalist from 2019 World Wrestling Championships and a two-time Asian champion.",
"title": "Sports"
}
]
| Haryana is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 November 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% of India's land area. The state capital is Chandigarh, which it shares with the neighbouring state of Punjab; and the most populous city is Faridabad, which is a part of the National Capital Region. The city of Gurgaon is among India's largest financial and technology hubs. Haryana has 6 administrative divisions, 22 districts, 72 sub-divisions, 93 revenue tehsils, 50 sub-tehsils, 140 community development blocks, 154 cities and towns, 7,356 villages, and 6,222 villages panchayats. Haryana contains 32 special economic zones (SEZs), mainly located within the industrial corridor projects connecting the National Capital Region. Gurgaon is considered one of the major information technology and automobile hubs of India. Haryana ranks 11th among Indian states in human development index. The economy of Haryana is the 13th largest in India, with a gross state domestic product (GSDP) of ₹7.65 trillion (US$96 billion) and has the country's 5th-highest GSDP per capita of ₹240,000 (US$3,000). The state is rich in history, monuments, heritage, flora and fauna and tourism, with a well-developed economy, national highways and state roads. It is bordered by Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to the north, by Rajasthan to the west and south, while river Yamuna forms its eastern border with Uttar Pradesh. Haryana surrounds the country's capital territory of Delhi on three sides, consequently, a large area of Haryana state is included in the economically important National Capital Region of India for the purposes of planning and development. | 2001-11-24T16:40:45Z | 2023-11-02T14:02:41Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haryana |
14,190 | Himachal Pradesh | Himachal Pradesh (/hɪˌmɑːtʃəl prəˈdɛʃ/; Hindi: [ɦɪˈmäːtʃəl pɾəˈd̪eːʃ] ; lit. "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterised by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks and extensive river systems. Himachal Pradesh is the northernmost state of India and shares borders with the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh to the north, and the states of Punjab to the west, Haryana to the southwest, Uttarakhand to the southeast and a very narrow border with Uttar Pradesh to the south. The state also shares an international border to the east with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Himachal Pradesh is also known as Dev Bhoomi or Dev Bhumi, meaning 'Land of Gods' and Veer Bhoomi which means 'Land of the Brave'.
The predominantly mountainous region comprising the present-day Himachal Pradesh has been inhabited since pre-historic times, having witnessed multiple waves of human migrations from other areas. Through its history, the region was mostly ruled by local kingdoms, some of which accepted the suzerainty of larger empires. Prior to India's independence from the British, Himachal comprised the hilly regions of the Punjab Province of British India. After independence, many of the hilly territories were organised as the Chief Commissioner's province of Himachal Pradesh, which later became a Union Territory. In 1966, hilly areas of the neighbouring Punjab state were merged into Himachal and it was ultimately granted full statehood in 1971.
Himachal Pradesh is spread across valleys with many perennial rivers flowing through them. Agriculture, horticulture, hydropower, and tourism are important constituents of the state's economy. The hilly state is almost universally electrified, with 99.5% of households having electricity as of 2016. The state was declared India's second open-defecation-free state in 2016. According to a survey of CMS-India Corruption Study in 2017, Himachal Pradesh is India's least corrupt state.
Himachal Pradesh is divided into 12 districts.
The name of the state is a reference to its setting: Himachal means “snowy slopes” (Sanskrit: hima, meaning “snow”; acal/achal meaning "slopes", or "land", or "abode"). Himachal Pradesh (ɦɪˈmaːtʃəl pɾəˈdeːʃ; literally "snow-laden province"). Himachal refers to being in the "aanchal" of the Himalayas hence, sheltered by the Himalayas or by the snow. It means "the land in the lap of snowy Himalayas". Pradesh means "state". Himachal was named by Diwakar Datt Sharma, a Sanskrit scholar.
Tribes such as the Koli, Hali, Dagi, Dhaugri, Dasa, Khasa, Kanaura, and Kirata inhabited the region from the prehistoric era. The foothills of the modern state of Himachal Pradesh were inhabited by people from the Indus valley civilisation, which flourished between 2250 and 1750 BCE. The Kols and Mundas are believed to be the original inhabitants to the hills of present-day Himachal Pradesh, followed by the Bhotas and Kiratas.
During the Vedic period, several small republics known as Janapada existed which were later conquered by the Gupta Empire. After a brief period of supremacy by King Harshavardhana, the region was divided into several local powers headed by chieftains, including some Rajputs principalities. These kingdoms enjoyed a large degree of independence and were invaded by Delhi Sultanate several times. Mahmud Ghaznavi conquered Kangra at the beginning of the 11th century. Timur and Sikander Lodi also marched through the lower hills of the state, captured several forts, and fought many battles. Several hill states acknowledged Mughal suzerainty and paid regular tribute to the Mughals.
The Kingdom of Gorkha conquered many kingdoms and came to power in Nepal in 1768. They consolidated their military power and began to expand their territory. Gradually, the Kingdom of Nepal annexed Sirmour and Shimla. Under the leadership of Amar Singh Thapa, the Nepali army laid siege to Kangra. They managed to defeat Sansar Chand Katoch, the ruler of Kangra, in 1806 with the help of many provincial chiefs. However, the Nepali army could not capture Kangra fort which came under Maharaja Ranjeet Singh in 1809. After the defeat, they expanded towards the south of the state. However, Raja Ram Singh, Raja of Siba State, captured the fort of Siba from the remnants of Lahore Darbar in Samvat 1846, during the First Anglo-Sikh War.
They came into direct conflict with the British along the tarai belt, after which the British expelled them from the provinces of the Satluj. The British gradually emerged as the paramount power in the region. In the revolt of 1857, or first Indian war of independence, arising from several grievances against the British, the people of the hill states were not as politically active as were those in other parts of the country. They and their rulers, except Bushahr, remained more or less inactive. Some, including the rulers of Chamba, Bilaspur, Bhagal and Dhami, rendered help to the British government during the revolt.
The British territories came under the British Crown after Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858. The states of Chamba, Mandi and Bilaspur made good progress in many fields during the British rule. During World War I, virtually all rulers of the hill states remained loyal and contributed to the British war effort, both in the form of men and materials. Among these were the states of Kangra, Jaswan, Datarpur, Guler, Rajgarh, Nurpur, Chamba, Suket, Mandi, and Bilaspur.
After independence, the Chief Commissioner's Province of Himachal Pradesh was organised on 15 April 1948 as a result of the integration of 30 petty princely states (including feudal princes and zaildars) in the promontories of the western Himalayas. These were known as the Simla Hills States and four Punjab southern hill states under the Himachal Pradesh (Administration) Order, 1948 under Sections 3 and 4 of the Extra-Provincial Jurisdiction Act, 1947 (later renamed as the Foreign Jurisdiction Act, 1947 vide A.O. of 1950). The State of Bilaspur was merged into Himachal Pradesh on 1 July 1954 by the Himachal Pradesh and Bilaspur (New State) Act, 1954.
Himachal became a Part 'C' state on 26 January 1950 when the Constitution of India came into effect and the Lieutenant Governor was appointed. The Legislative Assembly was elected in 1952. Himachal Pradesh became a union territory on 1 November 1956. Some areas of the Punjab State, namely, Simla, Kangra, Kullu and Lahul and Spiti Districts, Lohara, Amb and Una Kanungo circles, some areas of Santokhgarh Kanungo circle and some other specified area of Una Tehsil of Hoshiarpur District, as well as Kandaghat and Nalagarh Tehsils of erstwhile PEPSU State, besides some parts of Dhar Kalan Kanungo circle of Pathankot District—were merged with Himachal Pradesh on 1 November 1966 on the enactment by Parliament of the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966. On 18 December 1970, the State of Himachal Pradesh Act was passed by Parliament, and the new state came into being on 25 January 1971. Himachal became the 18th state of the Indian Union with Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar as its first chief minister.
Himachal is in the western Himalayas situated between 30°22′N and 33°12′N latitude and 75°47′E and 79°04′E longitude. Covering an area of 55,673 square kilometres (21,495 sq mi), it is a mountainous state. The Zanskar range runs in the northeastern part of the state and the great Himalayan range run through the eastern and northern parts, while the Dhauladhar and the Pir Panjal ranges of the lesser Himalayas, and their valleys, form much of the core regions. The outer Himalayas, or the Shiwalik range, form southern and western Himachal Pradesh. At 6,816 m, Reo Purgyil is the highest mountain peak in the state of Himachal Pradesh.
The drainage system of Himachal is composed both of rivers and glaciers. Himalayan rivers criss-cross the entire mountain chain. Himachal Pradesh provides water to both the Indus and Ganges basins. The drainage systems of the region are the Chandra Bhaga or the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, the Sutlej, and the Yamuna. These rivers are perennial and are fed by snow and rainfall. They are protected by an extensive cover of natural vegetation. Four of the five Punjab rivers flow through Himachal Pradesh, three of them originating in the state. These rivers run through a maze of valleys separated by the mountain ranges of the state. The Satluj Valley is formed by the Satluj river entering the state near Shipki La, while the Spiti and Baspa Valleys are formed by the river's two major tributaries in the state. The Beas river flows though the Kullu and the Kangra Valleys, with tributary Parvati forming the Parvati Valley. The Chenab river, formed by the confluence of the Chandra and Bhaga, forms much of the northern regions of Lahaul and Pangi, and the Ravi river flows principally through Chamba. The Pabbar and Giri rivers in the southeast are part of the Yamuna basin.
Due to extreme variation in elevation, great variation occurs in the climatic conditions of Himachal Pradesh. The climate varies from hot and humid subtropical in the southern tracts to, with more elevation, cold, alpine, and glacial in the northern and eastern mountain ranges. The state's winter capital, Dharamsala receives very heavy rainfall, while areas like Lahaul and Spiti are cold and almost rainless. Broadly, Himachal experiences three seasons: summer, winter, and rainy season. Summer lasts from mid-April until the end of June and most parts become very hot (except in the alpine zone which experiences a mild summer) with the average temperature ranging from 28 to 32 °C (82 to 90 °F). Winter lasts from late November until mid-March. Snowfall is common in alpine tracts. Pollution is affecting the climate of almost all the states of India. Due to steps taken by governments to prevent pollution, Himachal Pradesh has become the first smoke-free state in India which means cooking in the entire state is free of traditional chulhas.
Himachal Pradesh is one of the states that lies in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), one of the richest reservoirs of biological diversity in the world. As of 2002, the IHR is undergoing large scale irrational extraction of wild, medicinal herbs, thus endangering many of its high-value gene stock. To address this, a workshop on ‘Endangered Medicinal Plant Species in Himachal Pradesh’ was held in 2002 and the conference was attended by forty experts from diverse disciplines.
According to 2003 Forest Survey of India report, legally defined forest areas constitute 66.52% of the area of Himachal Pradesh. Vegetation in the state is dictated by elevation and precipitation. The state is endowed with a high diversity of medicinal and aromatic plants. Lahaul-Spiti region of the state, being a cold desert, supports unique plants of medicinal value including Ferula jaeschkeana, Hyoscyamus niger, Lancea tibetica, and Saussurea bracteata.
Himachal is also said to be the fruit bowl of the country, with widespread orchards. Meadows and pastures are also seen clinging to steep slopes. After the winter season, the hillsides and orchards bloom with wild flowers, white gladiolas, carnations, marigolds, roses, chrysanthemums, tulips and lilies are carefully cultivated. Himachal Pradesh Horticultural Produce Marketing and Processing Corporation Ltd. (HPMC) is a state body that markets fresh and processed fruits.
Himachal Pradesh has around 463 bird, and Tragopan melanocephalus is the state bird of Himanchal Pradesh 77 mammalian, 44 reptile and 80 fish species.Himachal Pradesh has currently five National Parks. Great Himalayan National Park, oldest and largest National park in the state, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Pin Valley National Park, Inderkilla, Khirganga and Simbalbara are the other national Parks located in the state. The state also has 30 wildlife sanctuaries and 3 conservation reserves. The state bird of Himachal Pradesh is the Western tragopan, locally known as the jujurana. It is one of the rarest living pheasants in the world. The state animal is the snow leopard, which is even rarer to find than the jujurana.
The Legislative Assembly of Himachal Pradesh has no pre-constitution history. The State itself is a post-independence creation. It came into being as a centrally administered territory on 15 April 1948 from the integration of thirty erstwhile princely states.
Himachal Pradesh is governed through a parliamentary system of representative democracy, a feature the state shares with other Indian states. Universal suffrage is granted to residents. The legislature consists of elected members and special office bearers such as the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker who are elected by the members. Assembly meetings are presided over by the Speaker or the Deputy Speaker in the Speaker's absence. The judiciary is composed of the Himachal Pradesh High Court and a system of lower courts.
Executive authority is vested in the Council of Ministers headed by the Chief Minister, although the titular head of government is the Governor. The governor is the head of state appointed by the President of India. The leader of the party or coalition with a majority in the Legislative Assembly is appointed as the Chief Minister by the governor, and the Council of Ministers are appointed by the governor on the advice of the Chief Minister. The Council of Ministers reports to the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly is unicameral with 68 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). Terms of office run for five years, unless the Assembly is dissolved prior to the completion of the term. Auxiliary authorities known as panchayats, for which local body elections are regularly held, govern local affairs.
In the assembly elections held in November 2022, the Indian National Congress secured an absolute majority, winning 40 of the 68 seats while the BJP won only 25 of the 68 seats. Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu was sworn in as Himachal Pradesh's 15th Chief Minister in Shimla on 11 December 2022. Mukesh Agnihotri was sworn in as his deputy the same day.
The state of Himachal Pradesh is divided into 12 districts which are grouped into three divisions, Shimla, Kangra and Mandi. The districts are further divided into 73 subdivisions, 78 blocks and 172 Tehsils.
Planning in Himachal Pradesh started in 1951 along with the rest of India with the implementation of the first five-year plan. The First Plan allocated ₹52.7 million to Himachal Pradesh. More than 50% of this expenditure was incurred on transport and communication; while the power sector got a share of just 4.6%, though it had steadily increased to 7% by the Third Plan. Expenditure on agriculture and allied activities increased from 14.4% in the First Plan to 32% in the Third Plan, showing a progressive decline afterwards from 24% in the Fourth Plan to less than 10% in the Tenth Plan. Expenditure on energy sector was 24.2% of the total in the Tenth Plan.
The total GDP for 2005–06 was estimated at ₹254 billion as against ₹230 billion in the year 2004–05, showing an increase of 10.5%. The GDP for fiscal 2015–16 was estimated at ₹1.110 trillion, which increased to ₹1.247 trillion in 2016–17, recording growth of 6.8%. The per capita income increased from ₹130,067 in 2015–16 to ₹147,277 in 2016–17. The state government's advance estimates for fiscal 2017–18 stated the total GDP and per capita income as ₹1.359 trillion and ₹158,462, respectively. As of 2018, Himachal is the 22nd-largest state economy in India with ₹1.52 lakh crore (US$19 billion) in gross domestic product and has the 13th-highest per capita income (₹160,000 (US$2,000)) among the states and union territories of India.
Himachal Pradesh also ranks as the second-best performing state in the country on human development indicators after Kerala. One of the Indian government's key initiatives to tackle unemployment is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The participation of women in the NREGA has been observed to vary across different regions of the nation. As of the year 2009–2010, Himachal Pradesh joined the category of high female participation, recording a 46% share of NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) workdays for women. This was a drastic increase from the 13% that was recorded in 2006–2007.
Agriculture accounts for 9.4% of the net state domestic product. It is the main source of income and employment in Himachal. About 90% of the population in Himachal depends directly upon agriculture, which provides direct employment to 62% of total workers of state. The main cereals grown include wheat, maize, rice and barley with major cropping systems being maize-wheat, rice-wheat and maize-potato-wheat. Pulses, fruits, vegetables and oilseeds are among the other crops grown in the state. Centuries-old traditional Kuhl irrigation system is prevalent in the Kangra valley, though in recent years these Kuhls have come under threat from hydroprojects on small streams in the valley. Land husbandry initiatives such as the Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project, which includes the Himachal Pradesh Reforestation Project (HPRP), the world's largest clean development mechanism (CDM) undertaking, have improved agricultural yields and productivity, and raised rural household incomes.
Apple is the principal cash crop of the state grown principally in the districts of Shimla, Kinnaur, Kullu, Mandi, Chamba and some parts of Sirmaur and Lahaul-Spiti with an average annual production of five lakh tonnes and per hectare production of 8 to 10 tonnes. The apple cultivation constitute 49 per cent of the total area under fruit crops and 85% of total fruit production in the state with an estimated economy of ₹3500 crore. Apples from Himachal are exported to other Indian states and even other countries. In 2011–12, the total area under apple cultivation was 104,000 hectares, increased from 90,347 hectares in 2000–01. According to the provisional estimates of Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, the annual apple production in Himachal for fiscal 2015–16 stood at 753,000 tonnes, making it India's second-largest apple-producing state after Jammu and Kashmir. The state is also among the leading producers of other fruits such as apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums and strawberries in India.
Kangra tea is grown in the Kangra valley. Tea plantation began in 1849, and production peaked in the late 19th century with the tea becoming popular across the globe. Production dipped sharply after the 1905 Kangra earthquake and continues to decline. The tea received geographical indication status in 2005.
Hydropower is one of the major sources of income generation for the state. The state has an abundance of hydropower resources because of the presence of various perennial rivers. Many high-capacity hydropower plants have been constructed which produce surplus electricity that is sold to other states, such as Delhi, Punjab and West Bengal. The income generated from exporting the electricity to other states is being provided as subsidy to the consumers in the state. The rich hydropower resources of Himachal have resulted in the state becoming almost universally electrified with around 94.8% houses receiving electricity as of 2001, as compared to the national average of 55.9%. Himachal's hydro-electric power production is, however, yet to be fully utilised. The identified hydroelectric potential for the state is 27,436 MW in five river basins while the hydroelectric capacity in 2016 was 10,351 MW.
Tourism in Himachal Pradesh is a major contributor to the state's economy and growth. The Himalayas attracts tourists from all over the world. Hill stations like Shimla, Manali, Dharamshala, Dalhousie, Chamba, Khajjiar, Kullu and Kasauli are popular destinations for both domestic and foreign tourists. The state also has many important Hindu pilgrimage sites with prominent temples like Shri Chamunda Devi Mandir, Naina Devi Temple, Bajreshwari Mata Temple, Jwala Ji Temple, Chintpurni, Baijnath Temple, Bhimakali Temple, Bijli Mahadev and Jakhoo Temple. Manimahesh Lake situated in the Bharmour region of Chamba district is the venue of an annual Hindu pilgrimage trek held in the month of August which attracts lakhs of devotees. The state is also referred to as "Dev Bhoomi" (literally meaning Abode of Gods) due to its mention as such in ancient Hindu texts and occurrence of a large number of historical temples in the state.
Himachal is also known for its adventure tourism activities like ice skating in Shimla, paragliding in Bir Billing and Solang Valley, rafting in Kullu, skiing in Manali, boating in Bilaspur, fishing in Tirthan Valley, trekking and horse riding in different parts of the state. Shimla, the state's capital, is home to Asia's only natural ice-skating rink. Spiti Valley in Lahaul and Spiti District situated at an altitude of over 3000 metres with its picturesque landscapes is popular destination for adventure seekers. The region also has some of the oldest Buddhist monasteries in the world. Himachal hosted the first Paragliding World Cup in India from 24 to 31 October in 2015. The venue for the paragliding world cup was Bir Billing, which is 70 km from the tourist town Macleod Ganj, located in the heart of Himachal in Kangra District. Bir Billing is the centre for aero sports in Himachal and considered as best for paragliding. Buddhist monasteries, trekking to tribal villages and mountain biking are other local possibilities.
There are a variety of festivals celebrated by the locals of Himachal Pradesh who worship gods and goddesses. There are over 2000 villages in Himachal Pradesh which celebrate festivals such as Kullu Dussehra, Chamba’s Minjar, Renuka ji Fair, Lohri, Halda, Phagli, Losar and Mandi Shivratri. There approximately 6000 temples in Himachal Pradesh with a known one being Bijli Mahadev. The temple is seen as a 20-meter structure built in stone which, according to locals, is known to attract lighting. They say that this is a way the Gods show their blessings.
The Great Himalayan National Park is found in the Kullu districts of Himachal Pradesh. It has an area of 620 km and ranging from an altitude of 1500 meters to 4500 meters and was created in 1984. There are various forest types found here such as Deodar, Himalayan Fir, Spruce, Oak and Alpine pastures. In the Great Himalayan National Park, there are a variety of animals found such as Snow leopard, Yak, Himalayan black bear, Western tragopan, Monal and Musk deer. This National Park is a trail to many hikers and trekkers too. Moreover, there are sanctuaries which are tourist spots such as Naina Devi and Gobind Sagar Sanctuary in the Una and Bilaspur districts with an area of 220 km. There are animals such as Indian porcupine and giant flying squirrel found here. The Gobind Sagar Lake has fish species such as Mrigal, Silver carp, Katla, Mahaseer and Rohu are found here. Narkanda located in at an altitude of around 8850 feet is known for its apple orchards. It is located between the river valleys of Giri and Sutlej.
Himachal has three domestic airports in Kangra, Kullu and Shimla districts, respectively. The air routes connect the state with New Delhi and Chandigarh.
The only broad-gauge railway line in the whole state connects Amb Andaura–Una Himachal railway station to Nangal Dam in Punjab and runs all the way to Daulatpur, Himachal Pradesh. It is an electrified track since 1999. While a tiny portion of line adjacent to Kandrori(KNDI) station on either side on Pathankot-Jalandhar Section, under Ferozepur Division of Northern Railway also crosses into Himachal Pradesh, before venturing out to Punjab again.
Future constructions:
Himachal is known for its narrow-gauge railways. One is the Kalka-Shimla Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and another is the Kangra Valley Railway. The total length of these two tracks is 259 kilometres (161 mi). The Kalka-Shimla Railway passes through many tunnels and bridges, while the Pathankot–Jogindernagar one meanders through a maze of hills and valleys. The total route length of the operational railway network in the state is 296.26 kilometres (184.09 mi).
Roads are the major mode of transport in Himachal Pradesh due to its hilly terrain. The state has road network of 28,208 kilometres (17,528 mi), including eight National Highways (NH) that constitute 1,234 kilometres (767 mi) and 19 State Highways with a total length of 1,625 kilometres (1,010 mi). Hamirpur district has the highest road density in the country. Some roads are closed during winter and monsoon seasons due to snow and landslides. The state-owned Himachal Road Transport Corporation with a fleet of over 3,100, operates bus services connecting important cities and towns with villages within the state and also on various interstate routes. In addition, around 5,000 private buses ply in the state.
Himachal Pradesh has a total population of 6,864,602 including 3,481,873 males and 3,382,729 females according to the Census of India 2011. It has only 0.57 per cent of India's total population, recording a growth of 12.81 per cent. The child sex ratio increased from 896 in 2001 to 909 in 2011. The total fertility rate (TFR) per woman in 2015 stood at 1.7, one of the lowest in India.
The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes account for 25.19 per cent and 5.71 per cent of the population, respectively. The sex ratio stood at 972 females per 1,000 males, recording a marginal increase from 968 in 2001. The main caste groups in Himachal Pradesh are Rajputs, Brahmins, Kanets, Kulindas, Girths, Raos, Rathis, Thakurs, Kolis, Hollis, Chamars, Drains, Rehars, Chanals, Lohars, Baris, Julahas, Dhakhis, Turis, BatwalsThe Koli forms the largest caste-cluster, comprising 30% of the total population of Himachal Pradesh.
In the census, the state is placed 21st on the population chart, followed by Tripura at 22nd place. Kangra District was top-ranked with a population strength of 1,507,223 (21.98%), Mandi District 999,518 (14.58%), Shimla District 813,384 (11.86%), Solan District 576,670 (8.41%), Sirmaur District 530,164 (7.73%), Una District 521,057 (7.60%), Chamba District 518,844 (7.57%), Hamirpur district 454,293 (6.63%), Kullu District 437,474 (6.38%), Bilaspur district 382,056 (5.57%), Kinnaur District 84,298 (1.23%) and Lahaul Spiti 31,528 (0.46%).
The life expectancy at birth in Himachal Pradesh increased significantly from 52.6 years in the period from 1970 to 1975 (above the national average of 49.7 years) to 72.0 years for the period 2011–15 (above the national average of 68.3 years). The infant mortality rate stood at 40 in 2010, and the crude birth rate has declined from 37.3 in 1971 to 16.9 in 2010, below the national average of 26.5 in 1998. The crude death rate was 6.9 in 2010. Himachal Pradesh's literacy rate has almost doubled between 1981 and 2011 (see table to right). The state is one of the most literate states of India with a literacy rate of 83.78% as of 2011.
Hindi is the de jure official language of Himachal Pradesh and is spoken by the majority of the population as a lingua franca. Sanskrit is the additional official language of the state. Although mostly encountered in academic and symbolic contexts, the government of Himachal Pradesh is encouraging its wider study and use.
Most of the population, however, speaks natively one or another of the Western Pahari languages (locally also known as Himachali or just Pahari), a subgroup of the Indo-Aryan languages that includes Bhattiyali, Bilaspuri, Chambeali, Churahi, Gaddi, Hinduri, Kangri, Kullu, Mahasu Pahari, Mandeali, Pahari Kinnauri, Pangwali, and Sirmauri. Additional Indo-Aryan languages spoken include Punjabi (native to 4.4% of the population), Nepali (1.3%), Chinali, Lahul Lohar, and others. In parts of the state there are speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages like Kinnauri (1.2%), Tibetan (0.3%), Lahuli–Spiti languages (0.16%), Pattani (0.12%), Bhoti Kinnauri, Chitkuli Kinnauri, Bunan (or Gahri), Jangshung, Kanashi, Shumcho, Spiti Bhoti, Sunam, Tinani, and Tukpa.
Languages of Himachal Pradesh (2011)
Religion in Himachal Pradesh (2011)
Hinduism is the major religion in Himachal Pradesh. More than 95% of the total population adheres to the Hindu faith and majorly follows Shaivism and Shaktism traditions, the distribution of which is evenly spread throughout the state. Himachal Pradesh has the highest proportion of Hindu population among all the states and union territories in India.
Other religions that form a smaller percentage are Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism. Muslims are mainly concentrated in Sirmaur, Chamba, Una and Solan districts where they form 4.2-5.7% of the population. Sikhs mostly live in towns and cities and constitute 1.16% of the state population. The Buddhists, who constitute 1.15%, are mainly natives and tribals from Lahaul and Spiti, where they form a majority of 62%, and Kinnaur, where they form 21.5%.
Himachal Pradesh was one of the few states that had remained largely untouched by external customs, largely due to its difficult terrain. With remarkable economic and social advancements, the state has changed rapidly. Himachal Pradesh is a multilingual state like other Indian states. Western Pahari (Mandiyali, Kangri, Chambyali, Dogri, Kulvi, and Kinauri) languages also known as Himachali languages are widely spoken in the state. Some of the most commonly spoken Pahadi lects are Kangri, Mandyali, Kulvi, Chambeali, Bharmauri and Kinnauri.
Himachal is well known for its handicrafts. The carpets, leather works, Kullu shawls, Kangra paintings, Chamba Rumals, stoles, embroidered grass footwear (Pullan chappal), silver jewellery, metal ware, knitted woolen socks, Pattoo, basketry of cane and bamboo (Wicker and Rattan) and woodwork are among the notable ones. Of late, the demand for these handicrafts has increased within and outside the country.
Himachali caps of various colour bands are also well-known local art work, and are often treated as a symbol of the Himachali identity. The colour of the Himachali caps has been an indicator of political loyalties in the hill state for a long period of time with Congress party leaders like Virbhadra Singh donning caps with green band and the rival BJP leader Prem Kumar Dhumal wearing a cap with maroon band. The former has served six terms as the Chief Minister of the state while the latter is a two-time Chief Minister. Local music and dance also reflect the cultural identity of the state. Through their dance and music, the Himachali people entreat their gods during local festivals and other special occasions.
There are national and regional fairs and festivals, including temple fairs in nearly every region. The Kullu Dussehra, Minjar mela and Mahashivratri Mandi festival is nationally known. The day-to-day cuisine of Himachalis is similar to the rest of northern India with Punjabi and Tibetan influences. Lentils (Dāl), rice (chāwal or bhāț), vegetables (sabzī) and chapati (wheat flatbread) form the staple food of the local population. Non-vegetarian food is more widely accepted in Himachal Pradesh than elsewhere in India, partly due to the scarcity of fresh vegetables on the hilly terrain of the state.
Himachali specialities include Siddu, Babru, Khatta, Mhanee, Channa Madra, Patrode, Mah ki dal, Chamba-style fried fish, Kullu trout, Chha Gosht, Pahadi Chicken, Sepu Badi, Auriya Kaddu, Aloo palda, Pateer, Makki di roti, Sarson ka saag, Chamba Chukh (Chouck), Bhagjery, Chutney of Til, etc.
At the time of Independence, Himachal Pradesh had a literacy rate of 8% – one of the lowest in the country. By 2011, the literacy rate surged to 82.8%, making Himachal one of the most-literate states in the country. There are over 10,000 primary schools, 1,000 secondary schools and more than 1,300 high schools in the state. In meeting the constitutional obligation to make primary education compulsory, Himachal became the first state in India to make elementary education accessible to every child. Himachal Pradesh is an exception to the nationwide gender bias in education levels. The state has a female literacy rate of around 76%. In addition, school enrolment and participation rates for girls are almost universal at the primary level. While higher levels of education do reflect a gender-based disparity, Himachal is still significantly ahead of other states at bridging the gap. The Hamirpur District in particular stands out for high literacy rates across all metrics of measurement.
The state government has played an instrumental role in the rise of literacy in the state by spending a significant proportion of the state's GDP on education. During the first six five-year plans, most of the development expenditure in the education sector was utilised in quantitative expansion, but after the seventh five-year-plan the state government switched emphasis on qualitative improvement and modernisation of education. To raise the number of the teaching staff at primary schools they appointed over 1000 teacher aids through the Vidya Upasak Yojna in 2001. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is another HP government initiative that not only aims for universal elementary education but also encourages communities to engage in the management of schools. The Rashtriya Madhayamic Shiksha Abhiyan launched in 2009, is a similar scheme but focuses on improving access to quality secondary education.
The standard of education in the state has reached a considerably high level as compared to other states in India with several reputed educational institutes for higher studies. The Baddi University of Emerging Sciences and Technologies, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Indian Institute of Management Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala, National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, Indian Institute of Information Technology Una, Alakh Prakash Goyal University, Maharaja Agrasen University, Himachal Pradesh National Law University are some of the notable universities in the state. Indira Gandhi Medical College and Hospital in Shimla, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College in Kangra, Rajiv Gandhi Government Post Graduate Ayurvedic College in Paprola and Homoeopathic Medical College & Hospital in Kumarhatti are the prominent medical institutes in the state. Besides these, there is a Government Dental College in Shimla which is the state's first recognised dental institute.
The state government has also decided to start three major nursing colleges to develop the healthcare system of the state. CSK Himachal Pradesh Krishi Vishwavidyalya Palampur is one of the most renowned hill agriculture institutes in the world. Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry has earned a unique distinction in India for imparting teaching, research and extension education in horticulture, forestry and allied disciplines. Further, state-run Jawaharlal Nehru Government Engineering College was inaugurated in 2006 at Sundernagar. Himachal Pradesh also hosts a campus of the fashion college, National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Kangra.
Source: Department of Information and Public Relations. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh (/hɪˌmɑːtʃəl prəˈdɛʃ/; Hindi: [ɦɪˈmäːtʃəl pɾəˈd̪eːʃ] ; lit. \"Snow-laden Mountain Province\") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterised by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks and extensive river systems. Himachal Pradesh is the northernmost state of India and shares borders with the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh to the north, and the states of Punjab to the west, Haryana to the southwest, Uttarakhand to the southeast and a very narrow border with Uttar Pradesh to the south. The state also shares an international border to the east with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Himachal Pradesh is also known as Dev Bhoomi or Dev Bhumi, meaning 'Land of Gods' and Veer Bhoomi which means 'Land of the Brave'.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The predominantly mountainous region comprising the present-day Himachal Pradesh has been inhabited since pre-historic times, having witnessed multiple waves of human migrations from other areas. Through its history, the region was mostly ruled by local kingdoms, some of which accepted the suzerainty of larger empires. Prior to India's independence from the British, Himachal comprised the hilly regions of the Punjab Province of British India. After independence, many of the hilly territories were organised as the Chief Commissioner's province of Himachal Pradesh, which later became a Union Territory. In 1966, hilly areas of the neighbouring Punjab state were merged into Himachal and it was ultimately granted full statehood in 1971.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh is spread across valleys with many perennial rivers flowing through them. Agriculture, horticulture, hydropower, and tourism are important constituents of the state's economy. The hilly state is almost universally electrified, with 99.5% of households having electricity as of 2016. The state was declared India's second open-defecation-free state in 2016. According to a survey of CMS-India Corruption Study in 2017, Himachal Pradesh is India's least corrupt state.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh is divided into 12 districts.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name of the state is a reference to its setting: Himachal means “snowy slopes” (Sanskrit: hima, meaning “snow”; acal/achal meaning \"slopes\", or \"land\", or \"abode\"). Himachal Pradesh (ɦɪˈmaːtʃəl pɾəˈdeːʃ; literally \"snow-laden province\"). Himachal refers to being in the \"aanchal\" of the Himalayas hence, sheltered by the Himalayas or by the snow. It means \"the land in the lap of snowy Himalayas\". Pradesh means \"state\". Himachal was named by Diwakar Datt Sharma, a Sanskrit scholar.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Tribes such as the Koli, Hali, Dagi, Dhaugri, Dasa, Khasa, Kanaura, and Kirata inhabited the region from the prehistoric era. The foothills of the modern state of Himachal Pradesh were inhabited by people from the Indus valley civilisation, which flourished between 2250 and 1750 BCE. The Kols and Mundas are believed to be the original inhabitants to the hills of present-day Himachal Pradesh, followed by the Bhotas and Kiratas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "During the Vedic period, several small republics known as Janapada existed which were later conquered by the Gupta Empire. After a brief period of supremacy by King Harshavardhana, the region was divided into several local powers headed by chieftains, including some Rajputs principalities. These kingdoms enjoyed a large degree of independence and were invaded by Delhi Sultanate several times. Mahmud Ghaznavi conquered Kangra at the beginning of the 11th century. Timur and Sikander Lodi also marched through the lower hills of the state, captured several forts, and fought many battles. Several hill states acknowledged Mughal suzerainty and paid regular tribute to the Mughals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Kingdom of Gorkha conquered many kingdoms and came to power in Nepal in 1768. They consolidated their military power and began to expand their territory. Gradually, the Kingdom of Nepal annexed Sirmour and Shimla. Under the leadership of Amar Singh Thapa, the Nepali army laid siege to Kangra. They managed to defeat Sansar Chand Katoch, the ruler of Kangra, in 1806 with the help of many provincial chiefs. However, the Nepali army could not capture Kangra fort which came under Maharaja Ranjeet Singh in 1809. After the defeat, they expanded towards the south of the state. However, Raja Ram Singh, Raja of Siba State, captured the fort of Siba from the remnants of Lahore Darbar in Samvat 1846, during the First Anglo-Sikh War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "They came into direct conflict with the British along the tarai belt, after which the British expelled them from the provinces of the Satluj. The British gradually emerged as the paramount power in the region. In the revolt of 1857, or first Indian war of independence, arising from several grievances against the British, the people of the hill states were not as politically active as were those in other parts of the country. They and their rulers, except Bushahr, remained more or less inactive. Some, including the rulers of Chamba, Bilaspur, Bhagal and Dhami, rendered help to the British government during the revolt.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The British territories came under the British Crown after Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858. The states of Chamba, Mandi and Bilaspur made good progress in many fields during the British rule. During World War I, virtually all rulers of the hill states remained loyal and contributed to the British war effort, both in the form of men and materials. Among these were the states of Kangra, Jaswan, Datarpur, Guler, Rajgarh, Nurpur, Chamba, Suket, Mandi, and Bilaspur.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After independence, the Chief Commissioner's Province of Himachal Pradesh was organised on 15 April 1948 as a result of the integration of 30 petty princely states (including feudal princes and zaildars) in the promontories of the western Himalayas. These were known as the Simla Hills States and four Punjab southern hill states under the Himachal Pradesh (Administration) Order, 1948 under Sections 3 and 4 of the Extra-Provincial Jurisdiction Act, 1947 (later renamed as the Foreign Jurisdiction Act, 1947 vide A.O. of 1950). The State of Bilaspur was merged into Himachal Pradesh on 1 July 1954 by the Himachal Pradesh and Bilaspur (New State) Act, 1954.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Himachal became a Part 'C' state on 26 January 1950 when the Constitution of India came into effect and the Lieutenant Governor was appointed. The Legislative Assembly was elected in 1952. Himachal Pradesh became a union territory on 1 November 1956. Some areas of the Punjab State, namely, Simla, Kangra, Kullu and Lahul and Spiti Districts, Lohara, Amb and Una Kanungo circles, some areas of Santokhgarh Kanungo circle and some other specified area of Una Tehsil of Hoshiarpur District, as well as Kandaghat and Nalagarh Tehsils of erstwhile PEPSU State, besides some parts of Dhar Kalan Kanungo circle of Pathankot District—were merged with Himachal Pradesh on 1 November 1966 on the enactment by Parliament of the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966. On 18 December 1970, the State of Himachal Pradesh Act was passed by Parliament, and the new state came into being on 25 January 1971. Himachal became the 18th state of the Indian Union with Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar as its first chief minister.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Himachal is in the western Himalayas situated between 30°22′N and 33°12′N latitude and 75°47′E and 79°04′E longitude. Covering an area of 55,673 square kilometres (21,495 sq mi), it is a mountainous state. The Zanskar range runs in the northeastern part of the state and the great Himalayan range run through the eastern and northern parts, while the Dhauladhar and the Pir Panjal ranges of the lesser Himalayas, and their valleys, form much of the core regions. The outer Himalayas, or the Shiwalik range, form southern and western Himachal Pradesh. At 6,816 m, Reo Purgyil is the highest mountain peak in the state of Himachal Pradesh.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The drainage system of Himachal is composed both of rivers and glaciers. Himalayan rivers criss-cross the entire mountain chain. Himachal Pradesh provides water to both the Indus and Ganges basins. The drainage systems of the region are the Chandra Bhaga or the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, the Sutlej, and the Yamuna. These rivers are perennial and are fed by snow and rainfall. They are protected by an extensive cover of natural vegetation. Four of the five Punjab rivers flow through Himachal Pradesh, three of them originating in the state. These rivers run through a maze of valleys separated by the mountain ranges of the state. The Satluj Valley is formed by the Satluj river entering the state near Shipki La, while the Spiti and Baspa Valleys are formed by the river's two major tributaries in the state. The Beas river flows though the Kullu and the Kangra Valleys, with tributary Parvati forming the Parvati Valley. The Chenab river, formed by the confluence of the Chandra and Bhaga, forms much of the northern regions of Lahaul and Pangi, and the Ravi river flows principally through Chamba. The Pabbar and Giri rivers in the southeast are part of the Yamuna basin.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Due to extreme variation in elevation, great variation occurs in the climatic conditions of Himachal Pradesh. The climate varies from hot and humid subtropical in the southern tracts to, with more elevation, cold, alpine, and glacial in the northern and eastern mountain ranges. The state's winter capital, Dharamsala receives very heavy rainfall, while areas like Lahaul and Spiti are cold and almost rainless. Broadly, Himachal experiences three seasons: summer, winter, and rainy season. Summer lasts from mid-April until the end of June and most parts become very hot (except in the alpine zone which experiences a mild summer) with the average temperature ranging from 28 to 32 °C (82 to 90 °F). Winter lasts from late November until mid-March. Snowfall is common in alpine tracts. Pollution is affecting the climate of almost all the states of India. Due to steps taken by governments to prevent pollution, Himachal Pradesh has become the first smoke-free state in India which means cooking in the entire state is free of traditional chulhas.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh is one of the states that lies in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), one of the richest reservoirs of biological diversity in the world. As of 2002, the IHR is undergoing large scale irrational extraction of wild, medicinal herbs, thus endangering many of its high-value gene stock. To address this, a workshop on ‘Endangered Medicinal Plant Species in Himachal Pradesh’ was held in 2002 and the conference was attended by forty experts from diverse disciplines.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "According to 2003 Forest Survey of India report, legally defined forest areas constitute 66.52% of the area of Himachal Pradesh. Vegetation in the state is dictated by elevation and precipitation. The state is endowed with a high diversity of medicinal and aromatic plants. Lahaul-Spiti region of the state, being a cold desert, supports unique plants of medicinal value including Ferula jaeschkeana, Hyoscyamus niger, Lancea tibetica, and Saussurea bracteata.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Himachal is also said to be the fruit bowl of the country, with widespread orchards. Meadows and pastures are also seen clinging to steep slopes. After the winter season, the hillsides and orchards bloom with wild flowers, white gladiolas, carnations, marigolds, roses, chrysanthemums, tulips and lilies are carefully cultivated. Himachal Pradesh Horticultural Produce Marketing and Processing Corporation Ltd. (HPMC) is a state body that markets fresh and processed fruits.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh has around 463 bird, and Tragopan melanocephalus is the state bird of Himanchal Pradesh 77 mammalian, 44 reptile and 80 fish species.Himachal Pradesh has currently five National Parks. Great Himalayan National Park, oldest and largest National park in the state, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Pin Valley National Park, Inderkilla, Khirganga and Simbalbara are the other national Parks located in the state. The state also has 30 wildlife sanctuaries and 3 conservation reserves. The state bird of Himachal Pradesh is the Western tragopan, locally known as the jujurana. It is one of the rarest living pheasants in the world. The state animal is the snow leopard, which is even rarer to find than the jujurana.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Legislative Assembly of Himachal Pradesh has no pre-constitution history. The State itself is a post-independence creation. It came into being as a centrally administered territory on 15 April 1948 from the integration of thirty erstwhile princely states.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh is governed through a parliamentary system of representative democracy, a feature the state shares with other Indian states. Universal suffrage is granted to residents. The legislature consists of elected members and special office bearers such as the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker who are elected by the members. Assembly meetings are presided over by the Speaker or the Deputy Speaker in the Speaker's absence. The judiciary is composed of the Himachal Pradesh High Court and a system of lower courts.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Executive authority is vested in the Council of Ministers headed by the Chief Minister, although the titular head of government is the Governor. The governor is the head of state appointed by the President of India. The leader of the party or coalition with a majority in the Legislative Assembly is appointed as the Chief Minister by the governor, and the Council of Ministers are appointed by the governor on the advice of the Chief Minister. The Council of Ministers reports to the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly is unicameral with 68 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). Terms of office run for five years, unless the Assembly is dissolved prior to the completion of the term. Auxiliary authorities known as panchayats, for which local body elections are regularly held, govern local affairs.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the assembly elections held in November 2022, the Indian National Congress secured an absolute majority, winning 40 of the 68 seats while the BJP won only 25 of the 68 seats. Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu was sworn in as Himachal Pradesh's 15th Chief Minister in Shimla on 11 December 2022. Mukesh Agnihotri was sworn in as his deputy the same day.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The state of Himachal Pradesh is divided into 12 districts which are grouped into three divisions, Shimla, Kangra and Mandi. The districts are further divided into 73 subdivisions, 78 blocks and 172 Tehsils.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Planning in Himachal Pradesh started in 1951 along with the rest of India with the implementation of the first five-year plan. The First Plan allocated ₹52.7 million to Himachal Pradesh. More than 50% of this expenditure was incurred on transport and communication; while the power sector got a share of just 4.6%, though it had steadily increased to 7% by the Third Plan. Expenditure on agriculture and allied activities increased from 14.4% in the First Plan to 32% in the Third Plan, showing a progressive decline afterwards from 24% in the Fourth Plan to less than 10% in the Tenth Plan. Expenditure on energy sector was 24.2% of the total in the Tenth Plan.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The total GDP for 2005–06 was estimated at ₹254 billion as against ₹230 billion in the year 2004–05, showing an increase of 10.5%. The GDP for fiscal 2015–16 was estimated at ₹1.110 trillion, which increased to ₹1.247 trillion in 2016–17, recording growth of 6.8%. The per capita income increased from ₹130,067 in 2015–16 to ₹147,277 in 2016–17. The state government's advance estimates for fiscal 2017–18 stated the total GDP and per capita income as ₹1.359 trillion and ₹158,462, respectively. As of 2018, Himachal is the 22nd-largest state economy in India with ₹1.52 lakh crore (US$19 billion) in gross domestic product and has the 13th-highest per capita income (₹160,000 (US$2,000)) among the states and union territories of India.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh also ranks as the second-best performing state in the country on human development indicators after Kerala. One of the Indian government's key initiatives to tackle unemployment is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The participation of women in the NREGA has been observed to vary across different regions of the nation. As of the year 2009–2010, Himachal Pradesh joined the category of high female participation, recording a 46% share of NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) workdays for women. This was a drastic increase from the 13% that was recorded in 2006–2007.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Agriculture accounts for 9.4% of the net state domestic product. It is the main source of income and employment in Himachal. About 90% of the population in Himachal depends directly upon agriculture, which provides direct employment to 62% of total workers of state. The main cereals grown include wheat, maize, rice and barley with major cropping systems being maize-wheat, rice-wheat and maize-potato-wheat. Pulses, fruits, vegetables and oilseeds are among the other crops grown in the state. Centuries-old traditional Kuhl irrigation system is prevalent in the Kangra valley, though in recent years these Kuhls have come under threat from hydroprojects on small streams in the valley. Land husbandry initiatives such as the Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project, which includes the Himachal Pradesh Reforestation Project (HPRP), the world's largest clean development mechanism (CDM) undertaking, have improved agricultural yields and productivity, and raised rural household incomes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Apple is the principal cash crop of the state grown principally in the districts of Shimla, Kinnaur, Kullu, Mandi, Chamba and some parts of Sirmaur and Lahaul-Spiti with an average annual production of five lakh tonnes and per hectare production of 8 to 10 tonnes. The apple cultivation constitute 49 per cent of the total area under fruit crops and 85% of total fruit production in the state with an estimated economy of ₹3500 crore. Apples from Himachal are exported to other Indian states and even other countries. In 2011–12, the total area under apple cultivation was 104,000 hectares, increased from 90,347 hectares in 2000–01. According to the provisional estimates of Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, the annual apple production in Himachal for fiscal 2015–16 stood at 753,000 tonnes, making it India's second-largest apple-producing state after Jammu and Kashmir. The state is also among the leading producers of other fruits such as apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums and strawberries in India.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kangra tea is grown in the Kangra valley. Tea plantation began in 1849, and production peaked in the late 19th century with the tea becoming popular across the globe. Production dipped sharply after the 1905 Kangra earthquake and continues to decline. The tea received geographical indication status in 2005.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Hydropower is one of the major sources of income generation for the state. The state has an abundance of hydropower resources because of the presence of various perennial rivers. Many high-capacity hydropower plants have been constructed which produce surplus electricity that is sold to other states, such as Delhi, Punjab and West Bengal. The income generated from exporting the electricity to other states is being provided as subsidy to the consumers in the state. The rich hydropower resources of Himachal have resulted in the state becoming almost universally electrified with around 94.8% houses receiving electricity as of 2001, as compared to the national average of 55.9%. Himachal's hydro-electric power production is, however, yet to be fully utilised. The identified hydroelectric potential for the state is 27,436 MW in five river basins while the hydroelectric capacity in 2016 was 10,351 MW.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Tourism in Himachal Pradesh is a major contributor to the state's economy and growth. The Himalayas attracts tourists from all over the world. Hill stations like Shimla, Manali, Dharamshala, Dalhousie, Chamba, Khajjiar, Kullu and Kasauli are popular destinations for both domestic and foreign tourists. The state also has many important Hindu pilgrimage sites with prominent temples like Shri Chamunda Devi Mandir, Naina Devi Temple, Bajreshwari Mata Temple, Jwala Ji Temple, Chintpurni, Baijnath Temple, Bhimakali Temple, Bijli Mahadev and Jakhoo Temple. Manimahesh Lake situated in the Bharmour region of Chamba district is the venue of an annual Hindu pilgrimage trek held in the month of August which attracts lakhs of devotees. The state is also referred to as \"Dev Bhoomi\" (literally meaning Abode of Gods) due to its mention as such in ancient Hindu texts and occurrence of a large number of historical temples in the state.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Himachal is also known for its adventure tourism activities like ice skating in Shimla, paragliding in Bir Billing and Solang Valley, rafting in Kullu, skiing in Manali, boating in Bilaspur, fishing in Tirthan Valley, trekking and horse riding in different parts of the state. Shimla, the state's capital, is home to Asia's only natural ice-skating rink. Spiti Valley in Lahaul and Spiti District situated at an altitude of over 3000 metres with its picturesque landscapes is popular destination for adventure seekers. The region also has some of the oldest Buddhist monasteries in the world. Himachal hosted the first Paragliding World Cup in India from 24 to 31 October in 2015. The venue for the paragliding world cup was Bir Billing, which is 70 km from the tourist town Macleod Ganj, located in the heart of Himachal in Kangra District. Bir Billing is the centre for aero sports in Himachal and considered as best for paragliding. Buddhist monasteries, trekking to tribal villages and mountain biking are other local possibilities.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "There are a variety of festivals celebrated by the locals of Himachal Pradesh who worship gods and goddesses. There are over 2000 villages in Himachal Pradesh which celebrate festivals such as Kullu Dussehra, Chamba’s Minjar, Renuka ji Fair, Lohri, Halda, Phagli, Losar and Mandi Shivratri. There approximately 6000 temples in Himachal Pradesh with a known one being Bijli Mahadev. The temple is seen as a 20-meter structure built in stone which, according to locals, is known to attract lighting. They say that this is a way the Gods show their blessings.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Great Himalayan National Park is found in the Kullu districts of Himachal Pradesh. It has an area of 620 km and ranging from an altitude of 1500 meters to 4500 meters and was created in 1984. There are various forest types found here such as Deodar, Himalayan Fir, Spruce, Oak and Alpine pastures. In the Great Himalayan National Park, there are a variety of animals found such as Snow leopard, Yak, Himalayan black bear, Western tragopan, Monal and Musk deer. This National Park is a trail to many hikers and trekkers too. Moreover, there are sanctuaries which are tourist spots such as Naina Devi and Gobind Sagar Sanctuary in the Una and Bilaspur districts with an area of 220 km. There are animals such as Indian porcupine and giant flying squirrel found here. The Gobind Sagar Lake has fish species such as Mrigal, Silver carp, Katla, Mahaseer and Rohu are found here. Narkanda located in at an altitude of around 8850 feet is known for its apple orchards. It is located between the river valleys of Giri and Sutlej.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Himachal has three domestic airports in Kangra, Kullu and Shimla districts, respectively. The air routes connect the state with New Delhi and Chandigarh.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The only broad-gauge railway line in the whole state connects Amb Andaura–Una Himachal railway station to Nangal Dam in Punjab and runs all the way to Daulatpur, Himachal Pradesh. It is an electrified track since 1999. While a tiny portion of line adjacent to Kandrori(KNDI) station on either side on Pathankot-Jalandhar Section, under Ferozepur Division of Northern Railway also crosses into Himachal Pradesh, before venturing out to Punjab again.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Future constructions:",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Himachal is known for its narrow-gauge railways. One is the Kalka-Shimla Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and another is the Kangra Valley Railway. The total length of these two tracks is 259 kilometres (161 mi). The Kalka-Shimla Railway passes through many tunnels and bridges, while the Pathankot–Jogindernagar one meanders through a maze of hills and valleys. The total route length of the operational railway network in the state is 296.26 kilometres (184.09 mi).",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Roads are the major mode of transport in Himachal Pradesh due to its hilly terrain. The state has road network of 28,208 kilometres (17,528 mi), including eight National Highways (NH) that constitute 1,234 kilometres (767 mi) and 19 State Highways with a total length of 1,625 kilometres (1,010 mi). Hamirpur district has the highest road density in the country. Some roads are closed during winter and monsoon seasons due to snow and landslides. The state-owned Himachal Road Transport Corporation with a fleet of over 3,100, operates bus services connecting important cities and towns with villages within the state and also on various interstate routes. In addition, around 5,000 private buses ply in the state.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh has a total population of 6,864,602 including 3,481,873 males and 3,382,729 females according to the Census of India 2011. It has only 0.57 per cent of India's total population, recording a growth of 12.81 per cent. The child sex ratio increased from 896 in 2001 to 909 in 2011. The total fertility rate (TFR) per woman in 2015 stood at 1.7, one of the lowest in India.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes account for 25.19 per cent and 5.71 per cent of the population, respectively. The sex ratio stood at 972 females per 1,000 males, recording a marginal increase from 968 in 2001. The main caste groups in Himachal Pradesh are Rajputs, Brahmins, Kanets, Kulindas, Girths, Raos, Rathis, Thakurs, Kolis, Hollis, Chamars, Drains, Rehars, Chanals, Lohars, Baris, Julahas, Dhakhis, Turis, BatwalsThe Koli forms the largest caste-cluster, comprising 30% of the total population of Himachal Pradesh.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In the census, the state is placed 21st on the population chart, followed by Tripura at 22nd place. Kangra District was top-ranked with a population strength of 1,507,223 (21.98%), Mandi District 999,518 (14.58%), Shimla District 813,384 (11.86%), Solan District 576,670 (8.41%), Sirmaur District 530,164 (7.73%), Una District 521,057 (7.60%), Chamba District 518,844 (7.57%), Hamirpur district 454,293 (6.63%), Kullu District 437,474 (6.38%), Bilaspur district 382,056 (5.57%), Kinnaur District 84,298 (1.23%) and Lahaul Spiti 31,528 (0.46%).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The life expectancy at birth in Himachal Pradesh increased significantly from 52.6 years in the period from 1970 to 1975 (above the national average of 49.7 years) to 72.0 years for the period 2011–15 (above the national average of 68.3 years). The infant mortality rate stood at 40 in 2010, and the crude birth rate has declined from 37.3 in 1971 to 16.9 in 2010, below the national average of 26.5 in 1998. The crude death rate was 6.9 in 2010. Himachal Pradesh's literacy rate has almost doubled between 1981 and 2011 (see table to right). The state is one of the most literate states of India with a literacy rate of 83.78% as of 2011.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Hindi is the de jure official language of Himachal Pradesh and is spoken by the majority of the population as a lingua franca. Sanskrit is the additional official language of the state. Although mostly encountered in academic and symbolic contexts, the government of Himachal Pradesh is encouraging its wider study and use.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Most of the population, however, speaks natively one or another of the Western Pahari languages (locally also known as Himachali or just Pahari), a subgroup of the Indo-Aryan languages that includes Bhattiyali, Bilaspuri, Chambeali, Churahi, Gaddi, Hinduri, Kangri, Kullu, Mahasu Pahari, Mandeali, Pahari Kinnauri, Pangwali, and Sirmauri. Additional Indo-Aryan languages spoken include Punjabi (native to 4.4% of the population), Nepali (1.3%), Chinali, Lahul Lohar, and others. In parts of the state there are speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages like Kinnauri (1.2%), Tibetan (0.3%), Lahuli–Spiti languages (0.16%), Pattani (0.12%), Bhoti Kinnauri, Chitkuli Kinnauri, Bunan (or Gahri), Jangshung, Kanashi, Shumcho, Spiti Bhoti, Sunam, Tinani, and Tukpa.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Languages of Himachal Pradesh (2011)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Religion in Himachal Pradesh (2011)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Hinduism is the major religion in Himachal Pradesh. More than 95% of the total population adheres to the Hindu faith and majorly follows Shaivism and Shaktism traditions, the distribution of which is evenly spread throughout the state. Himachal Pradesh has the highest proportion of Hindu population among all the states and union territories in India.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Other religions that form a smaller percentage are Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism. Muslims are mainly concentrated in Sirmaur, Chamba, Una and Solan districts where they form 4.2-5.7% of the population. Sikhs mostly live in towns and cities and constitute 1.16% of the state population. The Buddhists, who constitute 1.15%, are mainly natives and tribals from Lahaul and Spiti, where they form a majority of 62%, and Kinnaur, where they form 21.5%.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Himachal Pradesh was one of the few states that had remained largely untouched by external customs, largely due to its difficult terrain. With remarkable economic and social advancements, the state has changed rapidly. Himachal Pradesh is a multilingual state like other Indian states. Western Pahari (Mandiyali, Kangri, Chambyali, Dogri, Kulvi, and Kinauri) languages also known as Himachali languages are widely spoken in the state. Some of the most commonly spoken Pahadi lects are Kangri, Mandyali, Kulvi, Chambeali, Bharmauri and Kinnauri.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Himachal is well known for its handicrafts. The carpets, leather works, Kullu shawls, Kangra paintings, Chamba Rumals, stoles, embroidered grass footwear (Pullan chappal), silver jewellery, metal ware, knitted woolen socks, Pattoo, basketry of cane and bamboo (Wicker and Rattan) and woodwork are among the notable ones. Of late, the demand for these handicrafts has increased within and outside the country.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Himachali caps of various colour bands are also well-known local art work, and are often treated as a symbol of the Himachali identity. The colour of the Himachali caps has been an indicator of political loyalties in the hill state for a long period of time with Congress party leaders like Virbhadra Singh donning caps with green band and the rival BJP leader Prem Kumar Dhumal wearing a cap with maroon band. The former has served six terms as the Chief Minister of the state while the latter is a two-time Chief Minister. Local music and dance also reflect the cultural identity of the state. Through their dance and music, the Himachali people entreat their gods during local festivals and other special occasions.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "There are national and regional fairs and festivals, including temple fairs in nearly every region. The Kullu Dussehra, Minjar mela and Mahashivratri Mandi festival is nationally known. The day-to-day cuisine of Himachalis is similar to the rest of northern India with Punjabi and Tibetan influences. Lentils (Dāl), rice (chāwal or bhāț), vegetables (sabzī) and chapati (wheat flatbread) form the staple food of the local population. Non-vegetarian food is more widely accepted in Himachal Pradesh than elsewhere in India, partly due to the scarcity of fresh vegetables on the hilly terrain of the state.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Himachali specialities include Siddu, Babru, Khatta, Mhanee, Channa Madra, Patrode, Mah ki dal, Chamba-style fried fish, Kullu trout, Chha Gosht, Pahadi Chicken, Sepu Badi, Auriya Kaddu, Aloo palda, Pateer, Makki di roti, Sarson ka saag, Chamba Chukh (Chouck), Bhagjery, Chutney of Til, etc.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "At the time of Independence, Himachal Pradesh had a literacy rate of 8% – one of the lowest in the country. By 2011, the literacy rate surged to 82.8%, making Himachal one of the most-literate states in the country. There are over 10,000 primary schools, 1,000 secondary schools and more than 1,300 high schools in the state. In meeting the constitutional obligation to make primary education compulsory, Himachal became the first state in India to make elementary education accessible to every child. Himachal Pradesh is an exception to the nationwide gender bias in education levels. The state has a female literacy rate of around 76%. In addition, school enrolment and participation rates for girls are almost universal at the primary level. While higher levels of education do reflect a gender-based disparity, Himachal is still significantly ahead of other states at bridging the gap. The Hamirpur District in particular stands out for high literacy rates across all metrics of measurement.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The state government has played an instrumental role in the rise of literacy in the state by spending a significant proportion of the state's GDP on education. During the first six five-year plans, most of the development expenditure in the education sector was utilised in quantitative expansion, but after the seventh five-year-plan the state government switched emphasis on qualitative improvement and modernisation of education. To raise the number of the teaching staff at primary schools they appointed over 1000 teacher aids through the Vidya Upasak Yojna in 2001. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is another HP government initiative that not only aims for universal elementary education but also encourages communities to engage in the management of schools. The Rashtriya Madhayamic Shiksha Abhiyan launched in 2009, is a similar scheme but focuses on improving access to quality secondary education.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The standard of education in the state has reached a considerably high level as compared to other states in India with several reputed educational institutes for higher studies. The Baddi University of Emerging Sciences and Technologies, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Indian Institute of Management Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala, National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, Indian Institute of Information Technology Una, Alakh Prakash Goyal University, Maharaja Agrasen University, Himachal Pradesh National Law University are some of the notable universities in the state. Indira Gandhi Medical College and Hospital in Shimla, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College in Kangra, Rajiv Gandhi Government Post Graduate Ayurvedic College in Paprola and Homoeopathic Medical College & Hospital in Kumarhatti are the prominent medical institutes in the state. Besides these, there is a Government Dental College in Shimla which is the state's first recognised dental institute.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The state government has also decided to start three major nursing colleges to develop the healthcare system of the state. CSK Himachal Pradesh Krishi Vishwavidyalya Palampur is one of the most renowned hill agriculture institutes in the world. Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry has earned a unique distinction in India for imparting teaching, research and extension education in horticulture, forestry and allied disciplines. Further, state-run Jawaharlal Nehru Government Engineering College was inaugurated in 2006 at Sundernagar. Himachal Pradesh also hosts a campus of the fashion college, National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Kangra.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Source: Department of Information and Public Relations.",
"title": "State profile"
}
]
| Himachal Pradesh is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterised by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks and extensive river systems. Himachal Pradesh is the northernmost state of India and shares borders with the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh to the north, and the states of Punjab to the west, Haryana to the southwest, Uttarakhand to the southeast and a very narrow border with Uttar Pradesh to the south. The state also shares an international border to the east with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Himachal Pradesh is also known as Dev Bhoomi or Dev Bhumi, meaning 'Land of Gods' and Veer Bhoomi which means 'Land of the Brave'. The predominantly mountainous region comprising the present-day Himachal Pradesh has been inhabited since pre-historic times, having witnessed multiple waves of human migrations from other areas. Through its history, the region was mostly ruled by local kingdoms, some of which accepted the suzerainty of larger empires. Prior to India's independence from the British, Himachal comprised the hilly regions of the Punjab Province of British India. After independence, many of the hilly territories were organised as the Chief Commissioner's province of Himachal Pradesh, which later became a Union Territory. In 1966, hilly areas of the neighbouring Punjab state were merged into Himachal and it was ultimately granted full statehood in 1971. Himachal Pradesh is spread across valleys with many perennial rivers flowing through them. Agriculture, horticulture, hydropower, and tourism are important constituents of the state's economy. The hilly state is almost universally electrified, with 99.5% of households having electricity as of 2016. The state was declared India's second open-defecation-free state in 2016. According to a survey of CMS-India Corruption Study in 2017, Himachal Pradesh is India's least corrupt state. Himachal Pradesh is divided into 12 districts. | 2001-11-24T16:52:49Z | 2023-12-29T17:02:42Z | [
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14,192 | Helene | Helene or Hélène may refer to: | [
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14,193 | Hyperion | Hyperion may refer to: | [
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14,194 | History of medicine | The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies.
The history of medicine is the study and documentation of the evolution of medical treatments, practices, and knowledge over time. Medical historians often drawn from other humanities fields of study including economics, health sciences, sociology, and politics to better understand the institutions, practices, people, professions, and social systems that have shaped medicine. When a period which predates or lacks written sources regarding medicine, information is instead drawn from archaeological sources. This field tracks the evolution of human societies' approach to health, illness, and injury ranging from prehistory to the modern day, the events that shape these approaches, and their impact on populations.
Early medical traditions include those of Babylon, China, Egypt and India.
Invention of the microscope was a consequence of improved understanding, during the Renaissance. Prior to the 19th century, humorism (also known as humoralism) was thought to explain the cause of disease but it was gradually replaced by the germ theory of disease, leading to effective treatments and even cures for many infectious diseases. Military doctors advanced the methods of trauma treatment and surgery. Public health measures were developed especially in the 19th century as the rapid growth of cities required systematic sanitary measures. Advanced research centers opened in the early 20th century, often connected with major hospitals. The mid-20th century was characterized by new biological treatments, such as antibiotics. These advancements, along with developments in chemistry, genetics, and radiography led to modern medicine. Medicine was heavily professionalized in the 20th century, and new careers opened to women as nurses (from the 1870s) and as physicians (especially after 1970).
Prehistoric medicine is a field of study focused on understanding the use of medicinal plants, healing practices, illnesses, and wellness of humans before written records existed. Although styled prehistoric "medicine", prehistoric healthcare practices were vastly different from what we understand medicine to be in the present era and more accurately refers to studies and exploration of early healing practices.
This period extends across the first use of stone tools by early humans c. 3.3 million years ago to the beginning of writing systems and subsequent recorded history c. 5000 years ago.
As human populations were once scattered across the world, forming isolated communities and cultures that sporadically interacted, a range of archaeological periods have been developed to account for the differing contexts of technology, sociocultural developments, and uptake of writing systems throughout early human societies. Prehistoric medicine is then highly contextual to the location and people in question, creating an ununiform period of study to reflect various degrees of societal development.
Without written records, insights into prehistoric medicine comes indirectly from interpreting evidence left behind by prehistoric humans. One branch of this includes the archaeology of medicine; a discipline that utilises a range of archaeological techniques from observing illness in human remains, plant fossils, to excavations to uncover medical practices. There is evidence of healing practices within Neanderthals and other early human species. Prehistoric evidence of human engagement with medicine include the discovery of psychoactive plant sources such as psilocybin mushrooms in c. 6000 BCE Sahara to primitive dental care in c. 10,900 BCE (13,000 BP) Riparo Fredian (present-day Italy) and c. 7000 BCE Mehrgarh (present-day Pakistan).
Anthropology is another academic branch that contributes to understanding prehistoric medicine in uncovering the sociocultural relationships, meaning, and interpretation of prehistoric evidence. The overlap of medicine as both a root to healing the body as well as the spiritual throughout prehistoric periods highlights the multiple purposes that healing practices and plants could potentially have. From proto-religions to developed spiritual systems, relationships of humans and supernatural entities, from Gods to shamans, have played an interwoven part in prehistoric medicine.
Ancient history covers time between c. 3000 BCE to c. 500 CE, starting from evidenced development of writing systems to the end of the classical era and beginning of the post-classical period. This periodisation presents history as if it were the same everywhere, however it is important to note that socioculture and technological developments could differ locally from settlement to settlement as well as globally from one society to the next.
Ancient medicine covers a similar period of time and presented a range of similar healing theories from across the world connecting nature, religion, and humans within ideas of circulating fluids and energy. Although prominent scholars and texts detailed well-defined medicial insights, their real-world applications were marred by knowledge destruction and loss, poor communication, localised reinterpretations, and subsequent inconsistent applications.
The Mesopotamian region, covering much of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, was dominated by a series of civilisations including Sumer, the earliest known civilisation in the Fertile Crescent region, alongside the Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians). Overlapping ideas of what we now understand as medicine, science, magic, and religion characterised early Mesopotamian healing practices as a hybrid naturalistic and supernatural belief system.
The Sumerians, having developed one of the earliest known writing systems in the 3rd millennium BCE, created numerous cuneiform clay tablets regarding their civilisation included detailed accounts of drug prescriptions, operations, to exorcisms. These were administered and carried out by highly defined professionals including bârû (seers), âs[h]ipu (exorcists), and asû (physician-priests). An example of an early, prescription-like medication appeared in Sumerian during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BCE – c. 2004 BCE).
Following the conquest of the Sumerian civilisation by the Akkadian Empire and the empire's eventual collapse from a number of social and environmental factors, the Babylonian civilisation began to dominate the region. Examples of Babylonian medicine include the extensive Babylonian medical text, the Diagnostic Handbook, written by the ummânū, or chief scholar, Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, in the middle of the 11th century BCE during the reign of the Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina (1069–1046 BCE).
This medical treatise presented great attention to the practice of diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and remedies. The text contains a list of medical symptoms and often detailed empirical observations along with logical rules used in combining observed symptoms on the body of a patient with its diagnosis and prognosis. Here, clearly developed rationales were developed to understand the causes of disease and injury, supported by agreed upon theories at-the-time of elements we might now understand as natural causes, supernatural magic and religious explanations.
Most known and recovered artefacts from the ancient Mesopotamian civilisations centre on the neo-Assyrian (c. 900 - 600 BCE) and neo-Babylonian (c. 600 - 500 BCE) periods, as the last empires ruled by native Mesopotamian rulers. These discoveries include a huge array of medical clay tablets from this period, although damage to the clay documents creates large gaps in our understanding of medical practices.
Throughout the civilisations of Mesopotamia there is a wide range of medical innovations including evidenced practices of prophylaxis, taking measures to prevent the spread of disease, accounts of stroke, to an awareness of mental illnesses.
Ancient Egypt, a civilisation spanning across the river Nile (throughout parts of present-day Egypt, Sudan, and South Sudan), existed from its unification in c. 3150 BCE to its collapse via Persian conquest in 525 BCE and ultimate downfall from the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.
Throughout unique dynasties, golden eras, and intermediate periods of instability, ancient Egyptians developed a complex, experimental, and communicative medical tradition that has been uncovered through surviving documents, most made of papyrus, such as the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the Ebers Papyrus, the London Medical Papyrus, to the Greek Magical Papyri.
Herodotus described the Egyptians as "the healthiest of all men, next to the Libyans", because of the dry climate and the notable public health system that they possessed. According to him, "the practice of medicine is so specialized among them that each physician is a healer of one disease and no more." Although Egyptian medicine, to a considerable extent, dealt with the supernatural, it eventually developed a practical use in the fields of anatomy, public health, and clinical diagnostics.
Medical information in the Edwin Smith Papyrus may date to a time as early as 3000 BCE. Imhotep in the 3rd dynasty is sometimes credited with being the founder of ancient Egyptian medicine and with being the original author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus, detailing cures, ailments and anatomical observations. The Edwin Smith Papyrus is regarded as a copy of several earlier works and was written c. 1600 BCE. It is an ancient textbook on surgery almost completely devoid of magical thinking and describes in exquisite detail the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous ailments.
The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus treats women's complaints, including problems with conception. Thirty four cases detailing diagnosis and treatment survive, some of them fragmentarily. Dating to 1800 BCE, it is the oldest surviving medical text of any kind.
Medical institutions, referred to as Houses of Life are known to have been established in ancient Egypt as early as 2200 BCE.
The Ebers Papyrus is the oldest written text mentioning enemas. Many medications were administered by enemas and one of the many types of medical specialists was an Iri, the Shepherd of the Anus.
The earliest known physician is also credited to ancient Egypt: Hesy-Ra, "Chief of Dentists and Physicians" for King Djoser in the 27th century BCE. Also, the earliest known woman physician, Peseshet, practiced in Ancient Egypt at the time of the 4th dynasty. Her title was "Lady Overseer of the Lady Physicians."
Medical and healing practices in early Chinese dynasties were heavily shaped by the practice of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Starting around the Zhou Dynasty, parts of this system were being developed and are demonstrated in early writings on herbs in Classic of Changes (Yi Jing) and Classic of Poetry (Shi Jing).
China also developed a large body of traditional medicine. Much of the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine derived from empirical observations of disease and illness by Taoist physicians and reflects the classical Chinese belief that individual human experiences express causative principles effective in the environment at all scales. These causative principles, whether material, essential, or mystical, correlate as the expression of the natural order of the universe.
The foundational text of Chinese medicine is the Huangdi neijing, (or Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), written 5th century to 3rd century BCE. Near the end of the 2nd century CE, during the Han dynasty, Zhang Zhongjing, wrote a Treatise on Cold Damage, which contains the earliest known reference to the Neijing Suwen. The Jin dynasty practitioner and advocate of acupuncture and moxibustion, Huangfu Mi (215–282), also quotes the Yellow Emperor in his Jiayi jing, c. 265. During the Tang dynasty, the Suwen was expanded and revised and is now the best extant representation of the foundational roots of traditional Chinese medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine that is based on the use of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage and other forms of therapy has been practiced in China for thousands of years.
The Atharvaveda, a sacred text of Hinduism dating from the Early Iron Age, is one of the first Indian texts dealing with medicine. The Atharvaveda also contains prescriptions of herbs for various ailments. The use of herbs to treat ailments would later form a large part of Ayurveda.
Ayurveda, meaning the "complete knowledge for long life" is another medical system of India. Its two most famous texts belong to the schools of Charaka and Sushruta. The earliest foundations of Ayurveda were built on a synthesis of traditional herbal practices together with a massive addition of theoretical conceptualizations, new nosologies and new therapies dating from about 600 BCE onwards, and coming out of the communities of thinkers which included the Buddha and others.
According to the compendium of Charaka, the Charakasamhitā, health and disease are not predetermined and life may be prolonged by human effort. The compendium of Suśruta, the Suśrutasamhitā defines the purpose of medicine to cure the diseases of the sick, protect the healthy, and to prolong life. Both these ancient compendia include details of the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous ailments. The Suśrutasamhitā is notable for describing procedures on various forms of surgery, including rhinoplasty, the repair of torn ear lobes, perineal lithotomy, cataract surgery, and several other excisions and other surgical procedures. Most remarkable was Susruta's surgery specially the rhinoplasty for which he is called father of modern plastic surgery. Susruta also described more than 125 surgical instruments in detail. Also remarkable is Sushruta's penchant for scientific classification: His medical treatise consists of 184 chapters, 1,120 conditions are listed, including injuries and illnesses relating to aging and mental illness.
The Ayurvedic classics mention eight branches of medicine: kāyācikitsā (internal medicine), śalyacikitsā (surgery including anatomy), śālākyacikitsā (eye, ear, nose, and throat diseases), kaumārabhṛtya (pediatrics with obstetrics and gynaecology), bhūtavidyā (spirit and psychiatric medicine), agada tantra (toxicology with treatments of stings and bites), rasāyana (science of rejuvenation), and vājīkaraṇa (aphrodisiac and fertility). Apart from learning these, the student of Āyurveda was expected to know ten arts that were indispensable in the preparation and application of his medicines: distillation, operative skills, cooking, horticulture, metallurgy, sugar manufacture, pharmacy, analysis and separation of minerals, compounding of metals, and preparation of alkalis. The teaching of various subjects was done during the instruction of relevant clinical subjects. For example, the teaching of anatomy was a part of the teaching of surgery, embryology was a part of training in pediatrics and obstetrics, and the knowledge of physiology and pathology was interwoven in the teaching of all the clinical disciplines. The normal length of the student's training appears to have been seven years. But the physician was to continue to learn.
Humors
The theory of humors was derived from ancient medical works, dominated Western medicine until the 19th century, and is credited to Greek philosopher and surgeon Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216 CE). In Greek medicine, there are thought to be four humors, or bodily fluids that are linked to illness: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Early scientists believed that food is digested into blood, muscle, and bones, while the humors that weren't blood were then formed by indigestible materials that are left over. An excess or shortage of any one of the four humors is theorized to cause an imbalance that results in sickness; the aforementioned statement was hypothesized by sources before Hippocrates. Hippocrates (c. 400 BCE) deduced that the four seasons of the year and four ages of man that affect the body in relation to the humors. The four ages of man are childhood, youth, prime age, and old age. The four humors as associated with the four seasons are black bile – autumn, yellow bile – summer, phlegm – winter and blood – spring.
In De temperamentis, Galen linked what he called temperaments, or personality characteristics, to a person's natural mixture of humors. He also said that the best place to check the balance of temperaments was in the palm of the hand. A person that is considered to be phlegmatic is said to be an introvert, even-tempered, calm, and peaceful. This person would have an excess of phlegm, which is described as a viscous substance or mucous. Similarly, a melancholic temperament related to being moody, anxious, depressed, introverted, and pessimistic. A melancholic temperament is caused by an excess of black bile, which is sedimentary and dark in color. Being extroverted, talkative, easygoing, carefree, and sociable coincides with a sanguine temperament, which is linked to too much blood. Finally, a choleric temperament is related to too much yellow bile, which is actually red in color and has the texture of foam; it is associated with being aggressive, excitable, impulsive, and also extroverted.
There are numerous ways to treat a disproportion of the humors. For example, if someone was suspected to have too much blood, then the physician would perform bloodletting as a treatment. Likewise, if a person that had too much phlegm would feel better after expectorating, and someone with too much yellow bile would purge. Another factor to be considered in the balance of humors is the quality of air in which one resides, such as the climate and elevation. Also, the standard of food and drink, balance of sleeping and waking, exercise and rest, retention and evacuation are important. Moods such as anger, sadness, joy, and love can affect the balance. During that time, the importance of balance was demonstrated by the fact that women lose blood monthly during menstruation, and have a lesser occurrence of gout, arthritis, and epilepsy then men do. Galen also hypothesized that there are three faculties. The natural faculty affects growth and reproduction and is produced in the liver. Animal or vital faculty controls respiration and emotion, coming from the heart. In the brain, the psychic faculty commands the senses and thought. The structure of bodily functions is related to the humors as well. Greek physicians understood that food was cooked in the stomach; this is where the nutrients are extracted. The best, most potent and pure nutrients from food are reserved for blood, which is produced in the liver and carried through veins to organs. Blood enhanced with pneuma, which means wind or breath, is carried by the arteries. The path that blood take is as follows: venous blood passes through the vena cava and is moved into the right ventricle of the heart; then, the pulmonary artery takes it to the lungs. Later, the pulmonary vein then mixes air from the lungs with blood to form arterial blood, which has different observable characteristics. After leaving the liver, half of the yellow bile that is produced travels to the blood, while the other half travels to the gallbladder. Similarly, half of the black bile produced gets mixed in with blood, and the other half is used by the spleen.
People
Around 800 BCE Homer in the Iliad gives descriptions of wound treatment by the two sons of Asklepios, the admirable physicians Podaleirius and Machaon and one acting doctor, Patroclus. Because Machaon is wounded and Podaleirius is in combat Eurypylus asks Patroclus to "cut out the arrow-head, and wash the dark blood from my thigh with warm water, and sprinkle soothing herbs with power to heal on my wound". Asklepios, like Imhotep, came to be associated as a god of healing over time.
Temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius, known as Asclepieia (Ancient Greek: Ἀσκληπιεῖα, sing. Ἀσκληπιεῖον, Asclepieion), functioned as centers of medical advice, prognosis, and healing. At these shrines, patients would enter a dream-like state of induced sleep known as enkoimesis (ἐγκοίμησις) not unlike anesthesia, in which they either received guidance from the deity in a dream or were cured by surgery. Asclepeia provided carefully controlled spaces conducive to healing and fulfilled several of the requirements of institutions created for healing. In the Asclepeion of Epidaurus, three large marble boards dated to 350 BCE preserve the names, case histories, complaints, and cures of about 70 patients who came to the temple with a problem and shed it there. Some of the surgical cures listed, such as the opening of an abdominal abscess or the removal of traumatic foreign material, are realistic enough to have taken place, but with the patient in a state of enkoimesis induced with the help of soporific substances such as opium. Alcmaeon of Croton wrote on medicine between 500 and 450 BCE. He argued that channels linked the sensory organs to the brain, and it is possible that he discovered one type of channel, the optic nerves, by dissection.
Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE), considered the "father of modern medicine." The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of around seventy early medical works from ancient Greece strongly associated with Hippocrates and his students. Most famously, the Hippocratics invented the Hippocratic Oath for physicians. Contemporary physicians swear an oath of office which includes aspects found in early editions of the Hippocratic Oath.
Hippocrates and his followers were first to describe many diseases and medical conditions. Though humorism (humoralism) as a medical system predates 5th-century Greek medicine, Hippocrates and his students systematized the thinking that illness can be explained by an imbalance of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Hippocrates is given credit for the first description of clubbing of the fingers, an important diagnostic sign in chronic suppurative lung disease, lung cancer and cyanotic heart disease. For this reason, clubbed fingers are sometimes referred to as "Hippocratic fingers". Hippocrates was also the first physician to describe the Hippocratic face in Prognosis. Shakespeare famously alludes to this description when writing of Falstaff's death in Act II, Scene iii. of Henry V. Hippocrates began to categorize illnesses as acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic, and use terms such as, "exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, peak, and convalescence."
The Greek Galen (c. 129–216 CE) was one of the greatest physicians of the ancient world, as his theories dominated all medical studies for nearly 1500 years. His theories and experimentation laid the foundation for modern medicine surrounding the heart and blood. Galen's influence and innovations in medicine can be attributed to the experiments he conducted, which were unlike any other medical experiments of his time. Galen strongly believed that medical dissection was one of the essential procedures in truly understanding medicine. He began to dissect different animals that were anatomically similar to humans, which allowed him to learn more about the internal organs and extrapolate the surgical studies to the human body. In addition, he performed many audacious operations—including brain and eye surgeries—that were not tried again for almost two millennia. Through the dissections and surgical procedures, Galen concluded that blood is able to circulate throughout the human body, and the heart is most similar to the human soul. In Ars medica ("Arts of Medicine"), he further explains the mental properties in terms of specific mixtures of the bodily organs. While much of his work surrounded the physical anatomy, he also worked heavily in humoral physiology.
Galen's medical work was regarded as authoritative until well into the Middle Ages. He left a physiological model of the human body that became the mainstay of the medieval physician's university anatomy curriculum. Although he attempted to extrapolate the animal dissections towards the model of the human body, some of Galen's theories were incorrect. This caused his model to suffer greatly from stasis and intellectual stagnation. Greek and Roman taboos caused dissection of the human body to usually be banned in ancient times, but in the Middle Ages it changed.
In 1523 Galen's On the Natural Faculties was published in London. In the 1530s Belgian anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius launched a project to translate many of Galen's Greek texts into Latin. Vesalius's most famous work, De humani corporis fabrica was greatly influenced by Galenic writing and form.
Herophilus and Erasistratus
Two great Alexandrians laid the foundations for the scientific study of anatomy and physiology, Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos. Other Alexandrian surgeons gave us ligature (hemostasis), lithotomy, hernia operations, ophthalmic surgery, plastic surgery, methods of reduction of dislocations and fractures, tracheotomy, and mandrake as an anaesthetic. Some of what we know of them comes from Celsus and Galen of Pergamum.
Herophilus of Chalcedon, the renowned Alexandrian physician, was one of the pioneers of human anatomy. Though his knowledge of the anatomical structure of the human body was vast, he specialized in the aspects of neural anatomy. Thus, his experimentation was centered around the anatomical composition of the blood-vascular system and the pulsations that can be analyzed from the system. Furthermore, the surgical experimentation he administered caused him to become very prominent throughout the field of medicine, as he was one of the first physicians to initiate the exploration and dissection of the human body.
The banned practice of human dissection was lifted during his time within the scholastic community. This brief moment in the history of Greek medicine allowed him to further study the brain, which he believed was the core of the nervous system. He also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse and the former do not. Thus, while working at the medical school of Alexandria, Herophilus placed intelligence in the brain based on his surgical exploration of the body, and he connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. In addition, he and his contemporary, Erasistratus of Chios, continued to research the role of veins and nerves. After conducting extensive research, the two Alexandrians mapped out the course of the veins and nerves across the human body. Erasistratus connected the increased complexity of the surface of the human brain compared to other animals to its superior intelligence. He sometimes employed experiments to further his research, at one time repeatedly weighing a caged bird, and noting its weight loss between feeding times. In Erasistratus' physiology, air enters the body, is then drawn by the lungs into the heart, where it is transformed into vital spirit, and is then pumped by the arteries throughout the body. Some of this vital spirit reaches the brain, where it is transformed into animal spirit, which is then distributed by the nerves.
The Romans invented numerous surgical instruments, including the first instruments unique to women, as well as the surgical uses of forceps, scalpels, cautery, cross-bladed scissors, the surgical needle, the sound, and speculas. Romans also performed cataract surgery.
The Roman army physician Dioscorides (c. 40–90 CE), was a Greek botanist and pharmacologist. He wrote the encyclopedia De Materia Medica describing over 600 herbal cures, forming an influential pharmacopoeia which was used extensively for the following 1,500 years.
Early Christians in the Roman Empire incorporated medicine into their theology, ritual practices, and metaphors.
Byzantine medicine
Byzantine medicine encompasses the common medical practices of the Byzantine Empire from about 400 CE to 1453 CE. Byzantine medicine was notable for building upon the knowledge base developed by its Greco-Roman predecessors. In preserving medical practices from antiquity, Byzantine medicine influenced Islamic medicine as well as fostering the Western rebirth of medicine during the Renaissance.
Byzantine physicians often compiled and standardized medical knowledge into textbooks. Their records tended to include both diagnostic explanations and technical drawings. The Medical Compendium in Seven Books, written by the leading physician Paul of Aegina, survived as a particularly thorough source of medical knowledge. This compendium, written in the late seventh century, remained in use as a standard textbook for the following 800 years.
Late antiquity ushered in a revolution in medical science, and historical records often mention civilian hospitals (although battlefield medicine and wartime triage were recorded well before Imperial Rome). Constantinople stood out as a center of medicine during the Middle Ages, which was aided by its crossroads location, wealth, and accumulated knowledge.
The first ever known example of separating conjoined twins occurred in the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century. The next example of separating conjoined twins would be recorded many centuries later in Germany in 1689.
The Byzantine Empire's neighbors, the Persian Sassanid Empire, also made their noteworthy contributions mainly with the establishment of the Academy of Gondeshapur, which was "the most important medical center of the ancient world during the 6th and 7th centuries." In addition, Cyril Elgood, British physician and a historian of medicine in Persia, commented that thanks to medical centers like the Academy of Gondeshapur, "to a very large extent, the credit for the whole hospital system must be given to Persia."
Islamic medicine
The Islamic civilization rose to primacy in medical science as its physicians contributed significantly to the field of medicine, including anatomy, ophthalmology, pharmacology, pharmacy, physiology, and surgery. Islamic civilization's contribution to these fields within medicine was a gradual process that took hundreds of years. During the time of the first great Muslim dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE), these fields that were in their very early stages of development, and not much progress was made. One reason for the limited advancement in medicine during the Umayyad Caliphate was the Caliphate's focus on expansion after the death of Prophet Muhammad (632 CE). The focus on expansionism redirected resources from other fields, such as medicine. The priority on these factors led a dense amount of the population to believe that God will provide cures for their illnesses and diseases because of the attention on spirituality.
There were also many other areas of interest during that time before there was a rising interest in the field of medicine. Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the fifth caliph of the Umayyad, developed governmental administration, adopted Arabic as the main language, and focused on many other areas. However, this rising interest in Islamic medicine grew significantly when the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE) overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 CE. This change in dynasty from the Umayyad Caliphate to the Abbasid Caliphate served as a turning point towards scientific and medical developments. A big contributor to this is because, under Abbasid rule, there was a great part of the Greek legacy that was transmitted into Arabic which by then, was the main language of Islamic nations. Because of this, many Islamic physicians were heavily influenced by the works of Greek scholars of Alexandria and Egypt and were able to further expand on those texts to produce new medical pieces of knowledge. This period of time is also known as the Islamic Golden Age where there was a period of development for development and flourishments of technology, commerce, and sciences including medicine. Additionally, during this time the creation of the first Islamic Hospital in 805 CE by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad was recounted as a glorious event of the Golden Age. This hospital in Baghdad contributed immensely to Baghdad's success and also provided educational opportunities for Islamic physicians. During the Islamic Golden Age, there were many famous Islamic physicians that paved the way for medical advancements and understandings. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (965-1040 CE), sometimes referred to as the father of modern optics, is the author of the monumental Book of Optics and also was known for his work in differentiating smallpox from measles. However, this would not be possible without the influence from many different areas of the world that influenced the Arabs.
The Arabs were influenced by ancient Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine medical practices, and helped them develop further.Galen & Hippocrates were pre-eminent authorities. The translation of 129 of Galen's works into Arabic by the Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his assistants, and in particular Galen's insistence on a rational systematic approach to medicine, set the template for Islamic medicine, which rapidly spread throughout the Arab Empire. Its most famous physicians included the Persian polymaths Muhammad ibn Zakarīya al-Rāzi and Avicenna, who wrote more than 40 works on health, medicine, and well-being. Taking leads from Greece and Rome, Islamic scholars kept both the art and science of medicine alive and moving forward. Persian polymath Avicenna has also been called the "father of medicine". He wrote The Canon of Medicine which became a standard medical text at many medieval European universities, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine. The Canon of Medicine presents an overview of the contemporary medical knowledge of the medieval Islamic world, which had been influenced by earlier traditions including Greco-Roman medicine (particularly Galen), Persian medicine, Chinese medicine and Indian medicine. Persian physician al-Rāzi was one of the first to question the Greek theory of humorism, which nevertheless remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine. Some volumes of al-Rāzi's work Al-Mansuri, namely "On Surgery" and "A General Book on Therapy", became part of the medical curriculum in European universities. Additionally, he has been described as a doctor's doctor, the father of pediatrics, and a pioneer of ophthalmology. For example, he was the first to recognize the reaction of the eye's pupil to light.
In addition to contributions to humanity's understanding of human anatomy, Islamicate scientists and scholars, physicians specifically, played an invaluable role in the development of the modern hospital system, creating the foundations on which more contemporary medical professionals would build models of public health systems in Europe and elsewhere. During the time of the Safavid empire (16th–18th centuries) in Iran and the Mughal empire (16th–19th centuries) in India, Muslim scholars radically transformed the institution of the hospital, creating an environment in which rapidly developing medical knowledge of the time could be passed among students and teachers from a wide range of cultures. There were two main schools of thought with patient care at the time. These included humoral physiology from the Persians and Ayurvedic practice. After these theories were translated from Sanskrit to Persian and vice-versa, hospitals could have a mix of culture and techniques. This allowed for a sense of collaborative medicine. Hospitals became increasingly common during this period as wealthy patrons commonly founded them. Many features that are still in use today, such as an emphasis on hygiene, a staff fully dedicated to the care of patients, and separation of individual patients from each other were developed in Islamicate hospitals long before they came into practice in Europe. At the time, the patient care aspects of hospitals in Europe had not taken effect. European hospitals were places of religion rather than institutions of science. As was the case with much of the scientific work done by Islamicate scholars, many of these novel developments in medical practice were transmitted to European cultures hundreds of years after they had long been used throughout the Islamicate world. Although Islamicate scientists were responsible for discovering much of the knowledge that allows the hospital system to function safely today, European scholars who built on this work still receive the majority of the credit historically.
Before the development of scientific medical practices in the Islamicate empires, medical care was mainly performed by religious figures such as priests. Without a profound understanding of how infectious diseases worked and why sickness spread from person to person, these early attempts at caring for the ill and injured often did more harm than good. Contrarily, with the development of new and safer practices by Islamicate scholars and physicians in Arabian hospitals, ideas vital for the effective care of patients were developed, learned, and transmitted widely. Hospitals developed novel "concepts and structures" which are still in use today: separate wards for male and female patients, pharmacies, medical record-keeping, and personal and institutional sanitation and hygiene. Much of this knowledge was recorded and passed on through Islamicate medical texts, many of which were carried to Europe and translated for the use of European medical workers. The Tasrif, written by surgeon Abu Al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, was translated into Latin; it became one of the most important medical texts in European universities during the Middle Ages and contained useful information on surgical techniques and spread of bacterial infection.
The hospital was a typical institution included in the majority of Muslim cities, and although they were often physically attached to religious institutions, they were not themselves places of religious practice. Rather, they served as facilities in which education and scientific innovation could flourish. If they had places of worship, they were secondary to the medical side of the hospital. Islamicate hospitals, along with observatories used for astronomical science, were some of the most important points of exchange for the spread of scientific knowledge. Undoubtedly, the hospital system developed in the Islamicate world played an invaluable role in the creation and evolution of the hospitals we as a society know and depend on today.
After 400 CE, the study and practice of medicine in the Western Roman Empire went into deep decline. Medical services were provided, especially for the poor, in the thousands of monastic hospitals that sprang up across Europe, but the care was rudimentary and mainly palliative. Most of the writings of Galen and Hippocrates were lost to the West, with the summaries and compendia of St. Isidore of Seville being the primary channel for transmitting Greek medical ideas. The Carolingian Renaissance brought increased contact with Byzantium and a greater awareness of ancient medicine, but only with the Renaissance of the 12th century and the new translations coming from Muslim and Jewish sources in Spain, and the fifteenth-century flood of resources after the fall of Constantinople did the West fully recover its acquaintance with classical antiquity.
Greek and Roman taboos had meant that dissection was usually banned in ancient times, but in the Middle Ages it changed: medical teachers and students at Bologna began to open human bodies, and Mondino de Luzzi (c. 1275–1326) produced the first known anatomy textbook based on human dissection.
Wallis identifies a prestige hierarchy with university educated physicians on top, followed by learned surgeons; craft-trained surgeons; barber surgeons; itinerant specialists such as dentist and oculists; empirics; and midwives.
The first medical schools were opened in the 9th century, most notably the Schola Medica Salernitana at Salerno in southern Italy. The cosmopolitan influences from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew sources gave it an international reputation as the Hippocratic City. Students from wealthy families came for three years of preliminary studies and five of medical studies. The medicine, following the laws of Federico II, that he founded in 1224 the university and improved the Schola Salernitana, in the period between 1200 and 1400, it had in Sicily (so-called Sicilian Middle Ages) a particular development so much to create a true school of Jewish medicine.
As a result of which, after a legal examination, was conferred to a Jewish Sicilian woman, Virdimura, wife of another physician Pasquale of Catania, the historical record of before woman officially trained to exercise of the medical profession.
At the University of Bologna the training of physicians began in 1219. The Italian city attracted students from across Europe. Taddeo Alderotti built a tradition of medical education that established the characteristic features of Italian learned medicine and was copied by medical schools elsewhere.Turisanus (d. 1320) was his student.
The University of Padua was founded about 1220 by walkouts from the University of Bologna, and began teaching medicine in 1222. It played a leading role in the identification and treatment of diseases and ailments, specializing in autopsies and the inner workings of the body. Starting in 1595, Padua's famous anatomical theatre drew artists and scientists studying the human body during public dissections. The intensive study of Galen led to critiques of Galen modeled on his own writing, as in the first book of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica. Andreas Vesalius held the chair of Surgery and Anatomy (explicator chirurgiae) and in 1543 published his anatomical discoveries in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. He portrayed the human body as an interdependent system of organ groupings. The book triggered great public interest in dissections and caused many other European cities to establish anatomical theatres.
By the thirteenth century, the medical school at Montpellier began to eclipse the Salernitan school. In the 12th century, universities were founded in Italy, France, and England, which soon developed schools of medicine. The University of Montpellier in France and Italy's University of Padua and University of Bologna were leading schools. Nearly all the learning was from lectures and readings in Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Aristotle. In later centuries, the importance of universities founded in the late Middle Ages gradually increased, e.g. Charles University in Prague (established in 1348), Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1364), University of Vienna (1365), Heidelberg University (1386) and University of Greifswald (1456).
In 1376, in Sicily, it was historically given, in relationship to the laws of Federico II that they foresaw an examination with a regal errand of physicists, the first qualification to the exercise of the medicine to a woman, Virdimura a Jewish woman of Catania, whose document is preserved in Palermo to the Italian national archives.
England
In England, there were but three small hospitals after 1550. Pelling and Webster estimate that in London in the 1580 to 1600 period, out of a population of nearly 200,000 people, there were about 500 medical practitioners. Nurses and midwives are not included. There were about 50 physicians, 100 licensed surgeons, 100 apothecaries, and 250 additional unlicensed practitioners. In the last category about 25% were women. All across England—and indeed all of the world—the vast majority of the people in city, town or countryside depended for medical care on local amateurs with no professional training but with a reputation as wise healers who could diagnose problems and advise sick people what to do—and perhaps set broken bones, pull a tooth, give some traditional herbs or brews or perform a little magic to cure what ailed them.
The Renaissance brought an intense focus on scholarship to Christian Europe. A major effort to translate the Arabic and Greek scientific works into Latin emerged. Europeans gradually became experts not only in the ancient writings of the Romans and Greeks, but in the contemporary writings of Islamic scientists. During the later centuries of the Renaissance came an increase in experimental investigation, particularly in the field of dissection and body examination, thus advancing our knowledge of human anatomy.
At the University of Bologna the curriculum was revised and strengthened in 1560–1590. A representative professor was Julius Caesar Aranzi (Arantius) (1530–1589). He became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Bologna in 1556, where he established anatomy as a major branch of medicine for the first time. Aranzi combined anatomy with a description of pathological processes, based largely on his own research, Galen, and the work of his contemporary Italians. Aranzi discovered the 'Nodules of Aranzio' in the semilunar valves of the heart and wrote the first description of the superior levator palpebral and the coracobrachialis muscles. His books (in Latin) covered surgical techniques for many conditions, including hydrocephalus, nasal polyp, goitre and tumours to phimosis, ascites, haemorrhoids, anal abscess and fistulae.
Women
Catholic women played large roles in health and healing in medieval and early modern Europe. A life as a nun was a prestigious role; wealthy families provided dowries for their daughters, and these funded the convents, while the nuns provided free nursing care for the poor.
The Catholic elites provided hospital services because of their theology of salvation that good works were the route to heaven. The Protestant reformers rejected the notion that rich men could gain God's grace through good works—and thereby escape purgatory—by providing cash endowments to charitable institutions. They also rejected the Catholic idea that the poor patients earned grace and salvation through their suffering. Protestants generally closed all the convents and most of the hospitals, sending women home to become housewives, often against their will. On the other hand, local officials recognized the public value of hospitals, and some were continued in Protestant lands, but without monks or nuns and in the control of local governments.
In London, the crown allowed two hospitals to continue their charitable work, under nonreligious control of city officials. The convents were all shut down but Harkness finds that women—some of them former nuns—were part of a new system that delivered essential medical services to people outside their family. They were employed by parishes and hospitals, as well as by private families, and provided nursing care as well as some medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical services.
Meanwhile, in Catholic lands such as France, rich families continued to fund convents and monasteries, and enrolled their daughters as nuns who provided free health services to the poor. Nursing was a religious role for the nurse, and there was little call for science.
In the 18th century, during the Qing dynasty, there was a proliferation of popular books as well as more advanced encyclopedias on traditional medicine. Jesuit missionaries introduced Western science and medicine to the royal court, although the Chinese physicians ignored them.
Unani medicine was developed in India throughout the medieval and early modern age. It progressed during the Indian Sultanate and Mughal periods. Unani medicine is very close to Ayurveda. Both are based on the theory of the presence of the elements (in Unani, they are considered to be fire, water, earth, and air) in the human body. According to followers of Unani medicine, these elements are present in different fluids and their balance leads to health and their imbalance leads to illness.
By the 18th century CE, Sanskrit medical wisdom still dominated. Muslim rulers built large hospitals in 1595 in Hyderabad, and in Delhi in 1719, and numerous commentaries on ancient texts were written.
European Age of Enlightenment
During the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th century, science was held in high esteem and physicians upgraded their social status by becoming more scientific. The health field was crowded with self-trained barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, drug peddlers, and charlatans.
Across Europe medical schools relied primarily on lectures and readings. The final year student would have limited clinical experience by trailing the professor through the wards. Laboratory work was uncommon, and dissections were rarely done because of legal restrictions on cadavers. Most schools were small, and only Edinburgh Medical School, Scotland, with 11,000 alumni, produced large numbers of graduates.
Spain and the Spanish Empire
In the Spanish Empire, the viceregal capital of Mexico City was a site of medical training for physicians and the creation of hospitals. Epidemic disease had decimated indigenous populations starting with the early sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, when a black auxiliary in the armed forces of conqueror Hernán Cortés, with an active case of smallpox, set off a virgin land epidemic among indigenous peoples, Spanish allies and enemies alike. Aztec emperor Cuitlahuac died of smallpox. Disease was a significant factor in the Spanish conquest elsewhere as well.
Medical education instituted at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico chiefly served the needs of urban elites. Male and female curanderos or lay practitioners, attended to the ills of the popular classes. The Spanish crown began regulating the medical profession just a few years after the conquest, setting up the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicato, a board for licensing medical personnel in 1527. Licensing became more systematic after 1646 with physicians, druggists, surgeons, and bleeders requiring a license before they could publicly practice. Crown regulation of medical practice became more general in the Spanish empire.
Elites and the popular classes alike called on divine intervention in personal and society-wide health crises, such as the epidemic of 1737. The intervention of the Virgin of Guadalupe was depicted in a scene of dead and dying Indians, with elites on their knees praying for her aid. In the late eighteenth century, the crown began implementing secularizing policies on the Iberian peninsula and its overseas empire to control disease more systematically and scientifically.
Spanish Quest for Medicinal Spices
Botanical medicines also became popular during the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Spanish pharmaceutical books during this time contain medicinal recipes consisting of spices, herbs, and other botanical products. For example, nutmeg oil was documented for curing stomach ailments and cardamom oil was believed to relieve intestinal ailments. During the rise of the global trade market, spices and herbs, along with many other goods, that were indigenous to different territories began to appear in different locations across the globe. Herbs and spices were especially popular for their utility in cooking and medicines. As a result of this popularity and increased demand for spices, some areas in Asia, like China and Indonesia, became hubs for spice cultivation and trade. The Spanish Empire also wanted to benefit from the international spice trade, so they looked towards their American colonies.
The Spanish American colonies became an area where the Spanish searched to discover new spices and indigenous American medicinal recipes. The Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, is a major contribution to the history of Nahua medicine. The Spanish did discover many spices and herbs new to them, some of which were reportedly similar to Asian spices. A Spanish physician by the name of Nicolás Monardes studied many of the American spices coming into Spain. He documented many of the new American spices and their medicinal properties in his survey Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales. For example, Monardes describes the "Long Pepper" (Pimienta luenga), found along the coasts of the countries that are now known Panama and Colombia, as a pepper that was more flavorful, healthy, and spicy in comparison to the Eastern black pepper. The Spanish interest in American spices can first be seen in the commissioning of the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, which was a Spanish-American codex describing indigenous American spices and herbs and describing the ways that these were used in natural Aztec medicines. The codex was commissioned in the year 1552 by Francisco de Mendoza, the son of Antonio de Mendoza, who was the first Viceroy of New Spain. Francisco de Mendoza was interested in studying the properties of these herbs and spices, so that he would be able to profit from the trade of these herbs and the medicines that could be produced by them.
Francisco de Mendoza recruited the help of Monardez in studying the traditional medicines of the indigenous people living in what was then the Spanish colonies. Monardez researched these medicines and performed experiments to discover the possibilities of spice cultivation and medicine creation in the Spanish colonies. The Spanish transplanted some herbs from Asia, but only a few foreign crops were successfully grown in the Spanish Colonies. One notable crop brought from Asia and successfully grown in the Spanish colonies was ginger, as it was considered Hispaniola's number 1 crop at the end of the 16th Century. The Spanish Empire did profit from cultivating herbs and spices, but they also introduced pre-Columbian American medicinal knowledge to Europe. Other Europeans were inspired by the actions of Spain and decided to try to establish a botanical transplant system in colonies that they controlled, however, these subsequent attempts were not successful.
United Kingdom and the British Empire
The London Dispensary opened in 1696, the first clinic in the British Empire to dispense medicines to poor sick people. The innovation was slow to catch on, but new dispensaries were open in the 1770s. In the colonies, small hospitals opened in Philadelphia in 1752, New York in 1771, and Boston (Massachusetts General Hospital) in 1811.
Guy's Hospital, the first great British hospital with a modern foundation opened in 1721 in London, with funding from businessman Thomas Guy. It had been preceded by St Bartholomew's Hospital and St Thomas's Hospital, both medieval foundations. In 1821 a bequest of £200,000 by William Hunt in 1829 funded expansion for an additional hundred beds at Guy's. Samuel Sharp (1709–78), a surgeon at Guy's Hospital from 1733 to 1757, was internationally famous; his A Treatise on the Operations of Surgery (1st ed., 1739), was the first British study focused exclusively on operative technique.
English physician Thomas Percival (1740–1804) wrote a comprehensive system of medical conduct, Medical Ethics; or, a Code of Institutes and Precepts, Adapted to the Professional Conduct of Physicians and Surgeons (1803) that set the standard for many textbooks.
In the 1830s in Italy, Agostino Bassi traced the silkworm disease muscardine to microorganisms. Meanwhile, in Germany, Theodor Schwann led research on alcoholic fermentation by yeast, proposing that living microorganisms were responsible. Leading chemists, such as Justus von Liebig, seeking solely physicochemical explanations, derided this claim and alleged that Schwann was regressing to vitalism.
In 1847 in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), dramatically reduced the death rate of new mothers (due to childbed fever) by requiring physicians to clean their hands before attending childbirth, yet his principles were marginalized and attacked by professional peers. At that time most people still believed that infections were caused by foul odors called miasmas.
French scientist Louis Pasteur confirmed Schwann's fermentation experiments in 1857 and afterwards supported the hypothesis that yeast were microorganisms. Moreover, he suggested that such a process might also explain contagious disease. In 1860, Pasteur's report on bacterial fermentation of butyric acid motivated fellow Frenchman Casimir Davaine to identify a similar species (which he called bacteridia) as the pathogen of the deadly disease anthrax. Others dismissed "bacteridia" as a mere byproduct of the disease. British surgeon Joseph Lister, however, took these findings seriously and subsequently introduced antisepsis to wound treatment in 1865.
German physician Robert Koch, noting fellow German Ferdinand Cohn's report of a spore stage of a certain bacterial species, traced the life cycle of Davaine's bacteridia, identified spores, inoculated laboratory animals with them, and reproduced anthrax—a breakthrough for experimental pathology and germ theory of disease. Pasteur's group added ecological investigations confirming spores' role in the natural setting, while Koch published a landmark treatise in 1878 on the bacterial pathology of wounds. In 1881, Koch reported discovery of the "tubercle bacillus", cementing germ theory and Koch's acclaim.
Upon the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Alexandria, Egypt, two medical missions went to investigate and attend the sick, one was sent out by Pasteur and the other led by Koch. Koch's group returned in 1883, having successfully discovered the cholera pathogen. In Germany, however, Koch's bacteriologists had to vie against Max von Pettenkofer, Germany's leading proponent of miasmatic theory. Pettenkofer conceded bacteria's casual involvement, but maintained that other, environmental factors were required to turn it pathogenic, and opposed water treatment as a misdirected effort amid more important ways to improve public health. The massive cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892 devastated Pettenkoffer's position, and yielded German public health to "Koch's bacteriology".
On losing the 1883 rivalry in Alexandria, Pasteur switched research direction, and introduced his third vaccine—rabies vaccine—the first vaccine for humans since Jenner's for smallpox. From across the globe, donations poured in, funding the founding of Pasteur Institute, the globe's first biomedical institute, which opened in 1888. Along with Koch's bacteriologists, Pasteur's group—which preferred the term microbiology—led medicine into the new era of "scientific medicine" upon bacteriology and germ theory. Accepted from Jakob Henle, Koch's steps to confirm a species' pathogenicity became famed as "Koch's postulates". Although his proposed tuberculosis treatment, tuberculin, seemingly failed, it soon was used to test for infection with the involved species. In 1905, Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and remains renowned as the founder of medical microbiology.
The breakthrough to professionalization based on knowledge of advanced medicine was led by Florence Nightingale in England. She resolved to provide more advanced training than she saw on the Continent. At Kaiserswerth, where the first German nursing schools were founded in 1836 by Theodor Fliedner, she said, "The nursing was nil and the hygiene horrible.") Britain's male doctors preferred the old system, but Nightingale won out and her Nightingale Training School opened in 1860 and became a model. The Nightingale solution depended on the patronage of upper-class women, and they proved eager to serve. Royalty became involved. In 1902 the wife of the British king took control of the nursing unit of the British army, became its president, and renamed it after herself as the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps; when she died the next queen became president. Today its Colonel In Chief is Sophie, Countess of Wessex, the daughter-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II. In the United States, upper-middle-class women who already supported hospitals promoted nursing. The new profession proved highly attractive to women of all backgrounds, and schools of nursing opened in the late 19th century. They were soon a function of large hospitals , where they provided a steady stream of low-paid idealistic workers. The International Red Cross began operations in numerous countries in the late 19th century, promoting nursing as an ideal profession for middle-class women.
A major breakthrough in epidemiology came with the introduction of statistical maps and graphs. They allowed careful analysis of seasonality issues in disease incidents, and the maps allowed public health officials to identify critical loci for the dissemination of disease. John Snow in London developed the methods. In 1849, he observed that the symptoms of cholera, which had already claimed around 500 lives within a month, were vomiting and diarrhoea. He concluded that the source of contamination must be through ingestion, rather than inhalation as was previously thought. It was this insight that resulted in the removal of The Pump On Broad Street, after which deaths from cholera plummeted. English nurse Florence Nightingale pioneered analysis of large amounts of statistical data, using graphs and tables, regarding the condition of thousands of patients in the Crimean War to evaluate the efficacy of hospital services. Her methods proved convincing and led to reforms in military and civilian hospitals, usually with the full support of the government.
By the late 19th and early 20th century English statisticians led by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher developed the mathematical tools such as correlations and hypothesis tests that made possible much more sophisticated analysis of statistical data.
During the U.S. Civil War the Sanitary Commission collected enormous amounts of statistical data, and opened up the problems of storing information for fast access and mechanically searching for data patterns. The pioneer was John Shaw Billings (1838–1913). A senior surgeon in the war, Billings built the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine), the centerpiece of modern medical information systems. Billings figured out how to mechanically analyze medical and demographic data by turning facts into numbers and punching the numbers onto cardboard cards that could be sorted and counted by machine. The applications were developed by his assistant Herman Hollerith; Hollerith invented the punch card and counter-sorter system that dominated statistical data manipulation until the 1970s. Hollerith's company became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1911.
Until the nineteenth century, the care of the insane was largely a communal and family responsibility rather than a medical one. The vast majority of the mentally ill were treated in domestic contexts with only the most unmanageable or burdensome likely to be institutionally confined. This situation was transformed radically from the late eighteenth century as, amid changing cultural conceptions of madness, a new-found optimism in the curability of insanity within the asylum setting emerged. Increasingly, lunacy was perceived less as a physiological condition than as a mental and moral one to which the correct response was persuasion, aimed at inculcating internal restraint, rather than external coercion. This new therapeutic sensibility, referred to as moral treatment, was epitomised in French physician Philippe Pinel's quasi-mythological unchaining of the lunatics of the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris and realised in an institutional setting with the foundation in 1796 of the Quaker-run York Retreat in England.
From the early nineteenth century, as lay-led lunacy reform movements gained in influence, ever more state governments in the West extended their authority and responsibility over the mentally ill. Small-scale asylums, conceived as instruments to reshape both the mind and behaviour of the disturbed, proliferated across these regions. By the 1830s, moral treatment, together with the asylum itself, became increasingly medicalised and asylum doctors began to establish a distinct medical identity with the establishment in the 1840s of associations for their members in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and America, together with the founding of medico-psychological journals. Medical optimism in the capacity of the asylum to cure insanity soured by the close of the nineteenth century as the growth of the asylum population far outstripped that of the general population. Processes of long-term institutional segregation, allowing for the psychiatric conceptualisation of the natural course of mental illness, supported the perspective that the insane were a distinct population, subject to mental pathologies stemming from specific medical causes. As degeneration theory grew in influence from the mid-nineteenth century, heredity was seen as the central causal element in chronic mental illness, and, with national asylum systems overcrowded and insanity apparently undergoing an inexorable rise, the focus of psychiatric therapeutics shifted from a concern with treating the individual to maintaining the racial and biological health of national populations.
Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) introduced new medical categories of mental illness, which eventually came into psychiatric usage despite their basis in behavior rather than pathology or underlying cause. Shell shock among frontline soldiers exposed to heavy artillery bombardment was first diagnosed by British Army doctors in 1915. By 1916, similar symptoms were also noted in soldiers not exposed to explosive shocks, leading to questions as to whether the disorder was physical or psychiatric. In the 1920s surrealist opposition to psychiatry was expressed in a number of surrealist publications. In the 1930s several controversial medical practices were introduced including inducing seizures (by electroshock, insulin or other drugs) or cutting parts of the brain apart (leucotomy or lobotomy). Both came into widespread use by psychiatry, but there were grave concerns and much opposition on grounds of basic morality, harmful effects, or misuse.
In the 1950s new psychiatric drugs, notably the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, were designed in laboratories and slowly came into preferred use. Although often accepted as an advance in some ways, there was some opposition, due to serious adverse effects such as tardive dyskinesia. Patients often opposed psychiatry and refused or stopped taking the drugs when not subject to psychiatric control. There was also increasing opposition to the use of psychiatric hospitals, and attempts to move people back into the community on a collaborative user-led group approach ("therapeutic communities") not controlled by psychiatry. Campaigns against masturbation were done in the Victorian era and elsewhere. Lobotomy was used until the 1970s to treat schizophrenia. This was denounced by the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s and later.
It was very difficult for women to become doctors in any field before the 1970s. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to formally study and practice medicine in the United States. She was a leader in women's medical education. While Blackwell viewed medicine as a means for social and moral reform, her student Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) focused on curing disease. At a deeper level of disagreement, Blackwell felt that women would succeed in medicine because of their humane female values, but Jacobi believed that women should participate as the equals of men in all medical specialties using identical methods, values and insights. In the Soviet Union although the majority of medical doctors were women, they were paid less than the mostly male factory workers.
China
Finally in the 19th century, Western medicine was introduced at the local level by Christian medical missionaries from the London Missionary Society (Britain), the Methodist Church (Britain) and the Presbyterian Church (US). Benjamin Hobson (1816–1873) in 1839, set up a highly successful Wai Ai Clinic in Guangzhou, China. The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was founded in 1887 by the London Missionary Society, with its first graduate (in 1892) being Sun Yat-sen, who later led the Chinese Revolution (1911). The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was the forerunner of the School of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong, which started in 1911.
Because of the social custom that men and women should not be near to one another, the women of China were reluctant to be treated by male doctors. The missionaries sent women doctors such as Dr. Mary Hannah Fulton (1854–1927). Supported by the Foreign Missions Board of the Presbyterian Church (US) she in 1902 founded the first medical college for women in China, the Hackett Medical College for Women, in Guangzhou.
Japan
European ideas of modern medicine were spread widely through the world by medical missionaries, and the dissemination of textbooks. Japanese elites enthusiastically embraced Western medicine after the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. However they had been prepared by their knowledge of the Dutch and German medicine, for they had some contact with Europe through the Dutch. Highly influential was the 1765 edition of Hendrik van Deventer's pioneer work Nieuw Ligt ("A New Light") on Japanese obstetrics, especially on Katakura Kakuryo's publication in 1799 of Sanka Hatsumo ("Enlightenment of Obstetrics"). A cadre of Japanese physicians began to interact with Dutch doctors, who introduced smallpox vaccinations. By 1820 Japanese ranpô medical practitioners not only translated Dutch medical texts, they integrated their readings with clinical diagnoses. These men became leaders of the modernization of medicine in their country. They broke from Japanese traditions of closed medical fraternities and adopted the European approach of an open community of collaboration based on expertise in the latest scientific methods.
Kitasato Shibasaburō (1853–1931) studied bacteriology in Germany under Robert Koch. In 1891 he founded the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo, which introduced the study of bacteriology to Japan. He and French researcher Alexandre Yersin went to Hong Kong in 1894, where; Kitasato confirmed Yersin's discovery that the bacterium Yersinia pestis is the agent of the plague. In 1897 he isolated and described the organism that caused dysentery. He became the first dean of medicine at Keio University, and the first president of the Japan Medical Association.
Japanese physicians immediately recognized the values of X-Rays. They were able to purchase the equipment locally from the Shimadzu Company, which developed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed X-Ray machines after 1900. Japan not only adopted German methods of public health in the home islands, but implemented them in its colonies, especially Korea and Taiwan, and after 1931 in Manchuria. A heavy investment in sanitation resulted in a dramatic increase of life expectancy.
The practice of medicine changed in the face of rapid advances in science, as well as new approaches by physicians. Hospital doctors began much more systematic analysis of patients' symptoms in diagnosis. Among the more powerful new techniques were anaesthesia, and the development of both antiseptic and aseptic operating theatres. Effective cures were developed for certain endemic infectious diseases. However, the decline in many of the most lethal diseases was due more to improvements in public health and nutrition than to advances in medicine.
Medicine was revolutionized in the 19th century and beyond by advances in chemistry, laboratory techniques, and equipment. Old ideas of infectious disease epidemiology were gradually replaced by advances in bacteriology and virology.
The Russian Orthodox Church sponsored seven orders of nursing sisters in the late 19th century. They ran hospitals, clinics, almshouses, pharmacies, and shelters as well as training schools for nurses. In the Soviet era (1917–1991), with the aristocratic sponsors gone, nursing became a low-prestige occupation based in poorly maintained hospitals.
Paris (France) and Vienna were the two leading medical centers on the Continent in the era 1750–1914.
In the 1770s–1850s Paris became a world center of medical research and teaching. The "Paris School" emphasized that teaching and research should be based in large hospitals and promoted the professionalization of the medical profession and the emphasis on sanitation and public health. A major reformer was Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756–1832), a physician who was Minister of Internal Affairs. He created the Paris Hospital, health councils, and other bodies.
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to treat milk and wine in order to prevent it from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. He worked chiefly in Paris and in 1887 founded the Pasteur Institute there to perpetuate his commitment to basic research and its practical applications. As soon as his institute was created, Pasteur brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by Emile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Emile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the Institut Pasteur, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques). It became the model for numerous research centers around the world named "Pasteur Institutes.
The First Viennese School of Medicine, 1750–1800, was led by the Dutchman Gerard van Swieten (1700–1772), who aimed to put medicine on new scientific foundations—promoting unprejudiced clinical observation, botanical and chemical research, and introducing simple but powerful remedies. When the Vienna General Hospital opened in 1784, it at once became the world's largest hospital and physicians acquired a facility that gradually developed into the most important research centre. Progress ended with the Napoleonic wars and the government shutdown in 1819 of all liberal journals and schools; this caused a general return to traditionalism and eclecticism in medicine.
Vienna was the capital of a diverse empire and attracted not just Germans but Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, Poles and others to its world-class medical facilities. After 1820 the Second Viennese School of Medicine emerged with the contributions of physicians such as Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, Josef Škoda, Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra, and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. Basic medical science expanded and specialization advanced. Furthermore, the first dermatology, eye, as well as ear, nose, and throat clinics in the world were founded in Vienna. The textbook of ophthalmologist Georg Joseph Beer (1763–1821) Lehre von den Augenkrankheiten combined practical research and philosophical speculations, and became the standard reference work for decades.
After 1871 Berlin, the capital of the new German Empire, became a leading center for medical research. Robert Koch (1843–1910) was a representative leader. He became famous for isolating Bacillus anthracis (1877), the Tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and Vibrio cholerae (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for his tuberculosis findings. Koch is one of the founders of microbiology, inspiring such major figures as Paul Ehrlich and Gerhard Domagk.
American Civil War
In the American Civil War (1861–65), as was typical of the 19th century, more soldiers died of disease than in battle, and even larger numbers were temporarily incapacitated by wounds, disease and accidents. Conditions were poor in the Confederacy, where doctors and medical supplies were in short supply. The war had a dramatic long-term impact on medicine in the U.S., from surgical technique to hospitals to nursing and to research facilities. Weapon development -particularly the appearance of Springfield Model 1861, mass-produced and much more accurate than muskets led to generals underestimating the risks of long range rifle fire; risks exemplified in the death of John Sedgwick and the disastrous Pickett's Charge. The rifles could shatter bone forcing amputation and longer ranges meant casualties were sometimes not quickly found. Evacuation of the wounded from Second Battle of Bull Run took a week. As in earlier wars, untreated casualties sometimes survived unexpectedly due to maggots debriding the wound -an observation which led to the surgical use of maggots -still a useful method in the absence of effective antibiotics.
The hygiene of the training and field camps was poor, especially at the beginning of the war when men who had seldom been far from home were brought together for training with thousands of strangers. First came epidemics of the childhood diseases of chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, and, especially, measles. Operations in the South meant a dangerous and new disease environment, bringing diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid fever, and malaria. There were no antibiotics, so the surgeons prescribed coffee, whiskey, and quinine. Harsh weather, bad water, inadequate shelter in winter quarters, poor policing of camps, and dirty camp hospitals took their toll.
This was a common scenario in wars from time immemorial, and conditions faced by the Confederate army were even worse. The Union responded by building army hospitals in every state. What was different in the Union was the emergence of skilled, well-funded medical organizers who took proactive action, especially in the much enlarged United States Army Medical Department, and the United States Sanitary Commission, a new private agency. Numerous other new agencies also targeted the medical and morale needs of soldiers, including the United States Christian Commission as well as smaller private agencies.
The U.S. Army learned many lessons and in August 1886, it established the Hospital Corps.
Johns Hopkins Hospital, founded in 1889, originated several modern medical practices, including residency and rounds.
The ABO blood group system was discovered in 1901 by Karl Landsteiner at the University of Vienna. Landsteiner experimented on his staff, mixing their various blood components together, and found that some people's blood agglutinated (clumped together) with other blood, whilst some did not. This then lead him identifying three blood groups, ABC, which would later be renamed to ABO. The less frequently found blood group AB was discovered later in 1902 by Alfred Von Decastello and Adriano Sturli. In 1937 Landsteiner and Alexander S. Wiener further discovered the Rh factor (misnamed from early thinking that this blood group was similar to that found in rhesus monkeys) whose antigens further determine blood reaction between people. This was demonstrated in a 1939 case study by Phillip Levine and Rufus Stetson where a mother who had recently given birth had reacted to their partner's blood, highlighting the Rh factor.
Canadian physician Norman Bethune, M.D. developed a mobile blood-transfusion service for frontline operations in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), but ironically, he himself died of sepsis.
In 1958, Arne Larsson in Sweden became the first patient to depend on an artificial cardiac pacemaker. He died in 2001 at age 86, having outlived its inventor, the surgeon, and 26 pacemakers.
Cancer treatment has been developed with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgical oncology.
X-ray imaging was the first kind of medical imaging, and later ultrasonic imaging, CT scanning, MR scanning and other imaging methods became available.
Prosthetics have improved with lightweight materials as well as neural prosthetics emerging in the end of the 20th century.
Oral rehydration therapy has been extensively used since the 1970s to treat cholera and other diarrhea-inducing infections.
As infectious diseases have become less lethal, and the most common causes of death in developed countries are now tumors and cardiovascular diseases, these conditions have received increased attention in medical research.
Starting in World War II, DDT was used as insecticide to combat insect vectors carrying malaria, which was endemic in most tropical regions of the world. The first goal was to protect soldiers, but it was widely adopted as a public health device. In Liberia, for example, the United States had large military operations during the war and the U.S. Public Health Service began the use of DDT for indoor residual spraying (IRS) and as a larvicide, with the goal of controlling malaria in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. In the early 1950s, the project was expanded to nearby villages. In 1953, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched an antimalaria program in parts of Liberia as a pilot project to determine the feasibility of malaria eradication in tropical Africa. However these projects encountered a spate of difficulties that foreshadowed the general retreat from malaria eradication efforts across tropical Africa by the mid-1960s.
The 1918 influenza pandemic was a global pandemic in the early 20th century that occurred between 1918 and 1920. Sometimes known as Spanish Flu due to popular opinion at the time thinking the flu originated from Spain, this pandemic caused close to 50 million deaths around the world. Spreading at the end of World War I.
Public health measures became particularly important during the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people around the world. It became an important case study in epidemiology. Bristow shows there was a gendered response of health caregivers to the pandemic in the United States. Male doctors were unable to cure the patients, and they felt like failures. Women nurses also saw their patients die, but they took pride in their success in fulfilling their professional role of caring for, ministering, comforting, and easing the last hours of their patients, and helping the families of the patients cope as well.
Evidence-based medicine is a modern concept, not introduced to literature until the 1990s.
The sexual revolution included taboo-breaking research in human sexuality such as the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports, invention of hormonal contraception, and the normalization of abortion and homosexuality in many countries. Family planning has promoted a demographic transition in most of the world. With threatening sexually transmitted infections, not least HIV, use of barrier contraception has become imperative. The struggle against HIV has improved antiretroviral treatments.
Tobacco smoking as a cause of lung cancer was first researched in the 1920s, but was not widely supported by publications until the 1950s.
Cardiac surgery was revolutionized in 1948 as open-heart surgery was introduced for the first time since 1925. In 1954 Joseph Murray, J. Hartwell Harrison and others accomplished the first kidney transplantation. Transplantations of other organs, such as heart, liver and pancreas, were also introduced during the later 20th century. The first partial face transplant was performed in 2005, and the first full one in 2010. By the end of the 20th century, microtechnology had been used to create tiny robotic devices to assist microsurgery using micro-video and fiber-optic cameras to view internal tissues during surgery with minimally invasive practices. Laparoscopic surgery was broadly introduced in the 1990s. Natural orifice surgery has followed.
During the 19th century, large-scale wars were attended with medics and mobile hospital units which developed advanced techniques for healing massive injuries and controlling infections rampant in battlefield conditions. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), General Pancho Villa organized hospital trains for wounded soldiers. Boxcars marked Servicio Sanitario ("sanitary service") were re-purposed as surgical operating theaters and areas for recuperation, and staffed by up to 40 Mexican and U.S. physicians. Severely wounded soldiers were shuttled back to base hospitals.
Thousands of scarred troops provided the need for improved prosthetic limbs and expanded techniques in plastic surgery or reconstructive surgery. Those practices were combined to broaden cosmetic surgery and other forms of elective surgery.
From 1917 to 1932, the American Red Cross moved into Europe with a battery of long-term child health projects. It built and operated hospitals and clinics, and organized antituberculosis and antityphus campaigns. A high priority involved child health programs such as clinics, better baby shows, playgrounds, fresh air camps, and courses for women on infant hygiene. Hundreds of U.S. doctors, nurses, and welfare professionals administered these programs, which aimed to reform the health of European youth and to reshape European public health and welfare along American lines.
The advances in medicine made a dramatic difference for Allied troops, while the Germans and especially the Japanese and Chinese suffered from a severe lack of newer medicines, techniques and facilities. Harrison finds that the chances of recovery for a badly wounded British infantryman were as much as 25 times better than in the First World War. The reason was that:
During the second World War, Alexis Carrel and Henry Dakin developed the Carrel-Dakin method of treating wounds with an irrigation, Dakin's solution, a germicide which helped prevent gangrene.
The War spurred the usage of Roentgen's X-ray, and the electrocardiograph, for the monitoring of internal bodily functions. This was followed in the inter-war period by the development of the first anti-bacterial agents such as the sulpha antibiotics.
Nazi and Japanese medical research
Unethical human subject research, and killing of patients with disabilities, peaked during the Nazi era, with Nazi human experimentation and Aktion T4 during the Holocaust as the most significant examples. Many of the details of these and related events were the focus of the Doctors' Trial. Subsequently, principles of medical ethics, such as the Nuremberg Code, were introduced to prevent a recurrence of such atrocities. After 1937, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare in China. In Unit 731, Japanese doctors and research scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on human beings, mostly Chinese victims.
The World Health Organization was founded in 1948 as a United Nations agency to improve global health. In most of the world, life expectancy has improved since then, and was about 67 years as of 2010, and well above 80 years in some countries. Eradication of infectious diseases is an international effort, and several new vaccines have been developed during the post-war years, against infections such as measles, mumps, several strains of influenza and human papilloma virus. The long-known vaccine against Smallpox finally eradicated the disease in the 1970s, and Rinderpest was wiped out in 2011. Eradication of polio is underway. Tissue culture is important for development of vaccines. Though the early success of antiviral vaccines and antibacterial drugs, antiviral drugs were not introduced until the 1970s. Through the WHO, the international community has developed a response protocol against epidemics, displayed during the SARS epidemic in 2003, the Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 from 2004, the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and onwards.
The discovery of penicillin in the 20th century by Alexander Fleming provided a vital line of defence against bacterical infections that, without them, often cause patients to suffer prelonged recovery periods and highly increased chances of death. Its discovery and application within medicine allowed previously impossible treatments to take place, including cancer treatments, organ transplants, to open heart surgery. Throughout the 20th century, though, their overprescribed use to humans, as well as to animals that need them due to the conditions of intensive animal farming, has led to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The early 21st century, facilitated by extensive global connections, international travel, and unprecedented human disruption of ecological systems, has been defined by a number of noval as well as continuing global pandemics from the 20th century.
The SARS 2002 to 2004 outbreak affected a number of countries around the world and killed hundreds. This outbreak gave rise to a number of lessons learnt from viral infection control, including more effective isolation room protocols to better hand washing techniques for medical staff. A mutated strain of SARS would go on to develop into COVID-19, causing the future COVID-19 pandemic. A significant influenza strain, H1N1, caused a further pandemic between 2009 and 2010. Known as swine flu, due to its indirect source from pigs, it went on to infect over 700 million people.
The continuing HIV pandemic, starting in 1981, has infected and led to the deaths of millions of people around the world. Emerging and improved pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) treatments that aim to reduce the spread of the disease have proven effective in limiting the spread of HIV alongside combined use of safe sex methods, sexual health education, needle exchange programmes, and sexual health screenings. Efforts to find a HIV vaccine are ongoing whilst health inequities have left certain population groups, like trans women, as well as resource limited regions, like sub-Saharan Africa, at greater risk of contracting HIV compared with, for example, developed countries.
The outbreak of COVID-19, starting in 2019, and subsequent declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO is a major pandemic event within the early 21st century. Causing global disruptions, millions of infections and deaths, the pandemic has caused suffering throughout communities. The pandemic has also seen some of the largest logistical organisations of goods, medical equipment, medical professionals, and military personnel since World War II that highlights its far-reaching impact.
The rise of personalised medicine in the 21st century has generated the possibility to develop diagnosis and treatments based on the individual characteristics of a person, rather than through generic practices that defined 20th century medicine. Areas like DNA sequencing, genetic mapping, gene therapy, imaging protocols, proteomics, stem cell therapy, and wireless health monitoring devices are all rising innovations that can help medical professionals fine tune treatment to the individual.
Remote surgery is another recent development, with the transatlantic Lindbergh operation in 2001 as a groundbreaking example.
Racism has a long history in how medicine has evolved and established itself, both in terms of racism experience upon patients, professionals, and wider systematic violence within medical institutions and systems. See: medical racism in the United States, race and health, and scientific racism.
Women have always served as healers and midwives since ancient times. However, the professionalization of medicine forced them increasingly to the sidelines. As hospitals multiplied they relied in Europe on orders of Roman Catholic nun-nurses, and German Protestant and Anglican deaconesses in the early 19th century. They were trained in traditional methods of physical care that involved little knowledge of medicine. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The history of medicine is the study and documentation of the evolution of medical treatments, practices, and knowledge over time. Medical historians often drawn from other humanities fields of study including economics, health sciences, sociology, and politics to better understand the institutions, practices, people, professions, and social systems that have shaped medicine. When a period which predates or lacks written sources regarding medicine, information is instead drawn from archaeological sources. This field tracks the evolution of human societies' approach to health, illness, and injury ranging from prehistory to the modern day, the events that shape these approaches, and their impact on populations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Early medical traditions include those of Babylon, China, Egypt and India.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Invention of the microscope was a consequence of improved understanding, during the Renaissance. Prior to the 19th century, humorism (also known as humoralism) was thought to explain the cause of disease but it was gradually replaced by the germ theory of disease, leading to effective treatments and even cures for many infectious diseases. Military doctors advanced the methods of trauma treatment and surgery. Public health measures were developed especially in the 19th century as the rapid growth of cities required systematic sanitary measures. Advanced research centers opened in the early 20th century, often connected with major hospitals. The mid-20th century was characterized by new biological treatments, such as antibiotics. These advancements, along with developments in chemistry, genetics, and radiography led to modern medicine. Medicine was heavily professionalized in the 20th century, and new careers opened to women as nurses (from the 1870s) and as physicians (especially after 1970).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Prehistoric medicine is a field of study focused on understanding the use of medicinal plants, healing practices, illnesses, and wellness of humans before written records existed. Although styled prehistoric \"medicine\", prehistoric healthcare practices were vastly different from what we understand medicine to be in the present era and more accurately refers to studies and exploration of early healing practices.",
"title": "Prehistoric medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "This period extends across the first use of stone tools by early humans c. 3.3 million years ago to the beginning of writing systems and subsequent recorded history c. 5000 years ago.",
"title": "Prehistoric medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "As human populations were once scattered across the world, forming isolated communities and cultures that sporadically interacted, a range of archaeological periods have been developed to account for the differing contexts of technology, sociocultural developments, and uptake of writing systems throughout early human societies. Prehistoric medicine is then highly contextual to the location and people in question, creating an ununiform period of study to reflect various degrees of societal development.",
"title": "Prehistoric medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Without written records, insights into prehistoric medicine comes indirectly from interpreting evidence left behind by prehistoric humans. One branch of this includes the archaeology of medicine; a discipline that utilises a range of archaeological techniques from observing illness in human remains, plant fossils, to excavations to uncover medical practices. There is evidence of healing practices within Neanderthals and other early human species. Prehistoric evidence of human engagement with medicine include the discovery of psychoactive plant sources such as psilocybin mushrooms in c. 6000 BCE Sahara to primitive dental care in c. 10,900 BCE (13,000 BP) Riparo Fredian (present-day Italy) and c. 7000 BCE Mehrgarh (present-day Pakistan).",
"title": "Prehistoric medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Anthropology is another academic branch that contributes to understanding prehistoric medicine in uncovering the sociocultural relationships, meaning, and interpretation of prehistoric evidence. The overlap of medicine as both a root to healing the body as well as the spiritual throughout prehistoric periods highlights the multiple purposes that healing practices and plants could potentially have. From proto-religions to developed spiritual systems, relationships of humans and supernatural entities, from Gods to shamans, have played an interwoven part in prehistoric medicine.",
"title": "Prehistoric medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ancient history covers time between c. 3000 BCE to c. 500 CE, starting from evidenced development of writing systems to the end of the classical era and beginning of the post-classical period. This periodisation presents history as if it were the same everywhere, however it is important to note that socioculture and technological developments could differ locally from settlement to settlement as well as globally from one society to the next.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Ancient medicine covers a similar period of time and presented a range of similar healing theories from across the world connecting nature, religion, and humans within ideas of circulating fluids and energy. Although prominent scholars and texts detailed well-defined medicial insights, their real-world applications were marred by knowledge destruction and loss, poor communication, localised reinterpretations, and subsequent inconsistent applications.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Mesopotamian region, covering much of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, was dominated by a series of civilisations including Sumer, the earliest known civilisation in the Fertile Crescent region, alongside the Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians). Overlapping ideas of what we now understand as medicine, science, magic, and religion characterised early Mesopotamian healing practices as a hybrid naturalistic and supernatural belief system.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Sumerians, having developed one of the earliest known writing systems in the 3rd millennium BCE, created numerous cuneiform clay tablets regarding their civilisation included detailed accounts of drug prescriptions, operations, to exorcisms. These were administered and carried out by highly defined professionals including bârû (seers), âs[h]ipu (exorcists), and asû (physician-priests). An example of an early, prescription-like medication appeared in Sumerian during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BCE – c. 2004 BCE).",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Following the conquest of the Sumerian civilisation by the Akkadian Empire and the empire's eventual collapse from a number of social and environmental factors, the Babylonian civilisation began to dominate the region. Examples of Babylonian medicine include the extensive Babylonian medical text, the Diagnostic Handbook, written by the ummânū, or chief scholar, Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, in the middle of the 11th century BCE during the reign of the Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina (1069–1046 BCE).",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "This medical treatise presented great attention to the practice of diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and remedies. The text contains a list of medical symptoms and often detailed empirical observations along with logical rules used in combining observed symptoms on the body of a patient with its diagnosis and prognosis. Here, clearly developed rationales were developed to understand the causes of disease and injury, supported by agreed upon theories at-the-time of elements we might now understand as natural causes, supernatural magic and religious explanations.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Most known and recovered artefacts from the ancient Mesopotamian civilisations centre on the neo-Assyrian (c. 900 - 600 BCE) and neo-Babylonian (c. 600 - 500 BCE) periods, as the last empires ruled by native Mesopotamian rulers. These discoveries include a huge array of medical clay tablets from this period, although damage to the clay documents creates large gaps in our understanding of medical practices.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Throughout the civilisations of Mesopotamia there is a wide range of medical innovations including evidenced practices of prophylaxis, taking measures to prevent the spread of disease, accounts of stroke, to an awareness of mental illnesses.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ancient Egypt, a civilisation spanning across the river Nile (throughout parts of present-day Egypt, Sudan, and South Sudan), existed from its unification in c. 3150 BCE to its collapse via Persian conquest in 525 BCE and ultimate downfall from the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Throughout unique dynasties, golden eras, and intermediate periods of instability, ancient Egyptians developed a complex, experimental, and communicative medical tradition that has been uncovered through surviving documents, most made of papyrus, such as the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the Ebers Papyrus, the London Medical Papyrus, to the Greek Magical Papyri.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Herodotus described the Egyptians as \"the healthiest of all men, next to the Libyans\", because of the dry climate and the notable public health system that they possessed. According to him, \"the practice of medicine is so specialized among them that each physician is a healer of one disease and no more.\" Although Egyptian medicine, to a considerable extent, dealt with the supernatural, it eventually developed a practical use in the fields of anatomy, public health, and clinical diagnostics.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Medical information in the Edwin Smith Papyrus may date to a time as early as 3000 BCE. Imhotep in the 3rd dynasty is sometimes credited with being the founder of ancient Egyptian medicine and with being the original author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus, detailing cures, ailments and anatomical observations. The Edwin Smith Papyrus is regarded as a copy of several earlier works and was written c. 1600 BCE. It is an ancient textbook on surgery almost completely devoid of magical thinking and describes in exquisite detail the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous ailments.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus treats women's complaints, including problems with conception. Thirty four cases detailing diagnosis and treatment survive, some of them fragmentarily. Dating to 1800 BCE, it is the oldest surviving medical text of any kind.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Medical institutions, referred to as Houses of Life are known to have been established in ancient Egypt as early as 2200 BCE.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Ebers Papyrus is the oldest written text mentioning enemas. Many medications were administered by enemas and one of the many types of medical specialists was an Iri, the Shepherd of the Anus.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The earliest known physician is also credited to ancient Egypt: Hesy-Ra, \"Chief of Dentists and Physicians\" for King Djoser in the 27th century BCE. Also, the earliest known woman physician, Peseshet, practiced in Ancient Egypt at the time of the 4th dynasty. Her title was \"Lady Overseer of the Lady Physicians.\"",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Medical and healing practices in early Chinese dynasties were heavily shaped by the practice of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Starting around the Zhou Dynasty, parts of this system were being developed and are demonstrated in early writings on herbs in Classic of Changes (Yi Jing) and Classic of Poetry (Shi Jing).",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "China also developed a large body of traditional medicine. Much of the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine derived from empirical observations of disease and illness by Taoist physicians and reflects the classical Chinese belief that individual human experiences express causative principles effective in the environment at all scales. These causative principles, whether material, essential, or mystical, correlate as the expression of the natural order of the universe.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The foundational text of Chinese medicine is the Huangdi neijing, (or Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), written 5th century to 3rd century BCE. Near the end of the 2nd century CE, during the Han dynasty, Zhang Zhongjing, wrote a Treatise on Cold Damage, which contains the earliest known reference to the Neijing Suwen. The Jin dynasty practitioner and advocate of acupuncture and moxibustion, Huangfu Mi (215–282), also quotes the Yellow Emperor in his Jiayi jing, c. 265. During the Tang dynasty, the Suwen was expanded and revised and is now the best extant representation of the foundational roots of traditional Chinese medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine that is based on the use of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage and other forms of therapy has been practiced in China for thousands of years.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Atharvaveda, a sacred text of Hinduism dating from the Early Iron Age, is one of the first Indian texts dealing with medicine. The Atharvaveda also contains prescriptions of herbs for various ailments. The use of herbs to treat ailments would later form a large part of Ayurveda.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Ayurveda, meaning the \"complete knowledge for long life\" is another medical system of India. Its two most famous texts belong to the schools of Charaka and Sushruta. The earliest foundations of Ayurveda were built on a synthesis of traditional herbal practices together with a massive addition of theoretical conceptualizations, new nosologies and new therapies dating from about 600 BCE onwards, and coming out of the communities of thinkers which included the Buddha and others.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "According to the compendium of Charaka, the Charakasamhitā, health and disease are not predetermined and life may be prolonged by human effort. The compendium of Suśruta, the Suśrutasamhitā defines the purpose of medicine to cure the diseases of the sick, protect the healthy, and to prolong life. Both these ancient compendia include details of the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous ailments. The Suśrutasamhitā is notable for describing procedures on various forms of surgery, including rhinoplasty, the repair of torn ear lobes, perineal lithotomy, cataract surgery, and several other excisions and other surgical procedures. Most remarkable was Susruta's surgery specially the rhinoplasty for which he is called father of modern plastic surgery. Susruta also described more than 125 surgical instruments in detail. Also remarkable is Sushruta's penchant for scientific classification: His medical treatise consists of 184 chapters, 1,120 conditions are listed, including injuries and illnesses relating to aging and mental illness.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Ayurvedic classics mention eight branches of medicine: kāyācikitsā (internal medicine), śalyacikitsā (surgery including anatomy), śālākyacikitsā (eye, ear, nose, and throat diseases), kaumārabhṛtya (pediatrics with obstetrics and gynaecology), bhūtavidyā (spirit and psychiatric medicine), agada tantra (toxicology with treatments of stings and bites), rasāyana (science of rejuvenation), and vājīkaraṇa (aphrodisiac and fertility). Apart from learning these, the student of Āyurveda was expected to know ten arts that were indispensable in the preparation and application of his medicines: distillation, operative skills, cooking, horticulture, metallurgy, sugar manufacture, pharmacy, analysis and separation of minerals, compounding of metals, and preparation of alkalis. The teaching of various subjects was done during the instruction of relevant clinical subjects. For example, the teaching of anatomy was a part of the teaching of surgery, embryology was a part of training in pediatrics and obstetrics, and the knowledge of physiology and pathology was interwoven in the teaching of all the clinical disciplines. The normal length of the student's training appears to have been seven years. But the physician was to continue to learn.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Humors",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The theory of humors was derived from ancient medical works, dominated Western medicine until the 19th century, and is credited to Greek philosopher and surgeon Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216 CE). In Greek medicine, there are thought to be four humors, or bodily fluids that are linked to illness: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Early scientists believed that food is digested into blood, muscle, and bones, while the humors that weren't blood were then formed by indigestible materials that are left over. An excess or shortage of any one of the four humors is theorized to cause an imbalance that results in sickness; the aforementioned statement was hypothesized by sources before Hippocrates. Hippocrates (c. 400 BCE) deduced that the four seasons of the year and four ages of man that affect the body in relation to the humors. The four ages of man are childhood, youth, prime age, and old age. The four humors as associated with the four seasons are black bile – autumn, yellow bile – summer, phlegm – winter and blood – spring.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In De temperamentis, Galen linked what he called temperaments, or personality characteristics, to a person's natural mixture of humors. He also said that the best place to check the balance of temperaments was in the palm of the hand. A person that is considered to be phlegmatic is said to be an introvert, even-tempered, calm, and peaceful. This person would have an excess of phlegm, which is described as a viscous substance or mucous. Similarly, a melancholic temperament related to being moody, anxious, depressed, introverted, and pessimistic. A melancholic temperament is caused by an excess of black bile, which is sedimentary and dark in color. Being extroverted, talkative, easygoing, carefree, and sociable coincides with a sanguine temperament, which is linked to too much blood. Finally, a choleric temperament is related to too much yellow bile, which is actually red in color and has the texture of foam; it is associated with being aggressive, excitable, impulsive, and also extroverted.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "There are numerous ways to treat a disproportion of the humors. For example, if someone was suspected to have too much blood, then the physician would perform bloodletting as a treatment. Likewise, if a person that had too much phlegm would feel better after expectorating, and someone with too much yellow bile would purge. Another factor to be considered in the balance of humors is the quality of air in which one resides, such as the climate and elevation. Also, the standard of food and drink, balance of sleeping and waking, exercise and rest, retention and evacuation are important. Moods such as anger, sadness, joy, and love can affect the balance. During that time, the importance of balance was demonstrated by the fact that women lose blood monthly during menstruation, and have a lesser occurrence of gout, arthritis, and epilepsy then men do. Galen also hypothesized that there are three faculties. The natural faculty affects growth and reproduction and is produced in the liver. Animal or vital faculty controls respiration and emotion, coming from the heart. In the brain, the psychic faculty commands the senses and thought. The structure of bodily functions is related to the humors as well. Greek physicians understood that food was cooked in the stomach; this is where the nutrients are extracted. The best, most potent and pure nutrients from food are reserved for blood, which is produced in the liver and carried through veins to organs. Blood enhanced with pneuma, which means wind or breath, is carried by the arteries. The path that blood take is as follows: venous blood passes through the vena cava and is moved into the right ventricle of the heart; then, the pulmonary artery takes it to the lungs. Later, the pulmonary vein then mixes air from the lungs with blood to form arterial blood, which has different observable characteristics. After leaving the liver, half of the yellow bile that is produced travels to the blood, while the other half travels to the gallbladder. Similarly, half of the black bile produced gets mixed in with blood, and the other half is used by the spleen.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "People",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Around 800 BCE Homer in the Iliad gives descriptions of wound treatment by the two sons of Asklepios, the admirable physicians Podaleirius and Machaon and one acting doctor, Patroclus. Because Machaon is wounded and Podaleirius is in combat Eurypylus asks Patroclus to \"cut out the arrow-head, and wash the dark blood from my thigh with warm water, and sprinkle soothing herbs with power to heal on my wound\". Asklepios, like Imhotep, came to be associated as a god of healing over time.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius, known as Asclepieia (Ancient Greek: Ἀσκληπιεῖα, sing. Ἀσκληπιεῖον, Asclepieion), functioned as centers of medical advice, prognosis, and healing. At these shrines, patients would enter a dream-like state of induced sleep known as enkoimesis (ἐγκοίμησις) not unlike anesthesia, in which they either received guidance from the deity in a dream or were cured by surgery. Asclepeia provided carefully controlled spaces conducive to healing and fulfilled several of the requirements of institutions created for healing. In the Asclepeion of Epidaurus, three large marble boards dated to 350 BCE preserve the names, case histories, complaints, and cures of about 70 patients who came to the temple with a problem and shed it there. Some of the surgical cures listed, such as the opening of an abdominal abscess or the removal of traumatic foreign material, are realistic enough to have taken place, but with the patient in a state of enkoimesis induced with the help of soporific substances such as opium. Alcmaeon of Croton wrote on medicine between 500 and 450 BCE. He argued that channels linked the sensory organs to the brain, and it is possible that he discovered one type of channel, the optic nerves, by dissection.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE), considered the \"father of modern medicine.\" The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of around seventy early medical works from ancient Greece strongly associated with Hippocrates and his students. Most famously, the Hippocratics invented the Hippocratic Oath for physicians. Contemporary physicians swear an oath of office which includes aspects found in early editions of the Hippocratic Oath.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Hippocrates and his followers were first to describe many diseases and medical conditions. Though humorism (humoralism) as a medical system predates 5th-century Greek medicine, Hippocrates and his students systematized the thinking that illness can be explained by an imbalance of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Hippocrates is given credit for the first description of clubbing of the fingers, an important diagnostic sign in chronic suppurative lung disease, lung cancer and cyanotic heart disease. For this reason, clubbed fingers are sometimes referred to as \"Hippocratic fingers\". Hippocrates was also the first physician to describe the Hippocratic face in Prognosis. Shakespeare famously alludes to this description when writing of Falstaff's death in Act II, Scene iii. of Henry V. Hippocrates began to categorize illnesses as acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic, and use terms such as, \"exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, peak, and convalescence.\"",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Greek Galen (c. 129–216 CE) was one of the greatest physicians of the ancient world, as his theories dominated all medical studies for nearly 1500 years. His theories and experimentation laid the foundation for modern medicine surrounding the heart and blood. Galen's influence and innovations in medicine can be attributed to the experiments he conducted, which were unlike any other medical experiments of his time. Galen strongly believed that medical dissection was one of the essential procedures in truly understanding medicine. He began to dissect different animals that were anatomically similar to humans, which allowed him to learn more about the internal organs and extrapolate the surgical studies to the human body. In addition, he performed many audacious operations—including brain and eye surgeries—that were not tried again for almost two millennia. Through the dissections and surgical procedures, Galen concluded that blood is able to circulate throughout the human body, and the heart is most similar to the human soul. In Ars medica (\"Arts of Medicine\"), he further explains the mental properties in terms of specific mixtures of the bodily organs. While much of his work surrounded the physical anatomy, he also worked heavily in humoral physiology.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Galen's medical work was regarded as authoritative until well into the Middle Ages. He left a physiological model of the human body that became the mainstay of the medieval physician's university anatomy curriculum. Although he attempted to extrapolate the animal dissections towards the model of the human body, some of Galen's theories were incorrect. This caused his model to suffer greatly from stasis and intellectual stagnation. Greek and Roman taboos caused dissection of the human body to usually be banned in ancient times, but in the Middle Ages it changed.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1523 Galen's On the Natural Faculties was published in London. In the 1530s Belgian anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius launched a project to translate many of Galen's Greek texts into Latin. Vesalius's most famous work, De humani corporis fabrica was greatly influenced by Galenic writing and form.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Herophilus and Erasistratus",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Two great Alexandrians laid the foundations for the scientific study of anatomy and physiology, Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos. Other Alexandrian surgeons gave us ligature (hemostasis), lithotomy, hernia operations, ophthalmic surgery, plastic surgery, methods of reduction of dislocations and fractures, tracheotomy, and mandrake as an anaesthetic. Some of what we know of them comes from Celsus and Galen of Pergamum.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Herophilus of Chalcedon, the renowned Alexandrian physician, was one of the pioneers of human anatomy. Though his knowledge of the anatomical structure of the human body was vast, he specialized in the aspects of neural anatomy. Thus, his experimentation was centered around the anatomical composition of the blood-vascular system and the pulsations that can be analyzed from the system. Furthermore, the surgical experimentation he administered caused him to become very prominent throughout the field of medicine, as he was one of the first physicians to initiate the exploration and dissection of the human body.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The banned practice of human dissection was lifted during his time within the scholastic community. This brief moment in the history of Greek medicine allowed him to further study the brain, which he believed was the core of the nervous system. He also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse and the former do not. Thus, while working at the medical school of Alexandria, Herophilus placed intelligence in the brain based on his surgical exploration of the body, and he connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. In addition, he and his contemporary, Erasistratus of Chios, continued to research the role of veins and nerves. After conducting extensive research, the two Alexandrians mapped out the course of the veins and nerves across the human body. Erasistratus connected the increased complexity of the surface of the human brain compared to other animals to its superior intelligence. He sometimes employed experiments to further his research, at one time repeatedly weighing a caged bird, and noting its weight loss between feeding times. In Erasistratus' physiology, air enters the body, is then drawn by the lungs into the heart, where it is transformed into vital spirit, and is then pumped by the arteries throughout the body. Some of this vital spirit reaches the brain, where it is transformed into animal spirit, which is then distributed by the nerves.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Romans invented numerous surgical instruments, including the first instruments unique to women, as well as the surgical uses of forceps, scalpels, cautery, cross-bladed scissors, the surgical needle, the sound, and speculas. Romans also performed cataract surgery.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Roman army physician Dioscorides (c. 40–90 CE), was a Greek botanist and pharmacologist. He wrote the encyclopedia De Materia Medica describing over 600 herbal cures, forming an influential pharmacopoeia which was used extensively for the following 1,500 years.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Early Christians in the Roman Empire incorporated medicine into their theology, ritual practices, and metaphors.",
"title": "Ancient medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Byzantine medicine",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Byzantine medicine encompasses the common medical practices of the Byzantine Empire from about 400 CE to 1453 CE. Byzantine medicine was notable for building upon the knowledge base developed by its Greco-Roman predecessors. In preserving medical practices from antiquity, Byzantine medicine influenced Islamic medicine as well as fostering the Western rebirth of medicine during the Renaissance.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Byzantine physicians often compiled and standardized medical knowledge into textbooks. Their records tended to include both diagnostic explanations and technical drawings. The Medical Compendium in Seven Books, written by the leading physician Paul of Aegina, survived as a particularly thorough source of medical knowledge. This compendium, written in the late seventh century, remained in use as a standard textbook for the following 800 years.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Late antiquity ushered in a revolution in medical science, and historical records often mention civilian hospitals (although battlefield medicine and wartime triage were recorded well before Imperial Rome). Constantinople stood out as a center of medicine during the Middle Ages, which was aided by its crossroads location, wealth, and accumulated knowledge.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The first ever known example of separating conjoined twins occurred in the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century. The next example of separating conjoined twins would be recorded many centuries later in Germany in 1689.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Byzantine Empire's neighbors, the Persian Sassanid Empire, also made their noteworthy contributions mainly with the establishment of the Academy of Gondeshapur, which was \"the most important medical center of the ancient world during the 6th and 7th centuries.\" In addition, Cyril Elgood, British physician and a historian of medicine in Persia, commented that thanks to medical centers like the Academy of Gondeshapur, \"to a very large extent, the credit for the whole hospital system must be given to Persia.\"",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Islamic medicine",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Islamic civilization rose to primacy in medical science as its physicians contributed significantly to the field of medicine, including anatomy, ophthalmology, pharmacology, pharmacy, physiology, and surgery. Islamic civilization's contribution to these fields within medicine was a gradual process that took hundreds of years. During the time of the first great Muslim dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE), these fields that were in their very early stages of development, and not much progress was made. One reason for the limited advancement in medicine during the Umayyad Caliphate was the Caliphate's focus on expansion after the death of Prophet Muhammad (632 CE). The focus on expansionism redirected resources from other fields, such as medicine. The priority on these factors led a dense amount of the population to believe that God will provide cures for their illnesses and diseases because of the attention on spirituality.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "There were also many other areas of interest during that time before there was a rising interest in the field of medicine. Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the fifth caliph of the Umayyad, developed governmental administration, adopted Arabic as the main language, and focused on many other areas. However, this rising interest in Islamic medicine grew significantly when the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE) overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 CE. This change in dynasty from the Umayyad Caliphate to the Abbasid Caliphate served as a turning point towards scientific and medical developments. A big contributor to this is because, under Abbasid rule, there was a great part of the Greek legacy that was transmitted into Arabic which by then, was the main language of Islamic nations. Because of this, many Islamic physicians were heavily influenced by the works of Greek scholars of Alexandria and Egypt and were able to further expand on those texts to produce new medical pieces of knowledge. This period of time is also known as the Islamic Golden Age where there was a period of development for development and flourishments of technology, commerce, and sciences including medicine. Additionally, during this time the creation of the first Islamic Hospital in 805 CE by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad was recounted as a glorious event of the Golden Age. This hospital in Baghdad contributed immensely to Baghdad's success and also provided educational opportunities for Islamic physicians. During the Islamic Golden Age, there were many famous Islamic physicians that paved the way for medical advancements and understandings. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (965-1040 CE), sometimes referred to as the father of modern optics, is the author of the monumental Book of Optics and also was known for his work in differentiating smallpox from measles. However, this would not be possible without the influence from many different areas of the world that influenced the Arabs.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Arabs were influenced by ancient Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine medical practices, and helped them develop further.Galen & Hippocrates were pre-eminent authorities. The translation of 129 of Galen's works into Arabic by the Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his assistants, and in particular Galen's insistence on a rational systematic approach to medicine, set the template for Islamic medicine, which rapidly spread throughout the Arab Empire. Its most famous physicians included the Persian polymaths Muhammad ibn Zakarīya al-Rāzi and Avicenna, who wrote more than 40 works on health, medicine, and well-being. Taking leads from Greece and Rome, Islamic scholars kept both the art and science of medicine alive and moving forward. Persian polymath Avicenna has also been called the \"father of medicine\". He wrote The Canon of Medicine which became a standard medical text at many medieval European universities, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine. The Canon of Medicine presents an overview of the contemporary medical knowledge of the medieval Islamic world, which had been influenced by earlier traditions including Greco-Roman medicine (particularly Galen), Persian medicine, Chinese medicine and Indian medicine. Persian physician al-Rāzi was one of the first to question the Greek theory of humorism, which nevertheless remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine. Some volumes of al-Rāzi's work Al-Mansuri, namely \"On Surgery\" and \"A General Book on Therapy\", became part of the medical curriculum in European universities. Additionally, he has been described as a doctor's doctor, the father of pediatrics, and a pioneer of ophthalmology. For example, he was the first to recognize the reaction of the eye's pupil to light.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In addition to contributions to humanity's understanding of human anatomy, Islamicate scientists and scholars, physicians specifically, played an invaluable role in the development of the modern hospital system, creating the foundations on which more contemporary medical professionals would build models of public health systems in Europe and elsewhere. During the time of the Safavid empire (16th–18th centuries) in Iran and the Mughal empire (16th–19th centuries) in India, Muslim scholars radically transformed the institution of the hospital, creating an environment in which rapidly developing medical knowledge of the time could be passed among students and teachers from a wide range of cultures. There were two main schools of thought with patient care at the time. These included humoral physiology from the Persians and Ayurvedic practice. After these theories were translated from Sanskrit to Persian and vice-versa, hospitals could have a mix of culture and techniques. This allowed for a sense of collaborative medicine. Hospitals became increasingly common during this period as wealthy patrons commonly founded them. Many features that are still in use today, such as an emphasis on hygiene, a staff fully dedicated to the care of patients, and separation of individual patients from each other were developed in Islamicate hospitals long before they came into practice in Europe. At the time, the patient care aspects of hospitals in Europe had not taken effect. European hospitals were places of religion rather than institutions of science. As was the case with much of the scientific work done by Islamicate scholars, many of these novel developments in medical practice were transmitted to European cultures hundreds of years after they had long been used throughout the Islamicate world. Although Islamicate scientists were responsible for discovering much of the knowledge that allows the hospital system to function safely today, European scholars who built on this work still receive the majority of the credit historically.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Before the development of scientific medical practices in the Islamicate empires, medical care was mainly performed by religious figures such as priests. Without a profound understanding of how infectious diseases worked and why sickness spread from person to person, these early attempts at caring for the ill and injured often did more harm than good. Contrarily, with the development of new and safer practices by Islamicate scholars and physicians in Arabian hospitals, ideas vital for the effective care of patients were developed, learned, and transmitted widely. Hospitals developed novel \"concepts and structures\" which are still in use today: separate wards for male and female patients, pharmacies, medical record-keeping, and personal and institutional sanitation and hygiene. Much of this knowledge was recorded and passed on through Islamicate medical texts, many of which were carried to Europe and translated for the use of European medical workers. The Tasrif, written by surgeon Abu Al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, was translated into Latin; it became one of the most important medical texts in European universities during the Middle Ages and contained useful information on surgical techniques and spread of bacterial infection.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The hospital was a typical institution included in the majority of Muslim cities, and although they were often physically attached to religious institutions, they were not themselves places of religious practice. Rather, they served as facilities in which education and scientific innovation could flourish. If they had places of worship, they were secondary to the medical side of the hospital. Islamicate hospitals, along with observatories used for astronomical science, were some of the most important points of exchange for the spread of scientific knowledge. Undoubtedly, the hospital system developed in the Islamicate world played an invaluable role in the creation and evolution of the hospitals we as a society know and depend on today.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "After 400 CE, the study and practice of medicine in the Western Roman Empire went into deep decline. Medical services were provided, especially for the poor, in the thousands of monastic hospitals that sprang up across Europe, but the care was rudimentary and mainly palliative. Most of the writings of Galen and Hippocrates were lost to the West, with the summaries and compendia of St. Isidore of Seville being the primary channel for transmitting Greek medical ideas. The Carolingian Renaissance brought increased contact with Byzantium and a greater awareness of ancient medicine, but only with the Renaissance of the 12th century and the new translations coming from Muslim and Jewish sources in Spain, and the fifteenth-century flood of resources after the fall of Constantinople did the West fully recover its acquaintance with classical antiquity.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Greek and Roman taboos had meant that dissection was usually banned in ancient times, but in the Middle Ages it changed: medical teachers and students at Bologna began to open human bodies, and Mondino de Luzzi (c. 1275–1326) produced the first known anatomy textbook based on human dissection.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Wallis identifies a prestige hierarchy with university educated physicians on top, followed by learned surgeons; craft-trained surgeons; barber surgeons; itinerant specialists such as dentist and oculists; empirics; and midwives.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The first medical schools were opened in the 9th century, most notably the Schola Medica Salernitana at Salerno in southern Italy. The cosmopolitan influences from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew sources gave it an international reputation as the Hippocratic City. Students from wealthy families came for three years of preliminary studies and five of medical studies. The medicine, following the laws of Federico II, that he founded in 1224 the university and improved the Schola Salernitana, in the period between 1200 and 1400, it had in Sicily (so-called Sicilian Middle Ages) a particular development so much to create a true school of Jewish medicine.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "As a result of which, after a legal examination, was conferred to a Jewish Sicilian woman, Virdimura, wife of another physician Pasquale of Catania, the historical record of before woman officially trained to exercise of the medical profession.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "At the University of Bologna the training of physicians began in 1219. The Italian city attracted students from across Europe. Taddeo Alderotti built a tradition of medical education that established the characteristic features of Italian learned medicine and was copied by medical schools elsewhere.Turisanus (d. 1320) was his student.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The University of Padua was founded about 1220 by walkouts from the University of Bologna, and began teaching medicine in 1222. It played a leading role in the identification and treatment of diseases and ailments, specializing in autopsies and the inner workings of the body. Starting in 1595, Padua's famous anatomical theatre drew artists and scientists studying the human body during public dissections. The intensive study of Galen led to critiques of Galen modeled on his own writing, as in the first book of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica. Andreas Vesalius held the chair of Surgery and Anatomy (explicator chirurgiae) and in 1543 published his anatomical discoveries in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. He portrayed the human body as an interdependent system of organ groupings. The book triggered great public interest in dissections and caused many other European cities to establish anatomical theatres.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "By the thirteenth century, the medical school at Montpellier began to eclipse the Salernitan school. In the 12th century, universities were founded in Italy, France, and England, which soon developed schools of medicine. The University of Montpellier in France and Italy's University of Padua and University of Bologna were leading schools. Nearly all the learning was from lectures and readings in Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Aristotle. In later centuries, the importance of universities founded in the late Middle Ages gradually increased, e.g. Charles University in Prague (established in 1348), Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1364), University of Vienna (1365), Heidelberg University (1386) and University of Greifswald (1456).",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1376, in Sicily, it was historically given, in relationship to the laws of Federico II that they foresaw an examination with a regal errand of physicists, the first qualification to the exercise of the medicine to a woman, Virdimura a Jewish woman of Catania, whose document is preserved in Palermo to the Italian national archives.",
"title": "Post-classical medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "England",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In England, there were but three small hospitals after 1550. Pelling and Webster estimate that in London in the 1580 to 1600 period, out of a population of nearly 200,000 people, there were about 500 medical practitioners. Nurses and midwives are not included. There were about 50 physicians, 100 licensed surgeons, 100 apothecaries, and 250 additional unlicensed practitioners. In the last category about 25% were women. All across England—and indeed all of the world—the vast majority of the people in city, town or countryside depended for medical care on local amateurs with no professional training but with a reputation as wise healers who could diagnose problems and advise sick people what to do—and perhaps set broken bones, pull a tooth, give some traditional herbs or brews or perform a little magic to cure what ailed them.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The Renaissance brought an intense focus on scholarship to Christian Europe. A major effort to translate the Arabic and Greek scientific works into Latin emerged. Europeans gradually became experts not only in the ancient writings of the Romans and Greeks, but in the contemporary writings of Islamic scientists. During the later centuries of the Renaissance came an increase in experimental investigation, particularly in the field of dissection and body examination, thus advancing our knowledge of human anatomy.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "At the University of Bologna the curriculum was revised and strengthened in 1560–1590. A representative professor was Julius Caesar Aranzi (Arantius) (1530–1589). He became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Bologna in 1556, where he established anatomy as a major branch of medicine for the first time. Aranzi combined anatomy with a description of pathological processes, based largely on his own research, Galen, and the work of his contemporary Italians. Aranzi discovered the 'Nodules of Aranzio' in the semilunar valves of the heart and wrote the first description of the superior levator palpebral and the coracobrachialis muscles. His books (in Latin) covered surgical techniques for many conditions, including hydrocephalus, nasal polyp, goitre and tumours to phimosis, ascites, haemorrhoids, anal abscess and fistulae.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Women",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Catholic women played large roles in health and healing in medieval and early modern Europe. A life as a nun was a prestigious role; wealthy families provided dowries for their daughters, and these funded the convents, while the nuns provided free nursing care for the poor.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Catholic elites provided hospital services because of their theology of salvation that good works were the route to heaven. The Protestant reformers rejected the notion that rich men could gain God's grace through good works—and thereby escape purgatory—by providing cash endowments to charitable institutions. They also rejected the Catholic idea that the poor patients earned grace and salvation through their suffering. Protestants generally closed all the convents and most of the hospitals, sending women home to become housewives, often against their will. On the other hand, local officials recognized the public value of hospitals, and some were continued in Protestant lands, but without monks or nuns and in the control of local governments.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In London, the crown allowed two hospitals to continue their charitable work, under nonreligious control of city officials. The convents were all shut down but Harkness finds that women—some of them former nuns—were part of a new system that delivered essential medical services to people outside their family. They were employed by parishes and hospitals, as well as by private families, and provided nursing care as well as some medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical services.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Meanwhile, in Catholic lands such as France, rich families continued to fund convents and monasteries, and enrolled their daughters as nuns who provided free health services to the poor. Nursing was a religious role for the nurse, and there was little call for science.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In the 18th century, during the Qing dynasty, there was a proliferation of popular books as well as more advanced encyclopedias on traditional medicine. Jesuit missionaries introduced Western science and medicine to the royal court, although the Chinese physicians ignored them.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Unani medicine was developed in India throughout the medieval and early modern age. It progressed during the Indian Sultanate and Mughal periods. Unani medicine is very close to Ayurveda. Both are based on the theory of the presence of the elements (in Unani, they are considered to be fire, water, earth, and air) in the human body. According to followers of Unani medicine, these elements are present in different fluids and their balance leads to health and their imbalance leads to illness.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "By the 18th century CE, Sanskrit medical wisdom still dominated. Muslim rulers built large hospitals in 1595 in Hyderabad, and in Delhi in 1719, and numerous commentaries on ancient texts were written.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "European Age of Enlightenment",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "During the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th century, science was held in high esteem and physicians upgraded their social status by becoming more scientific. The health field was crowded with self-trained barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, drug peddlers, and charlatans.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Across Europe medical schools relied primarily on lectures and readings. The final year student would have limited clinical experience by trailing the professor through the wards. Laboratory work was uncommon, and dissections were rarely done because of legal restrictions on cadavers. Most schools were small, and only Edinburgh Medical School, Scotland, with 11,000 alumni, produced large numbers of graduates.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Spain and the Spanish Empire",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In the Spanish Empire, the viceregal capital of Mexico City was a site of medical training for physicians and the creation of hospitals. Epidemic disease had decimated indigenous populations starting with the early sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, when a black auxiliary in the armed forces of conqueror Hernán Cortés, with an active case of smallpox, set off a virgin land epidemic among indigenous peoples, Spanish allies and enemies alike. Aztec emperor Cuitlahuac died of smallpox. Disease was a significant factor in the Spanish conquest elsewhere as well.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Medical education instituted at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico chiefly served the needs of urban elites. Male and female curanderos or lay practitioners, attended to the ills of the popular classes. The Spanish crown began regulating the medical profession just a few years after the conquest, setting up the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicato, a board for licensing medical personnel in 1527. Licensing became more systematic after 1646 with physicians, druggists, surgeons, and bleeders requiring a license before they could publicly practice. Crown regulation of medical practice became more general in the Spanish empire.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Elites and the popular classes alike called on divine intervention in personal and society-wide health crises, such as the epidemic of 1737. The intervention of the Virgin of Guadalupe was depicted in a scene of dead and dying Indians, with elites on their knees praying for her aid. In the late eighteenth century, the crown began implementing secularizing policies on the Iberian peninsula and its overseas empire to control disease more systematically and scientifically.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Spanish Quest for Medicinal Spices",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Botanical medicines also became popular during the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Spanish pharmaceutical books during this time contain medicinal recipes consisting of spices, herbs, and other botanical products. For example, nutmeg oil was documented for curing stomach ailments and cardamom oil was believed to relieve intestinal ailments. During the rise of the global trade market, spices and herbs, along with many other goods, that were indigenous to different territories began to appear in different locations across the globe. Herbs and spices were especially popular for their utility in cooking and medicines. As a result of this popularity and increased demand for spices, some areas in Asia, like China and Indonesia, became hubs for spice cultivation and trade. The Spanish Empire also wanted to benefit from the international spice trade, so they looked towards their American colonies.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The Spanish American colonies became an area where the Spanish searched to discover new spices and indigenous American medicinal recipes. The Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, is a major contribution to the history of Nahua medicine. The Spanish did discover many spices and herbs new to them, some of which were reportedly similar to Asian spices. A Spanish physician by the name of Nicolás Monardes studied many of the American spices coming into Spain. He documented many of the new American spices and their medicinal properties in his survey Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales. For example, Monardes describes the \"Long Pepper\" (Pimienta luenga), found along the coasts of the countries that are now known Panama and Colombia, as a pepper that was more flavorful, healthy, and spicy in comparison to the Eastern black pepper. The Spanish interest in American spices can first be seen in the commissioning of the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, which was a Spanish-American codex describing indigenous American spices and herbs and describing the ways that these were used in natural Aztec medicines. The codex was commissioned in the year 1552 by Francisco de Mendoza, the son of Antonio de Mendoza, who was the first Viceroy of New Spain. Francisco de Mendoza was interested in studying the properties of these herbs and spices, so that he would be able to profit from the trade of these herbs and the medicines that could be produced by them.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Francisco de Mendoza recruited the help of Monardez in studying the traditional medicines of the indigenous people living in what was then the Spanish colonies. Monardez researched these medicines and performed experiments to discover the possibilities of spice cultivation and medicine creation in the Spanish colonies. The Spanish transplanted some herbs from Asia, but only a few foreign crops were successfully grown in the Spanish Colonies. One notable crop brought from Asia and successfully grown in the Spanish colonies was ginger, as it was considered Hispaniola's number 1 crop at the end of the 16th Century. The Spanish Empire did profit from cultivating herbs and spices, but they also introduced pre-Columbian American medicinal knowledge to Europe. Other Europeans were inspired by the actions of Spain and decided to try to establish a botanical transplant system in colonies that they controlled, however, these subsequent attempts were not successful.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "United Kingdom and the British Empire",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The London Dispensary opened in 1696, the first clinic in the British Empire to dispense medicines to poor sick people. The innovation was slow to catch on, but new dispensaries were open in the 1770s. In the colonies, small hospitals opened in Philadelphia in 1752, New York in 1771, and Boston (Massachusetts General Hospital) in 1811.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Guy's Hospital, the first great British hospital with a modern foundation opened in 1721 in London, with funding from businessman Thomas Guy. It had been preceded by St Bartholomew's Hospital and St Thomas's Hospital, both medieval foundations. In 1821 a bequest of £200,000 by William Hunt in 1829 funded expansion for an additional hundred beds at Guy's. Samuel Sharp (1709–78), a surgeon at Guy's Hospital from 1733 to 1757, was internationally famous; his A Treatise on the Operations of Surgery (1st ed., 1739), was the first British study focused exclusively on operative technique.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "English physician Thomas Percival (1740–1804) wrote a comprehensive system of medical conduct, Medical Ethics; or, a Code of Institutes and Precepts, Adapted to the Professional Conduct of Physicians and Surgeons (1803) that set the standard for many textbooks.",
"title": "Early modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "In the 1830s in Italy, Agostino Bassi traced the silkworm disease muscardine to microorganisms. Meanwhile, in Germany, Theodor Schwann led research on alcoholic fermentation by yeast, proposing that living microorganisms were responsible. Leading chemists, such as Justus von Liebig, seeking solely physicochemical explanations, derided this claim and alleged that Schwann was regressing to vitalism.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In 1847 in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), dramatically reduced the death rate of new mothers (due to childbed fever) by requiring physicians to clean their hands before attending childbirth, yet his principles were marginalized and attacked by professional peers. At that time most people still believed that infections were caused by foul odors called miasmas.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "French scientist Louis Pasteur confirmed Schwann's fermentation experiments in 1857 and afterwards supported the hypothesis that yeast were microorganisms. Moreover, he suggested that such a process might also explain contagious disease. In 1860, Pasteur's report on bacterial fermentation of butyric acid motivated fellow Frenchman Casimir Davaine to identify a similar species (which he called bacteridia) as the pathogen of the deadly disease anthrax. Others dismissed \"bacteridia\" as a mere byproduct of the disease. British surgeon Joseph Lister, however, took these findings seriously and subsequently introduced antisepsis to wound treatment in 1865.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "German physician Robert Koch, noting fellow German Ferdinand Cohn's report of a spore stage of a certain bacterial species, traced the life cycle of Davaine's bacteridia, identified spores, inoculated laboratory animals with them, and reproduced anthrax—a breakthrough for experimental pathology and germ theory of disease. Pasteur's group added ecological investigations confirming spores' role in the natural setting, while Koch published a landmark treatise in 1878 on the bacterial pathology of wounds. In 1881, Koch reported discovery of the \"tubercle bacillus\", cementing germ theory and Koch's acclaim.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Upon the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Alexandria, Egypt, two medical missions went to investigate and attend the sick, one was sent out by Pasteur and the other led by Koch. Koch's group returned in 1883, having successfully discovered the cholera pathogen. In Germany, however, Koch's bacteriologists had to vie against Max von Pettenkofer, Germany's leading proponent of miasmatic theory. Pettenkofer conceded bacteria's casual involvement, but maintained that other, environmental factors were required to turn it pathogenic, and opposed water treatment as a misdirected effort amid more important ways to improve public health. The massive cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892 devastated Pettenkoffer's position, and yielded German public health to \"Koch's bacteriology\".",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "On losing the 1883 rivalry in Alexandria, Pasteur switched research direction, and introduced his third vaccine—rabies vaccine—the first vaccine for humans since Jenner's for smallpox. From across the globe, donations poured in, funding the founding of Pasteur Institute, the globe's first biomedical institute, which opened in 1888. Along with Koch's bacteriologists, Pasteur's group—which preferred the term microbiology—led medicine into the new era of \"scientific medicine\" upon bacteriology and germ theory. Accepted from Jakob Henle, Koch's steps to confirm a species' pathogenicity became famed as \"Koch's postulates\". Although his proposed tuberculosis treatment, tuberculin, seemingly failed, it soon was used to test for infection with the involved species. In 1905, Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and remains renowned as the founder of medical microbiology.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The breakthrough to professionalization based on knowledge of advanced medicine was led by Florence Nightingale in England. She resolved to provide more advanced training than she saw on the Continent. At Kaiserswerth, where the first German nursing schools were founded in 1836 by Theodor Fliedner, she said, \"The nursing was nil and the hygiene horrible.\") Britain's male doctors preferred the old system, but Nightingale won out and her Nightingale Training School opened in 1860 and became a model. The Nightingale solution depended on the patronage of upper-class women, and they proved eager to serve. Royalty became involved. In 1902 the wife of the British king took control of the nursing unit of the British army, became its president, and renamed it after herself as the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps; when she died the next queen became president. Today its Colonel In Chief is Sophie, Countess of Wessex, the daughter-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II. In the United States, upper-middle-class women who already supported hospitals promoted nursing. The new profession proved highly attractive to women of all backgrounds, and schools of nursing opened in the late 19th century. They were soon a function of large hospitals , where they provided a steady stream of low-paid idealistic workers. The International Red Cross began operations in numerous countries in the late 19th century, promoting nursing as an ideal profession for middle-class women.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "A major breakthrough in epidemiology came with the introduction of statistical maps and graphs. They allowed careful analysis of seasonality issues in disease incidents, and the maps allowed public health officials to identify critical loci for the dissemination of disease. John Snow in London developed the methods. In 1849, he observed that the symptoms of cholera, which had already claimed around 500 lives within a month, were vomiting and diarrhoea. He concluded that the source of contamination must be through ingestion, rather than inhalation as was previously thought. It was this insight that resulted in the removal of The Pump On Broad Street, after which deaths from cholera plummeted. English nurse Florence Nightingale pioneered analysis of large amounts of statistical data, using graphs and tables, regarding the condition of thousands of patients in the Crimean War to evaluate the efficacy of hospital services. Her methods proved convincing and led to reforms in military and civilian hospitals, usually with the full support of the government.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "By the late 19th and early 20th century English statisticians led by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher developed the mathematical tools such as correlations and hypothesis tests that made possible much more sophisticated analysis of statistical data.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "During the U.S. Civil War the Sanitary Commission collected enormous amounts of statistical data, and opened up the problems of storing information for fast access and mechanically searching for data patterns. The pioneer was John Shaw Billings (1838–1913). A senior surgeon in the war, Billings built the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine), the centerpiece of modern medical information systems. Billings figured out how to mechanically analyze medical and demographic data by turning facts into numbers and punching the numbers onto cardboard cards that could be sorted and counted by machine. The applications were developed by his assistant Herman Hollerith; Hollerith invented the punch card and counter-sorter system that dominated statistical data manipulation until the 1970s. Hollerith's company became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1911.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Until the nineteenth century, the care of the insane was largely a communal and family responsibility rather than a medical one. The vast majority of the mentally ill were treated in domestic contexts with only the most unmanageable or burdensome likely to be institutionally confined. This situation was transformed radically from the late eighteenth century as, amid changing cultural conceptions of madness, a new-found optimism in the curability of insanity within the asylum setting emerged. Increasingly, lunacy was perceived less as a physiological condition than as a mental and moral one to which the correct response was persuasion, aimed at inculcating internal restraint, rather than external coercion. This new therapeutic sensibility, referred to as moral treatment, was epitomised in French physician Philippe Pinel's quasi-mythological unchaining of the lunatics of the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris and realised in an institutional setting with the foundation in 1796 of the Quaker-run York Retreat in England.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "From the early nineteenth century, as lay-led lunacy reform movements gained in influence, ever more state governments in the West extended their authority and responsibility over the mentally ill. Small-scale asylums, conceived as instruments to reshape both the mind and behaviour of the disturbed, proliferated across these regions. By the 1830s, moral treatment, together with the asylum itself, became increasingly medicalised and asylum doctors began to establish a distinct medical identity with the establishment in the 1840s of associations for their members in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and America, together with the founding of medico-psychological journals. Medical optimism in the capacity of the asylum to cure insanity soured by the close of the nineteenth century as the growth of the asylum population far outstripped that of the general population. Processes of long-term institutional segregation, allowing for the psychiatric conceptualisation of the natural course of mental illness, supported the perspective that the insane were a distinct population, subject to mental pathologies stemming from specific medical causes. As degeneration theory grew in influence from the mid-nineteenth century, heredity was seen as the central causal element in chronic mental illness, and, with national asylum systems overcrowded and insanity apparently undergoing an inexorable rise, the focus of psychiatric therapeutics shifted from a concern with treating the individual to maintaining the racial and biological health of national populations.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) introduced new medical categories of mental illness, which eventually came into psychiatric usage despite their basis in behavior rather than pathology or underlying cause. Shell shock among frontline soldiers exposed to heavy artillery bombardment was first diagnosed by British Army doctors in 1915. By 1916, similar symptoms were also noted in soldiers not exposed to explosive shocks, leading to questions as to whether the disorder was physical or psychiatric. In the 1920s surrealist opposition to psychiatry was expressed in a number of surrealist publications. In the 1930s several controversial medical practices were introduced including inducing seizures (by electroshock, insulin or other drugs) or cutting parts of the brain apart (leucotomy or lobotomy). Both came into widespread use by psychiatry, but there were grave concerns and much opposition on grounds of basic morality, harmful effects, or misuse.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "In the 1950s new psychiatric drugs, notably the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, were designed in laboratories and slowly came into preferred use. Although often accepted as an advance in some ways, there was some opposition, due to serious adverse effects such as tardive dyskinesia. Patients often opposed psychiatry and refused or stopped taking the drugs when not subject to psychiatric control. There was also increasing opposition to the use of psychiatric hospitals, and attempts to move people back into the community on a collaborative user-led group approach (\"therapeutic communities\") not controlled by psychiatry. Campaigns against masturbation were done in the Victorian era and elsewhere. Lobotomy was used until the 1970s to treat schizophrenia. This was denounced by the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s and later.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "It was very difficult for women to become doctors in any field before the 1970s. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to formally study and practice medicine in the United States. She was a leader in women's medical education. While Blackwell viewed medicine as a means for social and moral reform, her student Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) focused on curing disease. At a deeper level of disagreement, Blackwell felt that women would succeed in medicine because of their humane female values, but Jacobi believed that women should participate as the equals of men in all medical specialties using identical methods, values and insights. In the Soviet Union although the majority of medical doctors were women, they were paid less than the mostly male factory workers.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "China",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Finally in the 19th century, Western medicine was introduced at the local level by Christian medical missionaries from the London Missionary Society (Britain), the Methodist Church (Britain) and the Presbyterian Church (US). Benjamin Hobson (1816–1873) in 1839, set up a highly successful Wai Ai Clinic in Guangzhou, China. The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was founded in 1887 by the London Missionary Society, with its first graduate (in 1892) being Sun Yat-sen, who later led the Chinese Revolution (1911). The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was the forerunner of the School of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong, which started in 1911.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Because of the social custom that men and women should not be near to one another, the women of China were reluctant to be treated by male doctors. The missionaries sent women doctors such as Dr. Mary Hannah Fulton (1854–1927). Supported by the Foreign Missions Board of the Presbyterian Church (US) she in 1902 founded the first medical college for women in China, the Hackett Medical College for Women, in Guangzhou.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Japan",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "European ideas of modern medicine were spread widely through the world by medical missionaries, and the dissemination of textbooks. Japanese elites enthusiastically embraced Western medicine after the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. However they had been prepared by their knowledge of the Dutch and German medicine, for they had some contact with Europe through the Dutch. Highly influential was the 1765 edition of Hendrik van Deventer's pioneer work Nieuw Ligt (\"A New Light\") on Japanese obstetrics, especially on Katakura Kakuryo's publication in 1799 of Sanka Hatsumo (\"Enlightenment of Obstetrics\"). A cadre of Japanese physicians began to interact with Dutch doctors, who introduced smallpox vaccinations. By 1820 Japanese ranpô medical practitioners not only translated Dutch medical texts, they integrated their readings with clinical diagnoses. These men became leaders of the modernization of medicine in their country. They broke from Japanese traditions of closed medical fraternities and adopted the European approach of an open community of collaboration based on expertise in the latest scientific methods.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Kitasato Shibasaburō (1853–1931) studied bacteriology in Germany under Robert Koch. In 1891 he founded the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo, which introduced the study of bacteriology to Japan. He and French researcher Alexandre Yersin went to Hong Kong in 1894, where; Kitasato confirmed Yersin's discovery that the bacterium Yersinia pestis is the agent of the plague. In 1897 he isolated and described the organism that caused dysentery. He became the first dean of medicine at Keio University, and the first president of the Japan Medical Association.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Japanese physicians immediately recognized the values of X-Rays. They were able to purchase the equipment locally from the Shimadzu Company, which developed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed X-Ray machines after 1900. Japan not only adopted German methods of public health in the home islands, but implemented them in its colonies, especially Korea and Taiwan, and after 1931 in Manchuria. A heavy investment in sanitation resulted in a dramatic increase of life expectancy.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "The practice of medicine changed in the face of rapid advances in science, as well as new approaches by physicians. Hospital doctors began much more systematic analysis of patients' symptoms in diagnosis. Among the more powerful new techniques were anaesthesia, and the development of both antiseptic and aseptic operating theatres. Effective cures were developed for certain endemic infectious diseases. However, the decline in many of the most lethal diseases was due more to improvements in public health and nutrition than to advances in medicine.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Medicine was revolutionized in the 19th century and beyond by advances in chemistry, laboratory techniques, and equipment. Old ideas of infectious disease epidemiology were gradually replaced by advances in bacteriology and virology.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "The Russian Orthodox Church sponsored seven orders of nursing sisters in the late 19th century. They ran hospitals, clinics, almshouses, pharmacies, and shelters as well as training schools for nurses. In the Soviet era (1917–1991), with the aristocratic sponsors gone, nursing became a low-prestige occupation based in poorly maintained hospitals.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Paris (France) and Vienna were the two leading medical centers on the Continent in the era 1750–1914.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "In the 1770s–1850s Paris became a world center of medical research and teaching. The \"Paris School\" emphasized that teaching and research should be based in large hospitals and promoted the professionalization of the medical profession and the emphasis on sanitation and public health. A major reformer was Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756–1832), a physician who was Minister of Internal Affairs. He created the Paris Hospital, health councils, and other bodies.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to treat milk and wine in order to prevent it from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. He worked chiefly in Paris and in 1887 founded the Pasteur Institute there to perpetuate his commitment to basic research and its practical applications. As soon as his institute was created, Pasteur brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by Emile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Emile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the Institut Pasteur, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques). It became the model for numerous research centers around the world named \"Pasteur Institutes.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "The First Viennese School of Medicine, 1750–1800, was led by the Dutchman Gerard van Swieten (1700–1772), who aimed to put medicine on new scientific foundations—promoting unprejudiced clinical observation, botanical and chemical research, and introducing simple but powerful remedies. When the Vienna General Hospital opened in 1784, it at once became the world's largest hospital and physicians acquired a facility that gradually developed into the most important research centre. Progress ended with the Napoleonic wars and the government shutdown in 1819 of all liberal journals and schools; this caused a general return to traditionalism and eclecticism in medicine.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Vienna was the capital of a diverse empire and attracted not just Germans but Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, Poles and others to its world-class medical facilities. After 1820 the Second Viennese School of Medicine emerged with the contributions of physicians such as Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, Josef Škoda, Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra, and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. Basic medical science expanded and specialization advanced. Furthermore, the first dermatology, eye, as well as ear, nose, and throat clinics in the world were founded in Vienna. The textbook of ophthalmologist Georg Joseph Beer (1763–1821) Lehre von den Augenkrankheiten combined practical research and philosophical speculations, and became the standard reference work for decades.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "After 1871 Berlin, the capital of the new German Empire, became a leading center for medical research. Robert Koch (1843–1910) was a representative leader. He became famous for isolating Bacillus anthracis (1877), the Tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and Vibrio cholerae (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for his tuberculosis findings. Koch is one of the founders of microbiology, inspiring such major figures as Paul Ehrlich and Gerhard Domagk.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "American Civil War",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "In the American Civil War (1861–65), as was typical of the 19th century, more soldiers died of disease than in battle, and even larger numbers were temporarily incapacitated by wounds, disease and accidents. Conditions were poor in the Confederacy, where doctors and medical supplies were in short supply. The war had a dramatic long-term impact on medicine in the U.S., from surgical technique to hospitals to nursing and to research facilities. Weapon development -particularly the appearance of Springfield Model 1861, mass-produced and much more accurate than muskets led to generals underestimating the risks of long range rifle fire; risks exemplified in the death of John Sedgwick and the disastrous Pickett's Charge. The rifles could shatter bone forcing amputation and longer ranges meant casualties were sometimes not quickly found. Evacuation of the wounded from Second Battle of Bull Run took a week. As in earlier wars, untreated casualties sometimes survived unexpectedly due to maggots debriding the wound -an observation which led to the surgical use of maggots -still a useful method in the absence of effective antibiotics.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "The hygiene of the training and field camps was poor, especially at the beginning of the war when men who had seldom been far from home were brought together for training with thousands of strangers. First came epidemics of the childhood diseases of chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, and, especially, measles. Operations in the South meant a dangerous and new disease environment, bringing diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid fever, and malaria. There were no antibiotics, so the surgeons prescribed coffee, whiskey, and quinine. Harsh weather, bad water, inadequate shelter in winter quarters, poor policing of camps, and dirty camp hospitals took their toll.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "This was a common scenario in wars from time immemorial, and conditions faced by the Confederate army were even worse. The Union responded by building army hospitals in every state. What was different in the Union was the emergence of skilled, well-funded medical organizers who took proactive action, especially in the much enlarged United States Army Medical Department, and the United States Sanitary Commission, a new private agency. Numerous other new agencies also targeted the medical and morale needs of soldiers, including the United States Christian Commission as well as smaller private agencies.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "The U.S. Army learned many lessons and in August 1886, it established the Hospital Corps.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Johns Hopkins Hospital, founded in 1889, originated several modern medical practices, including residency and rounds.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "The ABO blood group system was discovered in 1901 by Karl Landsteiner at the University of Vienna. Landsteiner experimented on his staff, mixing their various blood components together, and found that some people's blood agglutinated (clumped together) with other blood, whilst some did not. This then lead him identifying three blood groups, ABC, which would later be renamed to ABO. The less frequently found blood group AB was discovered later in 1902 by Alfred Von Decastello and Adriano Sturli. In 1937 Landsteiner and Alexander S. Wiener further discovered the Rh factor (misnamed from early thinking that this blood group was similar to that found in rhesus monkeys) whose antigens further determine blood reaction between people. This was demonstrated in a 1939 case study by Phillip Levine and Rufus Stetson where a mother who had recently given birth had reacted to their partner's blood, highlighting the Rh factor.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Canadian physician Norman Bethune, M.D. developed a mobile blood-transfusion service for frontline operations in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), but ironically, he himself died of sepsis.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "In 1958, Arne Larsson in Sweden became the first patient to depend on an artificial cardiac pacemaker. He died in 2001 at age 86, having outlived its inventor, the surgeon, and 26 pacemakers.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Cancer treatment has been developed with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgical oncology.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "X-ray imaging was the first kind of medical imaging, and later ultrasonic imaging, CT scanning, MR scanning and other imaging methods became available.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Prosthetics have improved with lightweight materials as well as neural prosthetics emerging in the end of the 20th century.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Oral rehydration therapy has been extensively used since the 1970s to treat cholera and other diarrhea-inducing infections.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "As infectious diseases have become less lethal, and the most common causes of death in developed countries are now tumors and cardiovascular diseases, these conditions have received increased attention in medical research.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Starting in World War II, DDT was used as insecticide to combat insect vectors carrying malaria, which was endemic in most tropical regions of the world. The first goal was to protect soldiers, but it was widely adopted as a public health device. In Liberia, for example, the United States had large military operations during the war and the U.S. Public Health Service began the use of DDT for indoor residual spraying (IRS) and as a larvicide, with the goal of controlling malaria in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. In the early 1950s, the project was expanded to nearby villages. In 1953, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched an antimalaria program in parts of Liberia as a pilot project to determine the feasibility of malaria eradication in tropical Africa. However these projects encountered a spate of difficulties that foreshadowed the general retreat from malaria eradication efforts across tropical Africa by the mid-1960s.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "The 1918 influenza pandemic was a global pandemic in the early 20th century that occurred between 1918 and 1920. Sometimes known as Spanish Flu due to popular opinion at the time thinking the flu originated from Spain, this pandemic caused close to 50 million deaths around the world. Spreading at the end of World War I.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Public health measures became particularly important during the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people around the world. It became an important case study in epidemiology. Bristow shows there was a gendered response of health caregivers to the pandemic in the United States. Male doctors were unable to cure the patients, and they felt like failures. Women nurses also saw their patients die, but they took pride in their success in fulfilling their professional role of caring for, ministering, comforting, and easing the last hours of their patients, and helping the families of the patients cope as well.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Evidence-based medicine is a modern concept, not introduced to literature until the 1990s.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "The sexual revolution included taboo-breaking research in human sexuality such as the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports, invention of hormonal contraception, and the normalization of abortion and homosexuality in many countries. Family planning has promoted a demographic transition in most of the world. With threatening sexually transmitted infections, not least HIV, use of barrier contraception has become imperative. The struggle against HIV has improved antiretroviral treatments.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Tobacco smoking as a cause of lung cancer was first researched in the 1920s, but was not widely supported by publications until the 1950s.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Cardiac surgery was revolutionized in 1948 as open-heart surgery was introduced for the first time since 1925. In 1954 Joseph Murray, J. Hartwell Harrison and others accomplished the first kidney transplantation. Transplantations of other organs, such as heart, liver and pancreas, were also introduced during the later 20th century. The first partial face transplant was performed in 2005, and the first full one in 2010. By the end of the 20th century, microtechnology had been used to create tiny robotic devices to assist microsurgery using micro-video and fiber-optic cameras to view internal tissues during surgery with minimally invasive practices. Laparoscopic surgery was broadly introduced in the 1990s. Natural orifice surgery has followed.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "During the 19th century, large-scale wars were attended with medics and mobile hospital units which developed advanced techniques for healing massive injuries and controlling infections rampant in battlefield conditions. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), General Pancho Villa organized hospital trains for wounded soldiers. Boxcars marked Servicio Sanitario (\"sanitary service\") were re-purposed as surgical operating theaters and areas for recuperation, and staffed by up to 40 Mexican and U.S. physicians. Severely wounded soldiers were shuttled back to base hospitals.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Thousands of scarred troops provided the need for improved prosthetic limbs and expanded techniques in plastic surgery or reconstructive surgery. Those practices were combined to broaden cosmetic surgery and other forms of elective surgery.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "From 1917 to 1932, the American Red Cross moved into Europe with a battery of long-term child health projects. It built and operated hospitals and clinics, and organized antituberculosis and antityphus campaigns. A high priority involved child health programs such as clinics, better baby shows, playgrounds, fresh air camps, and courses for women on infant hygiene. Hundreds of U.S. doctors, nurses, and welfare professionals administered these programs, which aimed to reform the health of European youth and to reshape European public health and welfare along American lines.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "The advances in medicine made a dramatic difference for Allied troops, while the Germans and especially the Japanese and Chinese suffered from a severe lack of newer medicines, techniques and facilities. Harrison finds that the chances of recovery for a badly wounded British infantryman were as much as 25 times better than in the First World War. The reason was that:",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "During the second World War, Alexis Carrel and Henry Dakin developed the Carrel-Dakin method of treating wounds with an irrigation, Dakin's solution, a germicide which helped prevent gangrene.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "The War spurred the usage of Roentgen's X-ray, and the electrocardiograph, for the monitoring of internal bodily functions. This was followed in the inter-war period by the development of the first anti-bacterial agents such as the sulpha antibiotics.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Nazi and Japanese medical research",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "Unethical human subject research, and killing of patients with disabilities, peaked during the Nazi era, with Nazi human experimentation and Aktion T4 during the Holocaust as the most significant examples. Many of the details of these and related events were the focus of the Doctors' Trial. Subsequently, principles of medical ethics, such as the Nuremberg Code, were introduced to prevent a recurrence of such atrocities. After 1937, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare in China. In Unit 731, Japanese doctors and research scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on human beings, mostly Chinese victims.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "The World Health Organization was founded in 1948 as a United Nations agency to improve global health. In most of the world, life expectancy has improved since then, and was about 67 years as of 2010, and well above 80 years in some countries. Eradication of infectious diseases is an international effort, and several new vaccines have been developed during the post-war years, against infections such as measles, mumps, several strains of influenza and human papilloma virus. The long-known vaccine against Smallpox finally eradicated the disease in the 1970s, and Rinderpest was wiped out in 2011. Eradication of polio is underway. Tissue culture is important for development of vaccines. Though the early success of antiviral vaccines and antibacterial drugs, antiviral drugs were not introduced until the 1970s. Through the WHO, the international community has developed a response protocol against epidemics, displayed during the SARS epidemic in 2003, the Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 from 2004, the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and onwards.",
"title": "Late modern medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "The discovery of penicillin in the 20th century by Alexander Fleming provided a vital line of defence against bacterical infections that, without them, often cause patients to suffer prelonged recovery periods and highly increased chances of death. Its discovery and application within medicine allowed previously impossible treatments to take place, including cancer treatments, organ transplants, to open heart surgery. Throughout the 20th century, though, their overprescribed use to humans, as well as to animals that need them due to the conditions of intensive animal farming, has led to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "The early 21st century, facilitated by extensive global connections, international travel, and unprecedented human disruption of ecological systems, has been defined by a number of noval as well as continuing global pandemics from the 20th century.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "The SARS 2002 to 2004 outbreak affected a number of countries around the world and killed hundreds. This outbreak gave rise to a number of lessons learnt from viral infection control, including more effective isolation room protocols to better hand washing techniques for medical staff. A mutated strain of SARS would go on to develop into COVID-19, causing the future COVID-19 pandemic. A significant influenza strain, H1N1, caused a further pandemic between 2009 and 2010. Known as swine flu, due to its indirect source from pigs, it went on to infect over 700 million people.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "The continuing HIV pandemic, starting in 1981, has infected and led to the deaths of millions of people around the world. Emerging and improved pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) treatments that aim to reduce the spread of the disease have proven effective in limiting the spread of HIV alongside combined use of safe sex methods, sexual health education, needle exchange programmes, and sexual health screenings. Efforts to find a HIV vaccine are ongoing whilst health inequities have left certain population groups, like trans women, as well as resource limited regions, like sub-Saharan Africa, at greater risk of contracting HIV compared with, for example, developed countries.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "The outbreak of COVID-19, starting in 2019, and subsequent declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO is a major pandemic event within the early 21st century. Causing global disruptions, millions of infections and deaths, the pandemic has caused suffering throughout communities. The pandemic has also seen some of the largest logistical organisations of goods, medical equipment, medical professionals, and military personnel since World War II that highlights its far-reaching impact.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "The rise of personalised medicine in the 21st century has generated the possibility to develop diagnosis and treatments based on the individual characteristics of a person, rather than through generic practices that defined 20th century medicine. Areas like DNA sequencing, genetic mapping, gene therapy, imaging protocols, proteomics, stem cell therapy, and wireless health monitoring devices are all rising innovations that can help medical professionals fine tune treatment to the individual.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "Remote surgery is another recent development, with the transatlantic Lindbergh operation in 2001 as a groundbreaking example.",
"title": "Contemporary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Racism has a long history in how medicine has evolved and established itself, both in terms of racism experience upon patients, professionals, and wider systematic violence within medical institutions and systems. See: medical racism in the United States, race and health, and scientific racism.",
"title": "Themes in medical history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Women have always served as healers and midwives since ancient times. However, the professionalization of medicine forced them increasingly to the sidelines. As hospitals multiplied they relied in Europe on orders of Roman Catholic nun-nurses, and German Protestant and Anglican deaconesses in the early 19th century. They were trained in traditional methods of physical care that involved little knowledge of medicine.",
"title": "Themes in medical history"
}
]
| The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies. The history of medicine is the study and documentation of the evolution of medical treatments, practices, and knowledge over time. Medical historians often drawn from other humanities fields of study including economics, health sciences, sociology, and politics to better understand the institutions, practices, people, professions, and social systems that have shaped medicine. When a period which predates or lacks written sources regarding medicine, information is instead drawn from archaeological sources. This field tracks the evolution of human societies' approach to health, illness, and injury ranging from prehistory to the modern day, the events that shape these approaches, and their impact on populations. Early medical traditions include those of Babylon, China, Egypt and India. Invention of the microscope was a consequence of improved understanding, during the Renaissance. Prior to the 19th century, humorism was thought to explain the cause of disease but it was gradually replaced by the germ theory of disease, leading to effective treatments and even cures for many infectious diseases. Military doctors advanced the methods of trauma treatment and surgery. Public health measures were developed especially in the 19th century as the rapid growth of cities required systematic sanitary measures. Advanced research centers opened in the early 20th century, often connected with major hospitals. The mid-20th century was characterized by new biological treatments, such as antibiotics. These advancements, along with developments in chemistry, genetics, and radiography led to modern medicine. Medicine was heavily professionalized in the 20th century, and new careers opened to women as nurses and as physicians. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-31T06:44:55Z | [
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14,196 | Hamoaze | 50°23′44″N 4°12′28″W / 50.39556°N 4.20778°W / 50.39556; -4.20778
The Hamoaze (/hæmˈoʊz/; Cornish pronunciation: [ˈhɒmøz]) is an estuarine stretch of the English tidal River Tamar, between its confluence with the River Lynher and Plymouth Sound.
The name first appears as ryver of Hamose in 1588. The first element is thought to refer to specifically to Ham in the parish of Weston Peverel, now a suburb of Plymouth (whose name in turn came from the Old English word hamm, meaning "water-meadow, land in the bend of a river"). The second element is thought to derive from Old English wāse meaning "mud" (as in "ooze"). Thus the name once meant "mud-banks at Ham". The name originally probably applied only to a creek running past Ham, which perhaps consisted of mud-banks at low tide, north of the present-day Devonport Dockyard. The name later came to be used for the main channel of the estuary into which the creek drained.
The Hamoaze flows past Devonport Dockyard, which is one of three major bases of the Royal Navy today. The presence of large numbers of small watercraft is a challenge and hazard to the warships using the naval base and dockyard. Navigation on the waterway is controlled by the King's Harbour Master for Plymouth.
Settlements on the banks of the Hamoaze are Saltash, Wilcove, Torpoint and Cremyll in Cornwall, as well as Devonport and Plymouth in Devon.
Two regular ferry services crossing the Hamoaze exist: the Torpoint Ferry (a chain ferry that takes vehicles) and the Cremyll Ferry (passengers and cyclists only).
A street in Torpoint bears the name Hamoaze Avenue, named after the stretch of river. | [
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"text": "50°23′44″N 4°12′28″W / 50.39556°N 4.20778°W / 50.39556; -4.20778",
"title": ""
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"text": "The Hamoaze (/hæmˈoʊz/; Cornish pronunciation: [ˈhɒmøz]) is an estuarine stretch of the English tidal River Tamar, between its confluence with the River Lynher and Plymouth Sound.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The name first appears as ryver of Hamose in 1588. The first element is thought to refer to specifically to Ham in the parish of Weston Peverel, now a suburb of Plymouth (whose name in turn came from the Old English word hamm, meaning \"water-meadow, land in the bend of a river\"). The second element is thought to derive from Old English wāse meaning \"mud\" (as in \"ooze\"). Thus the name once meant \"mud-banks at Ham\". The name originally probably applied only to a creek running past Ham, which perhaps consisted of mud-banks at low tide, north of the present-day Devonport Dockyard. The name later came to be used for the main channel of the estuary into which the creek drained.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Hamoaze flows past Devonport Dockyard, which is one of three major bases of the Royal Navy today. The presence of large numbers of small watercraft is a challenge and hazard to the warships using the naval base and dockyard. Navigation on the waterway is controlled by the King's Harbour Master for Plymouth.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Settlements on the banks of the Hamoaze are Saltash, Wilcove, Torpoint and Cremyll in Cornwall, as well as Devonport and Plymouth in Devon.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Two regular ferry services crossing the Hamoaze exist: the Torpoint Ferry (a chain ferry that takes vehicles) and the Cremyll Ferry (passengers and cyclists only).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A street in Torpoint bears the name Hamoaze Avenue, named after the stretch of river.",
"title": "Geography"
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"text": "",
"title": "References"
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| The Hamoaze is an estuarine stretch of the English tidal River Tamar, between its confluence with the River Lynher and Plymouth Sound. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-11-04T09:33:31Z | [
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14,197 | Hanover | Hanover (/ˈhænoʊvər, -nəv-/ HAN-oh-vər, HAN-ə-vər; German: Hannover [haˈnoːfɐ] ; Low German: Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in northern Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. Hanover's urban area comprises the towns of Garbsen, Langenhagen and Laatzen and has a population of about 791,000 (2018). The Hanover Region has approximately 1.16 million inhabitants (2019) and is the largest in the Hannover–Braunschweig–Göttingen–Wolfsburg Metropolitan Region.
Before it became the capital of Lower Saxony in 1946, Hannover was the capital of the Principality of Calenberg (1636–1692), the Electorate of Hanover (1692–1814), the Kingdom of Hanover (1814–1866), the Province of Hannover of the Kingdom of Prussia (1868–1918), the Province of Hannover of the Free State of Prussia (1918–1946) and of the State of Hanover (1946). From 1714 to 1837 Hannover was by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, under their title of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg (later described as the Elector of Hanover).
The city lies at the confluence of the River Leine and its tributary the Ihme, in the south of the North German Plain. The city is a major crossing point of railway lines and motorways (Autobahnen), connecting European main lines in both the east–west (Berlin–Ruhr area/Düsseldorf/Cologne) and north–south (Hamburg–Frankfurt/Stuttgart/Munich) directions. Hannover Airport lies north of the city, in Langenhagen, and is Germany's ninth-busiest airport. The city's most notable institutes of higher education are the Hannover Medical School (Medizinische Hochschule Hannover), one of Germany's leading medical schools, with its university hospital Klinikum der Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover, and the Leibniz University Hannover. The city is also home to International Neuroscience Institute.
The Hanover Fairground, owing to numerous extensions, especially for the Expo 2000, is the largest in the world. Hannover hosts annual commercial trade fairs such as the Hannover Fair and up to 2018 the CeBIT. The IAA Commercial Vehicles show takes place every two years. It is the world's leading trade show for transport, logistics and mobility. Every year Hannover hosts the Schützenfest Hannover, the world's largest marksmen's festival, and the Oktoberfest Hannover.
'Hanover' is the traditional English spelling. The German spelling (with a double n) has become more popular in English; recent editions of encyclopedias prefer the German spelling, and the local government uses the German spelling on English websites. The English pronunciation, with stress on the first syllable, is applied to both the German and English spellings, which is different from German pronunciation, with stress on the second syllable and a long second vowel. The traditional English spelling is still used in historical contexts, especially when referring to the British House of Hanover.
Hanover was founded in medieval times on the east bank of the River Leine. Its original name Honovere may mean 'high (river)bank', but that is debated (cf. das Hohe Ufer). Hanover was a small village of ferrymen and fishermen that became a comparatively-large town in the 13th century and received town privileges in 1241 because of its position at a natural crossroads. As overland travel was relatively difficult, its position on the upper navigable reaches of the river helped it grow by increasing trade. It was connected to the Hanseatic League city of Bremen by the Leine and was situated near the southern edge of the wide North German Plain and north-west of the Harz mountains and so east–west traffic such as mule trains passed through it. Hanover was thus a gateway to the Rhine, Ruhr and Saar river valleys, and their industrial areas which grew up to the southwest and the plains regions to the east and north for overland traffic skirting the Harz between the Low Countries and Saxony or Thuringia.
In the 14th century, the main churches of Hanover were built, as well as a city wall with three city gates. The beginning of industrialization in Germany led to trade in iron and silver from the northern Harz Mountains, which increased the city's importance.
In 1636 George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, ruler of the Brunswick-Lüneburg principality of Calenberg, moved his residence to Hanover. The Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg were elevated by the Holy Roman Emperor to the rank of Prince-Elector in 1692, which was confirmed by the Imperial Diet in 1708. Thus, the principality was upgraded to the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, colloquially known as the Electorate of Hanover after Calenberg's capital (see also House of Hanover). Its electors later became monarchs of Great Britain (and from 1801 of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland). The first of them was George I Louis, who acceded to the British throne in 1714. The last British monarch who reigned in Hanover was William IV. Semi-Salic law, which required succession by the male line if possible, forbade the accession of Queen Victoria in Hanover. As a male-line descendant of George I, Queen Victoria was herself a member of the House of Hanover. Her descendants, however, bore her husband's titular name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Three kings of Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, were concurrently also Electoral Princes of Hanover.
During the time of the personal union of the crowns of the United Kingdom and Hanover (1714–1837), the monarchs rarely visited the city. In fact during the reigns of the last three joint rulers (1760–1837), there was only one short visit, by George IV in 1821. From 1816 to 1837, Viceroy Adolphus represented the monarch in Hanover.
During the Seven Years' War, the Battle of Hastenbeck was fought near the city on 26 July 1757. The French army defeated the Hanoverian Army of Observation, which led to the city's occupation as part of the Invasion of Hanover. It was recaptured by Anglo-German forces, led by Ferdinand of Brunswick, the following year.
After Napoleon imposed the Convention of Artlenburg (Convention of the Elbe) on 5 July 1803, about 35,000 French soldiers occupied Hanover. The convention also required disbanding the Hanoverian Army. However, George III did not recognise the Convention of the Elbe, which resulted in a great number of soldiers from Hanover eventually emigrating to Great Britain, where the King's German Legion was formed. It was only troops from Hanover and Brunswick who consistently opposed France throughout the Napoleonic Wars. The Legion later played an important role in the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In 1814 the electorate became the Kingdom of Hanover.
In 1837, the personal union of the United Kingdom and Hanover ended because William IV's heir in the United Kingdom was female (Queen Victoria). Hanover could be inherited only by male heirs if there were any. Thus, Hanover passed to William IV's brother, Ernest Augustus, and remained a kingdom until 1866, when it was annexed by Prussia during the Austro-Prussian war. Though Hanover was expected to defeat Prussia at the Battle of Langensalza, Prussia employed Moltke the Elder's Kesselschlacht order of battle to instead destroy the Hanoverian Army. The city of Hanover became the capital of the Prussian Province of Hanover.
In 1842, the first horse railway was inaugurated, and in 1893, an electric tram was installed.
After 1937 the lord mayor and the state commissioners of Hanover were members of the NSDAP (Nazi party). A large Jewish population then existed in Hanover. In October 1938, 484 Hanoverian Jews of Polish origin were expelled to Poland, including the Grynszpan family. However, Poland refused to accept them, leaving them stranded at the border with thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees, fed only intermittently by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organisations. The Grynszpans' son Herschel Grynszpan was in Paris at the time. When he learned of what was happening, he drove to the German embassy in Paris and shot the German diplomat Eduard Ernst vom Rath, who died shortly afterwards.
The Nazis took this act as a pretext to stage a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht (9 November 1938). On that day, the synagogue of Hanover, designed in 1870 by Edwin Oppler in neo-romantic style, was burnt by the Nazis.
In September 1941, through the "Action Lauterbacher" plan, a ghettoisation of the remaining Hanoverian Jewish families began. Even before the Wannsee Conference, on 15 December 1941, the first Jews from Hanover were deported to Riga. A total of 2,400 people were deported, and very few survived. During the war seven concentration camps were constructed in Hanover, in which many Jews were confined, but also Polish, French and Russian women. Of the approximately 4,800 Jews who had lived in Hannover in 1938, fewer than 100 were still in the city when troops of the United States Army arrived on 10 April 1945 to occupy Hanover at the end of the war. Today, a memorial at the Opera Square is a reminder of the persecution of the Jews in Hanover. After the war a large group of Orthodox Jewish survivors of the nearby Bergen-Belsen concentration camp settled in Hanover.
There was also a camp for Sinti and Romani people (see Romani Holocaust), and dozens of forced labour subcamps of the Stalag XI-B prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs.
As an important railway and road junction and production centre, Hanover was a major target for strategic bombing during World War II, including the Oil Campaign. Targets included the AFA (Stöcken), the Deurag-Nerag refinery (Misburg), the Continental plants (Vahrenwald and Limmer), the United light metal works (VLW) in Ricklingen and Laatzen (today Hanover fairground), the Hanover/Limmer rubber reclamation plant, the Hanomag factory (Linden) and the tank factory M.N.H. Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen (Badenstedt). Residential areas were also targeted, and more than 6,000 civilians were killed by the Allied bombing raids. More than 90% of the city centre was destroyed in a total of 88 bombing raids. After the war, the Aegidienkirche was not rebuilt and its ruins were left as a war memorial.
The Allied ground advance into Germany reached Hanover in April 1945. The US 84th Infantry Division captured the city on 10 April 1945.
Hanover was in the British zone of occupation of Germany and became part of the new state (Land) of Lower Saxony in 1946.
Today Hanover is a vice-president city of Mayors for Peace, an international mayoral organisation mobilising cities and citizens worldwide to abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020.
Hanover has an oceanic climate (Köppen: Cfb) independent of the isotherm. Although the city is not on a coastal location, the predominant air masses are still from the ocean, unlike other places further east or south-central Germany.
The city of Hanover is divided into 13 boroughs (Stadtbezirke) and 53 quarters (Stadtteile).
A selection of the 53 quarters:
The current mayor of Hanover is Belit Onay of the Alliance 90/The Greens since 2019. The most recent mayoral election was held on 17 October 2019, with a runoff held on 10 November, and the results were as follows:
The Hanover city council governs the city alongside the mayor. The most recent city council election was held on 12 September 2021, and the results were as follows:
One of Hanover's sights is the Royal Gardens of Herrenhausen. Its Great Garden is an important European Baroque garden. The palace itself was largely destroyed by Allied bombing but has been reconstructed and reopened in 2013. Among the points of interest is the Grotto. Its interior was designed by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle). The Great Garden consists of several parts and contains Europe's highest garden fountain. The historic Garden Theatre hosted the musicals of the German rock musician Heinz Rudolf Kunze.
Also at Herrenhausen, the Berggarten is a botanical garden with the most varied collection of orchids in Europe. Some points of interest are the Tropical House, the Cactus House, the Canary House and the Orchid House, and free-flying birds and butterflies. Near the entrance to the Berggarten is the historic Library Pavillon. The Mausoleum of the Guelphs is also located in the Berggarten. Like the Great Garden, the Berggarten also consists of several parts, for example the Paradies and the Prairie Garden. The Georgengarten is an English landscape garden. The Leibniz Temple and the Georgen Palace are two points of interest there.
The landmark of Hanover is the New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus). Inside the building are four scale models of the city. A worldwide unique diagonal/arch elevator goes up the large dome at a 17 degree angle to an observation deck.
The Hanover Zoo received the Park Scout Award for the fourth year running in 2009/10, placing it among the best zoos in Germany. The zoo consists of several theme areas: Sambesi, Meyers Farm, Gorilla-Mountain, Jungle-Palace, and Mullewapp. Some smaller areas are Australia, the wooded area for wolves, and the so-called swimming area with many seabirds. There is also a tropical house, a jungle house, and a show arena. The new Canadian-themed area, Yukon Bay, opened in 2010. In 2010 the Hanover Zoo had over 1.6 million visitors. There is also the Sea Life Centre Hanover, which is the first tropical aquarium in Germany.
Another point of interest is the Old Town. In the centre are the large Marktkirche (Church St. Georgii et Jacobi, preaching venue of the bishop of the Lutheran Landeskirche Hannovers) and the Old Town Hall. Nearby are the Leibniz House, the Nolte House, and the Beguine Tower. The Kreuz-Church-Quarter around the Kreuz Church contains many little lanes. Nearby is the old royal sports hall, now called the Ballhof theatre. On the edge of the Old Town are the Market Hall, the Leine Palace, and the ruin of the Aegidien Church which is now a monument to the victims of war and violence. Through the Marstall Gate the bank of the river Leine can be reached; the Nanas of Niki de Saint Phalle are located here. They are part of the Mile of Sculptures, which starts from Trammplatz, leads along the river bank, crosses Königsworther Square, and ends at the entrance of the Georgengarten. Near the Old Town is the district of Calenberger Neustadt where the Catholic Basilica Minor of St. Clemens, the Reformed Church and the Lutheran Neustädter Hof- und Stadtkirche St. Johannis are located.
Some other popular sights are the Waterloo Column, the Laves House, the Wangenheim Palace, the Lower Saxony State Archives, the Hanover Playhouse, the Kröpcke Clock, the Anzeiger Tower Block, the Administration Building of the NORD/LB, the Cupola Hall of the Congress Centre, the Lower Saxony Stock, the Ministry of Finance, the Garten Church, the Luther Church, the Gehry Tower (designed by the American architect Frank O. Gehry), the specially designed Bus Stops, the Opera House, the Central Station, the Maschsee lake and the city forest Eilenriede, which is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. With around 40 parks, forests and gardens, a couple of lakes, two rivers and one canal, Hanover offers a large variety of leisure activities.
Since 2007 the historic Leibniz Letters, which can be viewed in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, are on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Outside the city centre is the EXPO-Park, the former site of EXPO 2000. Some points of interest are the Planet M., the former German Pavillon, some nations' vacant pavilions, the Expowale, the EXPO-Plaza and the EXPO-Gardens (Parc Agricole, EXPO-Park South and the Gardens of change). The fairground can be reached by the Exponale, one of the largest pedestrian bridges in Europe.
The Hanover fairground is the largest exhibition centre in the world. It provides 496,000 square metres (5.34 million square feet) of covered indoor space, 58,000 square metres (620 thousand square feet) of open-air space, 27 halls and pavilions. Many of the Exhibition Centre's halls are architectural highlights. Furthermore, it offers the Convention Center with its 35 function rooms, glassed-in areas between halls, grassy park-like recreation zones and its own heliport. Two important sights on the fairground are the Hermes Tower (88.8 metres or 291 feet high) and the EXPO Roof, the largest wooden roof in the world.
In the district of Anderten is the European Cheese Centre, the only Cheese Experience Centre in Europe. Another tourist sight in Anderten is the Hindenburg Lock, which was the biggest lock in Europe at the time of its construction in 1928. The Tiergarten (literally the "animals' garden") in the district of Kirchrode is a large forest originally used for deer and other game for the king's table.
In the district of Groß-Buchholz the 282-metre-high (925 ft) Telemax is located, which is the tallest building in Lower Saxony and the highest television tower in Northern Germany. Some other notable towers are the VW-Tower in the city centre and the old towers of the former middle-age defence belt: Döhrener Tower, Lister Tower and the Horse Tower.
The 36 most important sights of the city centre are connected with a 4.2-kilometre-long (3 mi) red line, which is painted on the pavement. This so-called Red Thread marks out a walk that starts at the Tourist Information Office and ends on the Ernst-August-Square in front of the central station. There is also a guided sightseeing-bus tour through the city.
Hanover has a population of about 540,000. It is the largest city in Lower Saxony and is the 13th largest city in Germany. Hanover Region, a district that surrounds the city of Hanover and cities like Langenhagen, Garbsen and Laatzen has a population of about 1,160,000 and is the largest District (Landkreis) in Germany. Hanover metropolitan region, which includes also cities like Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Göttingen has a population of about 3,850,000 and is the 8th largest metropolitan area in Germany. Hanover passed 100,000 in 1875 and Hanover's population grow since 1946, when Hanover became the capital of Lower Saxony state and it grow rapidly in 1950s and 60s due to West German Wirtschaftswunder. This also saw the growth of large migrant population, drawn largely from Turkey, Greece and Italy. Hanover has also one of the largest Vietnamese community in former West Germany due to its close distance from former East Germany. The Viên Giác pagoda in Mittelfeld, southern district of Hanover is the largest Vietnamese pagoda in Germany and one of the largest in Europe. Hanover is one of the liveable cities due to its good location and good size of population.
It is the fifth-largest city in the Low German dialect area after Hamburg, Dortmund, Essen and Bremen.
Hanover is headquarters for several Protestant organizations, including the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Protestant Church in Germany, the Reformed Alliance, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, and the Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church.
In 2015, 31.1% of the population were Protestant and 13.4% were Roman Catholic. The majority 55.5% were irreligious or other faith.
The Historisches Museum Hannover (Historic museum) describes the history of Hanover, from the medieval settlement "Honovere" to the city of today. The museum focuses on the period from 1714 to 1834 when Hanover had a strong relationship with the British royal house.
With more than 4,000 members, the Kestnergesellschaft is the largest art society in Germany. The museum hosts exhibitions from classical modernist art to contemporary art. Emphasis is placed on film, video, contemporary music and architecture, room installments and presentations of contemporary paintings, sculptures and video art.
The Kestner-Museum is located in the House of 5.000 windows. The museum is named after August Kestner and exhibits 6,000 years of applied art in four areas: Ancient cultures, ancient Egypt, applied art and a valuable collection of historic coins.
The KUBUS is a forum for contemporary art. It features mostly exhibitions and projects of artists from Hanover.
The Kunstverein Hannover (Art Society Hanover) shows contemporary art and was established in 1832 as one of the first art societies in Germany. It is located in the Künstlerhaus (House of artists). There are around seven international exhibitions each year.
The Landesmuseum Hannover is the largest museum in Hanover. The art gallery shows European art from the 11th to the 20th century, the nature department shows the zoology, geology, botanic, geology and a vivarium with fish, insects, reptiles and amphibians. The primeval department shows the primeval history of Lower Saxony, and the folklore department shows cultures from all over the world.
The Sprengel Museum shows the art of the 20th century. It is one of the most notable art museums in Germany. The focus is put on the classical modernist art with the collection of Kurt Schwitters, works of German expressionism, and French cubism, the cabinet of abstracts, the graphics and the department of photography and media. Furthermore, the museum shows the works of the French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle.
The Theatre Museum shows an exhibition of the history of the theatre in Hanover from the 17th century up to now: opera, concert, drama and ballet. The museum also hosts several touring exhibitions during the year.
The Wilhelm Busch Museum is the German Museum of Caricature and Critical Graphic Arts. The collection of the works of Wilhelm Busch and the extensive collection of cartoons and critical graphics is unique in Germany. Furthermore, the museum hosts several exhibitions of national and international artists during the year.
A cabinet of coins is the Münzkabinett der TUI-AG. The Polizeigeschichtliche Sammlung Niedersachsen is the largest police museum in Germany. Textiles from all over the world can be visited in the Museum for textile art. The EXPOseeum is the museum of the world-exhibition "EXPO 2000 Hannover". Carpets and objects from the orient can be visited in the Oriental Carpet Museum. The Museum for the visually impaired is a rarity in Germany, there is only one other of its kind in Berlin. The Museum of veterinary medicine is unique in Germany. The Museum for Energy History describes the 150 years old history of the application of energy. The Heimat-Museum Ahlem shows the history of the district of Ahlem. The Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ahlem describes the history of the Jewish people in Hanover and the Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte / Kestner Pro Arte shows modern art. Modern art is also the main topic of the Kunsthalle Faust, the Nord/LB Art Gallery and of the Foro Artistico / Eisfabrik.
Some leading art events in Hanover are the Long Night of the Museums and the Zinnober Kunstvolkslauf which features all the galleries in Hanover.
People who are interested in astronomy should visit the Observatory Geschwister Herschel on the Lindener Mountain or the small planetarium inside of the Bismarck School.
Around 40 theatres are located in Hanover. The Opera House, the Schauspielhaus (Play House), the Ballhof eins, the Ballhof zwei and the Cumberlandsche Galerie belong to the Lower Saxony State Theatre. The Theater am Aegi is Hanover's principal theatre for musicals, shows and guest performances. The Neues Theater (New Theatre) is the boulevard theatre of Hanover. The Theater für Niedersachsen is another large theatre in Hanover, which also has an own musical company. Some of the most important musical productions are the rock musicals of the German rock musician Heinz Rudolph Kunze, which take place at the Garden-Theatre in the Great Garden.
Some important theatre events are the Tanztheater International, the Long Night of the Theatres, the Festival Theaterformen and the International Competition for Choreographers.
Hanover's leading cabaret stage is the GOP Variety theatre which is located in the Georgs Palace. Some other cabaret-stages are the Variety Marlene, the Uhu-Theatre. the theatre Die Hinterbühne, the Rampenlich Variety and the revue-stage TAK. The most important cabaret event is the Kleines Fest im Großen Garten (Little Festival in the Great Garden) which is the most successful cabaret festival in Germany. It features artists from around the world. Some other important events are the Calenberger Cabaret Weeks, the Hanover Cabaret Festival and the Wintervariety.
Hanover has two symphony orchestras: The Lower Saxon State Orchestra Hanover and the NDR Radiophilharmonie (North German Radio Philharmonic Orchestra). Two notable choirs have their homes in Hanover: the Mädchenchor Hannover (girls' choir) and the Knabenchor Hannover (boys' choir).
There are two major international competitions for classical music in Hanover:
The rock bands Scorpions and Fury in the Slaughterhouse are originally from Hanover. Acclaimed DJ Mousse T also has his main recording studio in the area. Rick J. Jordan, member of the band Scooter was born here in 1968. Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2010, Lena, is also from Hanover.
Hannover 96 (nickname Die Roten or 'The Reds') is the top local football team that currently plays in the 2. Bundesliga. Home games are played at the HDI-Arena, which hosted matches in the 1974 and 2006 World Cups and the Euro 1988. Their reserve team Hannover 96 II plays in the fourth league. Their home games were played in the traditional Eilenriedestadium until they moved to the HDI Arena due to DFL directives. Arminia Hannover is another traditional soccer team in Hanover that has played in the second division (then 2. Liga Nord) for years and plays now in the Niedersachsen-West Liga (Lower Saxony League West). Home matches are played in the Rudolf-Kalweit-Stadium.
The Hannover Indians are the local ice hockey team. They play in the third tier. Their home games are played at the traditional Eisstadion am Pferdeturm. The Hannover Scorpions played in Hanover in Germany's top league until 2013 when they sold their license and moved to Langenhagen.
Hanover was one of the rugby union capitals in Germany. The first German rugby team was founded in Hanover in 1878. Hanover-based teams dominated the German rugby scene for a long time. DRC Hannover plays in the first division, and SV Odin von 1905 as well as SG 78/08 Hannover play in the second division.
Hanover has traditionally been one of Germany's hubs in Water sports and especially in Water polo. The SG Waspo'98 Hannover won the Deutsche Wasserball-Liga in 2020 and 2021. In total, clubs from Hanover have won the German championship 11 times. Thanks to the Maschsee lake, the rivers Ihme and Leine and to the Mittellandkanal channel, Hanover hosts sailing schools, yacht schools, waterski clubs, rowing clubs, canoe clubs and paddle clubs.
The first German fencing club was founded in Hanover in 1862. Today there are three additional fencing clubs in Hanover.
The Hannover Korbjäger are the city's top basketball team. They play their home games at the IGS Linden.
The Hannover Regents play in the third Bundesliga (baseball) division. The Hannover Grizzlies, Armina Spartans and Hannover Stampeders are the local American football teams.
The Hannover Marathon is the biggest running event in Hanover with more than 11,000 participants and usually around 200,000 spectators. Some other important running events are the Gilde Stadtstaffel (relay), the Sport-Check Nachtlauf (night-running), the Herrenhäuser Team-Challenge, the Hannoversche Firmenlauf (company running) and the Silvesterlauf (sylvester running).
Hanover also hosts an important international cycle race: The Nacht von Hannover (night of Hanover). The race takes place around the Market Hall.
The lake Maschsee hosts the International Dragon Boat Races and the Canoe Polo-Tournament. Many regattas take place during the year. "Head of the river Leine" on the river Leine is one of the biggest rowing regattas in Hanover. One of Germany's most successful dragon boat teams, the All Sports Team Hannover, which has won since its foundation in year 2000 more than 100 medals on national and international competitions, is doing practising on the Maschsee in the heart of Hannover. The All Sports Team has received the award "Team of the Year 2013" in Lower Saxony.
Some other important sport events are the Lower Saxony Beach Volleyball Tournament, the international horse show "German Classics" and the international ice hockey tournament Nations Cup.
Hanover is one of the leading exhibition cities in the world. It hosts more than 60 international and national exhibitions every year. The most popular ones are the CeBIT, the Hanover Fair, the Domotex, the Ligna, the IAA Nutzfahrzeuge and the Agritechnica. Hanover also hosts a huge number of congresses and symposiums like the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management.
Hanover is also host to the Schützenfest Hannover, the largest marksmen's fun fair in the world which takes place once a year from late June to early July. Founded in 1529, it consists of more than 260 rides and inns, five large beer tents and a large entertainment programme. The highlight of this fun fair is the 12-kilometre-long (7 mi) Parade of the Marksmen with more than 12,000 participants from all over the world, including around 5,000 marksmen, 128 bands, and more than 70 wagons, carriages, and other festival vehicles. This makes it the longest procession in Europe. Around 2 million people visit this fun fair every year. The landmark of this fun fair is the biggest transportable Ferris wheel in the world, at about 60 metres (197 ft) high.
Hanover also hosts one of the two largest spring festivals in Europe, with around 180 rides and inns, 2 large beer tents, and around 1.5 million visitors each year. The Oktoberfest Hannover is the second largest Oktoberfest in the world with around 160 rides and inns, two large beer tents and around 1 million visitors each year.
The Maschsee Festival takes place around the Maschsee Lake. Each year around 2 million visitors come to enjoy live music, comedy, cabaret, and much more. It is the largest Volksfest of its kind in Northern Germany. The Great Garden hosts every year the International Fireworks Competition, and the International Festival Weeks Herrenhausen, with music and cabaret performances. The Carnival Procession is around 3 kilometres (2 mi) long and consists of 3.000 participants, around 30 festival vehicles and around 20 bands and takes place every year.
Other festivals include the Festival Feuer und Flamme (Fire and Flames), the Gartenfestival (Garden Festival), the Herbstfestival (Autumn Festival), the Harley Days, the Steintor Festival (Steintor is a party area in the city centre) and the Lister-Meile-Festival (Lister Meile is a large pedestrian area).
Hanover also hosts food-oriented festivals including the Wine Festival and the Gourmet Festival. It also hosts some special markets like the Old Town Flea Market and the Market for Art and Trade. Some other major markets include the Christmas Markets of the City of Hanover in the Old Town and city centre, and the Lister Meile.
Hanover is an attractive tourist place due to its many sights and famous events. Hanover had about 580,000 visitors in 2021, predominantly from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Famous sights in Hanover are New Town Hall, Herrenhausen Gardens and Hanover Zoo, which is one of the largest Zoos in Germany. Hannover Messe, first held in 1947, is also an attractive place for visitors, which has about 250,000 visitors every year. Hanover Messe is dedicated to the topic of industry development. Hanover Messe is one of the world's largest trade fairs and it has the largest fairground in the world.
The city's central station, Hannover Hauptbahnhof, is a hub of the German high-speed ICE network. It is the starting point of the Hanover-Würzburg high-speed rail line and also the central hub for the Hanover S-Bahn. It offers many international and national connections.
Hanover and its area is served by Hannover Airport (IATA code: HAJ; ICAO code: EDDV) in Langenhagen.
Hanover is also an important hub of Germany's autobahn network; the junction of two major autobahns, the A2 and A7 is at Kreuz Hannover-Ost, at the northeastern edge of the city.
Local autobahns are A 352 (a short cut between A7 [north] and A2 [west], also known as the Airport autobahn because it passes Hanover Airport) and the A 37.
The expressway (Schnellweg) system, a number of Bundesstraße roads, forms a structure loosely resembling a large ring road together with A2 and A7. The roads are B 3, B 6 and Bundesstraße 65|B 65, called Westschnellweg (B6 on the northern part, B3 on the southern part), Messeschnellweg (B3, becomes A37 near Burgdorf, crosses A2, becomes B3 again, changes to B6 at Seelhorster Kreuz, then passes the Hanover fairground as B6 and becomes A37 again before merging into A7) and Südschnellweg (starts out as B65, becomes B3/B6/B65 upon crossing Westschnellweg, then becomes B65 again at Seelhorster Kreuz).
Hanover has an extensive Stadtbahn and bus system, operated by üstra. The city uses designer buses and tramways, the TW 6000 and TW 2000 trams being examples.
Bicycle paths are very common in the city centre. At off-peak hours you are allowed to take your bike on a tram or bus.
Various industrial businesses are located in Hannover. The Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Transporter (VWN) factory at Hannover-Stöcken is the biggest employer in the region and operates a large plant at the northern edge of town adjoining the Mittellandkanal and Motorway A2. Volkswagen shares a coal-burning power plant with a factory of German tire and automobile parts manufacturer Continental AG. Continental AG, founded in Hanover in 1871, is one of the city's major companies. Since 2008 a take-over has been in progress: the Schaeffler Group from Herzogenaurach (Bavaria) holds the majority of Continental's stock but were required due to the financial crisis to deposit the options as securities at banks.
The audio equipment company Sennheiser and the travel group TUI AG are both based in Hanover. Hanover is home to many insurance companies including Talanx, VHV Group, and Concordia Insurance. The major global reinsurance company Hannover Re also has its headquarters east of the city centre.
In 2012, the city generated a GDP of €29.5 billion, which is equivalent to €74,822 per employee. The gross value of production in 2012 was €26.4 billion, which is equivalent to €66,822 per employee.
Around 300,000 employees were counted in 2014. Of these, 189,000 had their primary residence in Hanover, while 164,892 commute into the city every day.
In 2014 the city was home to 34,198 businesses, of which 9,342 were registered in the German Trade Register and 24,856 counted as small businesses. Hence, more than half of the metropolitan area's businesses in the German Trade Register are located in Hanover (17,485 total).
Hannoverimpuls GMBH is a joint business development company from the city and region of Hannover. The company was founded in 2003 and supports the start-up, growth and relocation of businesses in the Hannover Region. The focus is on thirteen sectors, which stand for sustainable economic growth: Automotive, Energy Solutions, Information and Communications Technology, Life Sciences, Optical Technologies, Creative Industries and Production Engineering.
A range of programmes supports companies from the key industries in their expansion plans in Hannover or abroad. Three regional centres specifically promote international economic relations with Russia, India and Turkey.
The Institut für Integrierte Produktion Hannover is a spin-off from Leibniz University Hannover in the field of production technology that promotes transfer of scientific knowledge to business.
The Leibniz University Hannover is the largest funded institution in Hanover for providing higher education to students from around the world. Below are the names of the universities and some of the important schools, including newly opened Hannover Medical Research School in 2003 for attracting the students from biology background from around the world.
There are several universities in Hanover:
There is one University of Applied Science and Arts in Hanover:
The Schulbiologiezentrum Hannover maintains practical biology schools in four locations (Botanischer Schulgarten Burg, Freiluftschule Burg, Zooschule Hannover, and Botanischer Schulgarten Linden). The University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover also maintains its own botanical garden specializing in medicinal and poisonous plants, the Heil- und Giftpflanzengarten der Tierärztlichen Hochschule Hannover.
Hanover is twinned with:
Hanover also cooperates with: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hanover (/ˈhænoʊvər, -nəv-/ HAN-oh-vər, HAN-ə-vər; German: Hannover [haˈnoːfɐ] ; Low German: Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in northern Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. Hanover's urban area comprises the towns of Garbsen, Langenhagen and Laatzen and has a population of about 791,000 (2018). The Hanover Region has approximately 1.16 million inhabitants (2019) and is the largest in the Hannover–Braunschweig–Göttingen–Wolfsburg Metropolitan Region.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Before it became the capital of Lower Saxony in 1946, Hannover was the capital of the Principality of Calenberg (1636–1692), the Electorate of Hanover (1692–1814), the Kingdom of Hanover (1814–1866), the Province of Hannover of the Kingdom of Prussia (1868–1918), the Province of Hannover of the Free State of Prussia (1918–1946) and of the State of Hanover (1946). From 1714 to 1837 Hannover was by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, under their title of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg (later described as the Elector of Hanover).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The city lies at the confluence of the River Leine and its tributary the Ihme, in the south of the North German Plain. The city is a major crossing point of railway lines and motorways (Autobahnen), connecting European main lines in both the east–west (Berlin–Ruhr area/Düsseldorf/Cologne) and north–south (Hamburg–Frankfurt/Stuttgart/Munich) directions. Hannover Airport lies north of the city, in Langenhagen, and is Germany's ninth-busiest airport. The city's most notable institutes of higher education are the Hannover Medical School (Medizinische Hochschule Hannover), one of Germany's leading medical schools, with its university hospital Klinikum der Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover, and the Leibniz University Hannover. The city is also home to International Neuroscience Institute.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Hanover Fairground, owing to numerous extensions, especially for the Expo 2000, is the largest in the world. Hannover hosts annual commercial trade fairs such as the Hannover Fair and up to 2018 the CeBIT. The IAA Commercial Vehicles show takes place every two years. It is the world's leading trade show for transport, logistics and mobility. Every year Hannover hosts the Schützenfest Hannover, the world's largest marksmen's festival, and the Oktoberfest Hannover.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "'Hanover' is the traditional English spelling. The German spelling (with a double n) has become more popular in English; recent editions of encyclopedias prefer the German spelling, and the local government uses the German spelling on English websites. The English pronunciation, with stress on the first syllable, is applied to both the German and English spellings, which is different from German pronunciation, with stress on the second syllable and a long second vowel. The traditional English spelling is still used in historical contexts, especially when referring to the British House of Hanover.",
"title": "Etmyology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hanover was founded in medieval times on the east bank of the River Leine. Its original name Honovere may mean 'high (river)bank', but that is debated (cf. das Hohe Ufer). Hanover was a small village of ferrymen and fishermen that became a comparatively-large town in the 13th century and received town privileges in 1241 because of its position at a natural crossroads. As overland travel was relatively difficult, its position on the upper navigable reaches of the river helped it grow by increasing trade. It was connected to the Hanseatic League city of Bremen by the Leine and was situated near the southern edge of the wide North German Plain and north-west of the Harz mountains and so east–west traffic such as mule trains passed through it. Hanover was thus a gateway to the Rhine, Ruhr and Saar river valleys, and their industrial areas which grew up to the southwest and the plains regions to the east and north for overland traffic skirting the Harz between the Low Countries and Saxony or Thuringia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the 14th century, the main churches of Hanover were built, as well as a city wall with three city gates. The beginning of industrialization in Germany led to trade in iron and silver from the northern Harz Mountains, which increased the city's importance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1636 George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, ruler of the Brunswick-Lüneburg principality of Calenberg, moved his residence to Hanover. The Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg were elevated by the Holy Roman Emperor to the rank of Prince-Elector in 1692, which was confirmed by the Imperial Diet in 1708. Thus, the principality was upgraded to the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, colloquially known as the Electorate of Hanover after Calenberg's capital (see also House of Hanover). Its electors later became monarchs of Great Britain (and from 1801 of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland). The first of them was George I Louis, who acceded to the British throne in 1714. The last British monarch who reigned in Hanover was William IV. Semi-Salic law, which required succession by the male line if possible, forbade the accession of Queen Victoria in Hanover. As a male-line descendant of George I, Queen Victoria was herself a member of the House of Hanover. Her descendants, however, bore her husband's titular name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Three kings of Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, were concurrently also Electoral Princes of Hanover.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the time of the personal union of the crowns of the United Kingdom and Hanover (1714–1837), the monarchs rarely visited the city. In fact during the reigns of the last three joint rulers (1760–1837), there was only one short visit, by George IV in 1821. From 1816 to 1837, Viceroy Adolphus represented the monarch in Hanover.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the Seven Years' War, the Battle of Hastenbeck was fought near the city on 26 July 1757. The French army defeated the Hanoverian Army of Observation, which led to the city's occupation as part of the Invasion of Hanover. It was recaptured by Anglo-German forces, led by Ferdinand of Brunswick, the following year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After Napoleon imposed the Convention of Artlenburg (Convention of the Elbe) on 5 July 1803, about 35,000 French soldiers occupied Hanover. The convention also required disbanding the Hanoverian Army. However, George III did not recognise the Convention of the Elbe, which resulted in a great number of soldiers from Hanover eventually emigrating to Great Britain, where the King's German Legion was formed. It was only troops from Hanover and Brunswick who consistently opposed France throughout the Napoleonic Wars. The Legion later played an important role in the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In 1814 the electorate became the Kingdom of Hanover.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1837, the personal union of the United Kingdom and Hanover ended because William IV's heir in the United Kingdom was female (Queen Victoria). Hanover could be inherited only by male heirs if there were any. Thus, Hanover passed to William IV's brother, Ernest Augustus, and remained a kingdom until 1866, when it was annexed by Prussia during the Austro-Prussian war. Though Hanover was expected to defeat Prussia at the Battle of Langensalza, Prussia employed Moltke the Elder's Kesselschlacht order of battle to instead destroy the Hanoverian Army. The city of Hanover became the capital of the Prussian Province of Hanover.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1842, the first horse railway was inaugurated, and in 1893, an electric tram was installed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After 1937 the lord mayor and the state commissioners of Hanover were members of the NSDAP (Nazi party). A large Jewish population then existed in Hanover. In October 1938, 484 Hanoverian Jews of Polish origin were expelled to Poland, including the Grynszpan family. However, Poland refused to accept them, leaving them stranded at the border with thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees, fed only intermittently by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organisations. The Grynszpans' son Herschel Grynszpan was in Paris at the time. When he learned of what was happening, he drove to the German embassy in Paris and shot the German diplomat Eduard Ernst vom Rath, who died shortly afterwards.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Nazis took this act as a pretext to stage a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht (9 November 1938). On that day, the synagogue of Hanover, designed in 1870 by Edwin Oppler in neo-romantic style, was burnt by the Nazis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In September 1941, through the \"Action Lauterbacher\" plan, a ghettoisation of the remaining Hanoverian Jewish families began. Even before the Wannsee Conference, on 15 December 1941, the first Jews from Hanover were deported to Riga. A total of 2,400 people were deported, and very few survived. During the war seven concentration camps were constructed in Hanover, in which many Jews were confined, but also Polish, French and Russian women. Of the approximately 4,800 Jews who had lived in Hannover in 1938, fewer than 100 were still in the city when troops of the United States Army arrived on 10 April 1945 to occupy Hanover at the end of the war. Today, a memorial at the Opera Square is a reminder of the persecution of the Jews in Hanover. After the war a large group of Orthodox Jewish survivors of the nearby Bergen-Belsen concentration camp settled in Hanover.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "There was also a camp for Sinti and Romani people (see Romani Holocaust), and dozens of forced labour subcamps of the Stalag XI-B prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As an important railway and road junction and production centre, Hanover was a major target for strategic bombing during World War II, including the Oil Campaign. Targets included the AFA (Stöcken), the Deurag-Nerag refinery (Misburg), the Continental plants (Vahrenwald and Limmer), the United light metal works (VLW) in Ricklingen and Laatzen (today Hanover fairground), the Hanover/Limmer rubber reclamation plant, the Hanomag factory (Linden) and the tank factory M.N.H. Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen (Badenstedt). Residential areas were also targeted, and more than 6,000 civilians were killed by the Allied bombing raids. More than 90% of the city centre was destroyed in a total of 88 bombing raids. After the war, the Aegidienkirche was not rebuilt and its ruins were left as a war memorial.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Allied ground advance into Germany reached Hanover in April 1945. The US 84th Infantry Division captured the city on 10 April 1945.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Hanover was in the British zone of occupation of Germany and became part of the new state (Land) of Lower Saxony in 1946.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Today Hanover is a vice-president city of Mayors for Peace, an international mayoral organisation mobilising cities and citizens worldwide to abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hanover has an oceanic climate (Köppen: Cfb) independent of the isotherm. Although the city is not on a coastal location, the predominant air masses are still from the ocean, unlike other places further east or south-central Germany.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The city of Hanover is divided into 13 boroughs (Stadtbezirke) and 53 quarters (Stadtteile).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A selection of the 53 quarters:",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The current mayor of Hanover is Belit Onay of the Alliance 90/The Greens since 2019. The most recent mayoral election was held on 17 October 2019, with a runoff held on 10 November, and the results were as follows:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Hanover city council governs the city alongside the mayor. The most recent city council election was held on 12 September 2021, and the results were as follows:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "One of Hanover's sights is the Royal Gardens of Herrenhausen. Its Great Garden is an important European Baroque garden. The palace itself was largely destroyed by Allied bombing but has been reconstructed and reopened in 2013. Among the points of interest is the Grotto. Its interior was designed by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle). The Great Garden consists of several parts and contains Europe's highest garden fountain. The historic Garden Theatre hosted the musicals of the German rock musician Heinz Rudolf Kunze.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Also at Herrenhausen, the Berggarten is a botanical garden with the most varied collection of orchids in Europe. Some points of interest are the Tropical House, the Cactus House, the Canary House and the Orchid House, and free-flying birds and butterflies. Near the entrance to the Berggarten is the historic Library Pavillon. The Mausoleum of the Guelphs is also located in the Berggarten. Like the Great Garden, the Berggarten also consists of several parts, for example the Paradies and the Prairie Garden. The Georgengarten is an English landscape garden. The Leibniz Temple and the Georgen Palace are two points of interest there.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The landmark of Hanover is the New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus). Inside the building are four scale models of the city. A worldwide unique diagonal/arch elevator goes up the large dome at a 17 degree angle to an observation deck.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Hanover Zoo received the Park Scout Award for the fourth year running in 2009/10, placing it among the best zoos in Germany. The zoo consists of several theme areas: Sambesi, Meyers Farm, Gorilla-Mountain, Jungle-Palace, and Mullewapp. Some smaller areas are Australia, the wooded area for wolves, and the so-called swimming area with many seabirds. There is also a tropical house, a jungle house, and a show arena. The new Canadian-themed area, Yukon Bay, opened in 2010. In 2010 the Hanover Zoo had over 1.6 million visitors. There is also the Sea Life Centre Hanover, which is the first tropical aquarium in Germany.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Another point of interest is the Old Town. In the centre are the large Marktkirche (Church St. Georgii et Jacobi, preaching venue of the bishop of the Lutheran Landeskirche Hannovers) and the Old Town Hall. Nearby are the Leibniz House, the Nolte House, and the Beguine Tower. The Kreuz-Church-Quarter around the Kreuz Church contains many little lanes. Nearby is the old royal sports hall, now called the Ballhof theatre. On the edge of the Old Town are the Market Hall, the Leine Palace, and the ruin of the Aegidien Church which is now a monument to the victims of war and violence. Through the Marstall Gate the bank of the river Leine can be reached; the Nanas of Niki de Saint Phalle are located here. They are part of the Mile of Sculptures, which starts from Trammplatz, leads along the river bank, crosses Königsworther Square, and ends at the entrance of the Georgengarten. Near the Old Town is the district of Calenberger Neustadt where the Catholic Basilica Minor of St. Clemens, the Reformed Church and the Lutheran Neustädter Hof- und Stadtkirche St. Johannis are located.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Some other popular sights are the Waterloo Column, the Laves House, the Wangenheim Palace, the Lower Saxony State Archives, the Hanover Playhouse, the Kröpcke Clock, the Anzeiger Tower Block, the Administration Building of the NORD/LB, the Cupola Hall of the Congress Centre, the Lower Saxony Stock, the Ministry of Finance, the Garten Church, the Luther Church, the Gehry Tower (designed by the American architect Frank O. Gehry), the specially designed Bus Stops, the Opera House, the Central Station, the Maschsee lake and the city forest Eilenriede, which is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. With around 40 parks, forests and gardens, a couple of lakes, two rivers and one canal, Hanover offers a large variety of leisure activities.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Since 2007 the historic Leibniz Letters, which can be viewed in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, are on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Outside the city centre is the EXPO-Park, the former site of EXPO 2000. Some points of interest are the Planet M., the former German Pavillon, some nations' vacant pavilions, the Expowale, the EXPO-Plaza and the EXPO-Gardens (Parc Agricole, EXPO-Park South and the Gardens of change). The fairground can be reached by the Exponale, one of the largest pedestrian bridges in Europe.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Hanover fairground is the largest exhibition centre in the world. It provides 496,000 square metres (5.34 million square feet) of covered indoor space, 58,000 square metres (620 thousand square feet) of open-air space, 27 halls and pavilions. Many of the Exhibition Centre's halls are architectural highlights. Furthermore, it offers the Convention Center with its 35 function rooms, glassed-in areas between halls, grassy park-like recreation zones and its own heliport. Two important sights on the fairground are the Hermes Tower (88.8 metres or 291 feet high) and the EXPO Roof, the largest wooden roof in the world.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the district of Anderten is the European Cheese Centre, the only Cheese Experience Centre in Europe. Another tourist sight in Anderten is the Hindenburg Lock, which was the biggest lock in Europe at the time of its construction in 1928. The Tiergarten (literally the \"animals' garden\") in the district of Kirchrode is a large forest originally used for deer and other game for the king's table.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the district of Groß-Buchholz the 282-metre-high (925 ft) Telemax is located, which is the tallest building in Lower Saxony and the highest television tower in Northern Germany. Some other notable towers are the VW-Tower in the city centre and the old towers of the former middle-age defence belt: Döhrener Tower, Lister Tower and the Horse Tower.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The 36 most important sights of the city centre are connected with a 4.2-kilometre-long (3 mi) red line, which is painted on the pavement. This so-called Red Thread marks out a walk that starts at the Tourist Information Office and ends on the Ernst-August-Square in front of the central station. There is also a guided sightseeing-bus tour through the city.",
"title": "Main sights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Hanover has a population of about 540,000. It is the largest city in Lower Saxony and is the 13th largest city in Germany. Hanover Region, a district that surrounds the city of Hanover and cities like Langenhagen, Garbsen and Laatzen has a population of about 1,160,000 and is the largest District (Landkreis) in Germany. Hanover metropolitan region, which includes also cities like Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Göttingen has a population of about 3,850,000 and is the 8th largest metropolitan area in Germany. Hanover passed 100,000 in 1875 and Hanover's population grow since 1946, when Hanover became the capital of Lower Saxony state and it grow rapidly in 1950s and 60s due to West German Wirtschaftswunder. This also saw the growth of large migrant population, drawn largely from Turkey, Greece and Italy. Hanover has also one of the largest Vietnamese community in former West Germany due to its close distance from former East Germany. The Viên Giác pagoda in Mittelfeld, southern district of Hanover is the largest Vietnamese pagoda in Germany and one of the largest in Europe. Hanover is one of the liveable cities due to its good location and good size of population.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "It is the fifth-largest city in the Low German dialect area after Hamburg, Dortmund, Essen and Bremen.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Hanover is headquarters for several Protestant organizations, including the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Protestant Church in Germany, the Reformed Alliance, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, and the Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2015, 31.1% of the population were Protestant and 13.4% were Roman Catholic. The majority 55.5% were irreligious or other faith.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Historisches Museum Hannover (Historic museum) describes the history of Hanover, from the medieval settlement \"Honovere\" to the city of today. The museum focuses on the period from 1714 to 1834 when Hanover had a strong relationship with the British royal house.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "With more than 4,000 members, the Kestnergesellschaft is the largest art society in Germany. The museum hosts exhibitions from classical modernist art to contemporary art. Emphasis is placed on film, video, contemporary music and architecture, room installments and presentations of contemporary paintings, sculptures and video art.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Kestner-Museum is located in the House of 5.000 windows. The museum is named after August Kestner and exhibits 6,000 years of applied art in four areas: Ancient cultures, ancient Egypt, applied art and a valuable collection of historic coins.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The KUBUS is a forum for contemporary art. It features mostly exhibitions and projects of artists from Hanover.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Kunstverein Hannover (Art Society Hanover) shows contemporary art and was established in 1832 as one of the first art societies in Germany. It is located in the Künstlerhaus (House of artists). There are around seven international exhibitions each year.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Landesmuseum Hannover is the largest museum in Hanover. The art gallery shows European art from the 11th to the 20th century, the nature department shows the zoology, geology, botanic, geology and a vivarium with fish, insects, reptiles and amphibians. The primeval department shows the primeval history of Lower Saxony, and the folklore department shows cultures from all over the world.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Sprengel Museum shows the art of the 20th century. It is one of the most notable art museums in Germany. The focus is put on the classical modernist art with the collection of Kurt Schwitters, works of German expressionism, and French cubism, the cabinet of abstracts, the graphics and the department of photography and media. Furthermore, the museum shows the works of the French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Theatre Museum shows an exhibition of the history of the theatre in Hanover from the 17th century up to now: opera, concert, drama and ballet. The museum also hosts several touring exhibitions during the year.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Wilhelm Busch Museum is the German Museum of Caricature and Critical Graphic Arts. The collection of the works of Wilhelm Busch and the extensive collection of cartoons and critical graphics is unique in Germany. Furthermore, the museum hosts several exhibitions of national and international artists during the year.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "A cabinet of coins is the Münzkabinett der TUI-AG. The Polizeigeschichtliche Sammlung Niedersachsen is the largest police museum in Germany. Textiles from all over the world can be visited in the Museum for textile art. The EXPOseeum is the museum of the world-exhibition \"EXPO 2000 Hannover\". Carpets and objects from the orient can be visited in the Oriental Carpet Museum. The Museum for the visually impaired is a rarity in Germany, there is only one other of its kind in Berlin. The Museum of veterinary medicine is unique in Germany. The Museum for Energy History describes the 150 years old history of the application of energy. The Heimat-Museum Ahlem shows the history of the district of Ahlem. The Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ahlem describes the history of the Jewish people in Hanover and the Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte / Kestner Pro Arte shows modern art. Modern art is also the main topic of the Kunsthalle Faust, the Nord/LB Art Gallery and of the Foro Artistico / Eisfabrik.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Some leading art events in Hanover are the Long Night of the Museums and the Zinnober Kunstvolkslauf which features all the galleries in Hanover.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "People who are interested in astronomy should visit the Observatory Geschwister Herschel on the Lindener Mountain or the small planetarium inside of the Bismarck School.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Around 40 theatres are located in Hanover. The Opera House, the Schauspielhaus (Play House), the Ballhof eins, the Ballhof zwei and the Cumberlandsche Galerie belong to the Lower Saxony State Theatre. The Theater am Aegi is Hanover's principal theatre for musicals, shows and guest performances. The Neues Theater (New Theatre) is the boulevard theatre of Hanover. The Theater für Niedersachsen is another large theatre in Hanover, which also has an own musical company. Some of the most important musical productions are the rock musicals of the German rock musician Heinz Rudolph Kunze, which take place at the Garden-Theatre in the Great Garden.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Some important theatre events are the Tanztheater International, the Long Night of the Theatres, the Festival Theaterformen and the International Competition for Choreographers.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Hanover's leading cabaret stage is the GOP Variety theatre which is located in the Georgs Palace. Some other cabaret-stages are the Variety Marlene, the Uhu-Theatre. the theatre Die Hinterbühne, the Rampenlich Variety and the revue-stage TAK. The most important cabaret event is the Kleines Fest im Großen Garten (Little Festival in the Great Garden) which is the most successful cabaret festival in Germany. It features artists from around the world. Some other important events are the Calenberger Cabaret Weeks, the Hanover Cabaret Festival and the Wintervariety.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Hanover has two symphony orchestras: The Lower Saxon State Orchestra Hanover and the NDR Radiophilharmonie (North German Radio Philharmonic Orchestra). Two notable choirs have their homes in Hanover: the Mädchenchor Hannover (girls' choir) and the Knabenchor Hannover (boys' choir).",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "There are two major international competitions for classical music in Hanover:",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The rock bands Scorpions and Fury in the Slaughterhouse are originally from Hanover. Acclaimed DJ Mousse T also has his main recording studio in the area. Rick J. Jordan, member of the band Scooter was born here in 1968. Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2010, Lena, is also from Hanover.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Hannover 96 (nickname Die Roten or 'The Reds') is the top local football team that currently plays in the 2. Bundesliga. Home games are played at the HDI-Arena, which hosted matches in the 1974 and 2006 World Cups and the Euro 1988. Their reserve team Hannover 96 II plays in the fourth league. Their home games were played in the traditional Eilenriedestadium until they moved to the HDI Arena due to DFL directives. Arminia Hannover is another traditional soccer team in Hanover that has played in the second division (then 2. Liga Nord) for years and plays now in the Niedersachsen-West Liga (Lower Saxony League West). Home matches are played in the Rudolf-Kalweit-Stadium.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The Hannover Indians are the local ice hockey team. They play in the third tier. Their home games are played at the traditional Eisstadion am Pferdeturm. The Hannover Scorpions played in Hanover in Germany's top league until 2013 when they sold their license and moved to Langenhagen.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Hanover was one of the rugby union capitals in Germany. The first German rugby team was founded in Hanover in 1878. Hanover-based teams dominated the German rugby scene for a long time. DRC Hannover plays in the first division, and SV Odin von 1905 as well as SG 78/08 Hannover play in the second division.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Hanover has traditionally been one of Germany's hubs in Water sports and especially in Water polo. The SG Waspo'98 Hannover won the Deutsche Wasserball-Liga in 2020 and 2021. In total, clubs from Hanover have won the German championship 11 times. Thanks to the Maschsee lake, the rivers Ihme and Leine and to the Mittellandkanal channel, Hanover hosts sailing schools, yacht schools, waterski clubs, rowing clubs, canoe clubs and paddle clubs.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The first German fencing club was founded in Hanover in 1862. Today there are three additional fencing clubs in Hanover.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Hannover Korbjäger are the city's top basketball team. They play their home games at the IGS Linden.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Hannover Regents play in the third Bundesliga (baseball) division. The Hannover Grizzlies, Armina Spartans and Hannover Stampeders are the local American football teams.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Hannover Marathon is the biggest running event in Hanover with more than 11,000 participants and usually around 200,000 spectators. Some other important running events are the Gilde Stadtstaffel (relay), the Sport-Check Nachtlauf (night-running), the Herrenhäuser Team-Challenge, the Hannoversche Firmenlauf (company running) and the Silvesterlauf (sylvester running).",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Hanover also hosts an important international cycle race: The Nacht von Hannover (night of Hanover). The race takes place around the Market Hall.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The lake Maschsee hosts the International Dragon Boat Races and the Canoe Polo-Tournament. Many regattas take place during the year. \"Head of the river Leine\" on the river Leine is one of the biggest rowing regattas in Hanover. One of Germany's most successful dragon boat teams, the All Sports Team Hannover, which has won since its foundation in year 2000 more than 100 medals on national and international competitions, is doing practising on the Maschsee in the heart of Hannover. The All Sports Team has received the award \"Team of the Year 2013\" in Lower Saxony.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Some other important sport events are the Lower Saxony Beach Volleyball Tournament, the international horse show \"German Classics\" and the international ice hockey tournament Nations Cup.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Hanover is one of the leading exhibition cities in the world. It hosts more than 60 international and national exhibitions every year. The most popular ones are the CeBIT, the Hanover Fair, the Domotex, the Ligna, the IAA Nutzfahrzeuge and the Agritechnica. Hanover also hosts a huge number of congresses and symposiums like the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Hanover is also host to the Schützenfest Hannover, the largest marksmen's fun fair in the world which takes place once a year from late June to early July. Founded in 1529, it consists of more than 260 rides and inns, five large beer tents and a large entertainment programme. The highlight of this fun fair is the 12-kilometre-long (7 mi) Parade of the Marksmen with more than 12,000 participants from all over the world, including around 5,000 marksmen, 128 bands, and more than 70 wagons, carriages, and other festival vehicles. This makes it the longest procession in Europe. Around 2 million people visit this fun fair every year. The landmark of this fun fair is the biggest transportable Ferris wheel in the world, at about 60 metres (197 ft) high.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Hanover also hosts one of the two largest spring festivals in Europe, with around 180 rides and inns, 2 large beer tents, and around 1.5 million visitors each year. The Oktoberfest Hannover is the second largest Oktoberfest in the world with around 160 rides and inns, two large beer tents and around 1 million visitors each year.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The Maschsee Festival takes place around the Maschsee Lake. Each year around 2 million visitors come to enjoy live music, comedy, cabaret, and much more. It is the largest Volksfest of its kind in Northern Germany. The Great Garden hosts every year the International Fireworks Competition, and the International Festival Weeks Herrenhausen, with music and cabaret performances. The Carnival Procession is around 3 kilometres (2 mi) long and consists of 3.000 participants, around 30 festival vehicles and around 20 bands and takes place every year.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Other festivals include the Festival Feuer und Flamme (Fire and Flames), the Gartenfestival (Garden Festival), the Herbstfestival (Autumn Festival), the Harley Days, the Steintor Festival (Steintor is a party area in the city centre) and the Lister-Meile-Festival (Lister Meile is a large pedestrian area).",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Hanover also hosts food-oriented festivals including the Wine Festival and the Gourmet Festival. It also hosts some special markets like the Old Town Flea Market and the Market for Art and Trade. Some other major markets include the Christmas Markets of the City of Hanover in the Old Town and city centre, and the Lister Meile.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Hanover is an attractive tourist place due to its many sights and famous events. Hanover had about 580,000 visitors in 2021, predominantly from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Famous sights in Hanover are New Town Hall, Herrenhausen Gardens and Hanover Zoo, which is one of the largest Zoos in Germany. Hannover Messe, first held in 1947, is also an attractive place for visitors, which has about 250,000 visitors every year. Hanover Messe is dedicated to the topic of industry development. Hanover Messe is one of the world's largest trade fairs and it has the largest fairground in the world.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The city's central station, Hannover Hauptbahnhof, is a hub of the German high-speed ICE network. It is the starting point of the Hanover-Würzburg high-speed rail line and also the central hub for the Hanover S-Bahn. It offers many international and national connections.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Hanover and its area is served by Hannover Airport (IATA code: HAJ; ICAO code: EDDV) in Langenhagen.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Hanover is also an important hub of Germany's autobahn network; the junction of two major autobahns, the A2 and A7 is at Kreuz Hannover-Ost, at the northeastern edge of the city.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Local autobahns are A 352 (a short cut between A7 [north] and A2 [west], also known as the Airport autobahn because it passes Hanover Airport) and the A 37.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The expressway (Schnellweg) system, a number of Bundesstraße roads, forms a structure loosely resembling a large ring road together with A2 and A7. The roads are B 3, B 6 and Bundesstraße 65|B 65, called Westschnellweg (B6 on the northern part, B3 on the southern part), Messeschnellweg (B3, becomes A37 near Burgdorf, crosses A2, becomes B3 again, changes to B6 at Seelhorster Kreuz, then passes the Hanover fairground as B6 and becomes A37 again before merging into A7) and Südschnellweg (starts out as B65, becomes B3/B6/B65 upon crossing Westschnellweg, then becomes B65 again at Seelhorster Kreuz).",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Hanover has an extensive Stadtbahn and bus system, operated by üstra. The city uses designer buses and tramways, the TW 6000 and TW 2000 trams being examples.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Bicycle paths are very common in the city centre. At off-peak hours you are allowed to take your bike on a tram or bus.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Various industrial businesses are located in Hannover. The Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Transporter (VWN) factory at Hannover-Stöcken is the biggest employer in the region and operates a large plant at the northern edge of town adjoining the Mittellandkanal and Motorway A2. Volkswagen shares a coal-burning power plant with a factory of German tire and automobile parts manufacturer Continental AG. Continental AG, founded in Hanover in 1871, is one of the city's major companies. Since 2008 a take-over has been in progress: the Schaeffler Group from Herzogenaurach (Bavaria) holds the majority of Continental's stock but were required due to the financial crisis to deposit the options as securities at banks.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The audio equipment company Sennheiser and the travel group TUI AG are both based in Hanover. Hanover is home to many insurance companies including Talanx, VHV Group, and Concordia Insurance. The major global reinsurance company Hannover Re also has its headquarters east of the city centre.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In 2012, the city generated a GDP of €29.5 billion, which is equivalent to €74,822 per employee. The gross value of production in 2012 was €26.4 billion, which is equivalent to €66,822 per employee.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Around 300,000 employees were counted in 2014. Of these, 189,000 had their primary residence in Hanover, while 164,892 commute into the city every day.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In 2014 the city was home to 34,198 businesses, of which 9,342 were registered in the German Trade Register and 24,856 counted as small businesses. Hence, more than half of the metropolitan area's businesses in the German Trade Register are located in Hanover (17,485 total).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Hannoverimpuls GMBH is a joint business development company from the city and region of Hannover. The company was founded in 2003 and supports the start-up, growth and relocation of businesses in the Hannover Region. The focus is on thirteen sectors, which stand for sustainable economic growth: Automotive, Energy Solutions, Information and Communications Technology, Life Sciences, Optical Technologies, Creative Industries and Production Engineering.",
"title": "Business development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "A range of programmes supports companies from the key industries in their expansion plans in Hannover or abroad. Three regional centres specifically promote international economic relations with Russia, India and Turkey.",
"title": "Business development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The Institut für Integrierte Produktion Hannover is a spin-off from Leibniz University Hannover in the field of production technology that promotes transfer of scientific knowledge to business.",
"title": "Business development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The Leibniz University Hannover is the largest funded institution in Hanover for providing higher education to students from around the world. Below are the names of the universities and some of the important schools, including newly opened Hannover Medical Research School in 2003 for attracting the students from biology background from around the world.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "There are several universities in Hanover:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "There is one University of Applied Science and Arts in Hanover:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The Schulbiologiezentrum Hannover maintains practical biology schools in four locations (Botanischer Schulgarten Burg, Freiluftschule Burg, Zooschule Hannover, and Botanischer Schulgarten Linden). The University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover also maintains its own botanical garden specializing in medicinal and poisonous plants, the Heil- und Giftpflanzengarten der Tierärztlichen Hochschule Hannover.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Hanover is twinned with:",
"title": "Twin towns – sister cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Hanover also cooperates with:",
"title": "Twin towns – sister cities"
}
]
| Hanover is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in northern Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. Hanover's urban area comprises the towns of Garbsen, Langenhagen and Laatzen and has a population of about 791,000 (2018). The Hanover Region has approximately 1.16 million inhabitants (2019) and is the largest in the Hannover–Braunschweig–Göttingen–Wolfsburg Metropolitan Region. Before it became the capital of Lower Saxony in 1946, Hannover was the capital of the Principality of Calenberg (1636–1692), the Electorate of Hanover (1692–1814), the Kingdom of Hanover (1814–1866), the Province of Hannover of the Kingdom of Prussia (1868–1918), the Province of Hannover of the Free State of Prussia (1918–1946) and of the State of Hanover (1946). From 1714 to 1837 Hannover was by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, under their title of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The city lies at the confluence of the River Leine and its tributary the Ihme, in the south of the North German Plain. The city is a major crossing point of railway lines and motorways (Autobahnen), connecting European main lines in both the east–west and north–south (Hamburg–Frankfurt/Stuttgart/Munich) directions. Hannover Airport lies north of the city, in Langenhagen, and is Germany's ninth-busiest airport. The city's most notable institutes of higher education are the Hannover Medical School, one of Germany's leading medical schools, with its university hospital Klinikum der Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover, and the Leibniz University Hannover. The city is also home to International Neuroscience Institute. The Hanover Fairground, owing to numerous extensions, especially for the Expo 2000, is the largest in the world. Hannover hosts annual commercial trade fairs such as the Hannover Fair and up to 2018 the CeBIT. The IAA Commercial Vehicles show takes place every two years. It is the world's leading trade show for transport, logistics and mobility. Every year Hannover hosts the Schützenfest Hannover, the world's largest marksmen's festival, and the Oktoberfest Hannover. | 2001-05-17T18:49:31Z | 2023-12-30T00:56:47Z | [
"Template:Wide image",
"Template:Cities and towns in Hanover (district)",
"Template:Infobox German place",
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanover |
14,199 | Handheld game console | A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the console, screen, speakers, and controls in one unit, allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place.
In 1976, Mattel introduced the first handheld electronic game with the release of Auto Race. Later, several companies—including Coleco and Milton Bradley—made their own single-game, lightweight table-top or handheld electronic game devices. The first commercial successful handheld console was Merlin from 1978 which sold more than 5 million units. The first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges is the Milton Bradley Microvision in 1979.
Nintendo is credited with popularizing the handheld console concept with the release of the Game Boy in 1989 and continues to dominate the handheld console market. The first internet-enabled handheld console and the first with a touchscreen was the Game.com released by Tiger Electronics in 1997. The Nintendo DS, released in 2004, introduced touchscreen controls and wireless online gaming to a wider audience, becoming the best-selling handheld console with over 150 million units sold worldwide.
This table describes handheld games consoles over video game generations with over 1 million sales.
The origins of handheld game consoles are found in handheld and tabletop electronic game devices of the 1970s and early 1980s. These electronic devices are capable of playing only a single game, they fit in the palm of the hand or on a tabletop, and they may make use of a variety of video displays such as LED, VFD, or LCD. In 1978, handheld electronic games were described by Popular Electronics magazine as "nonvideo electronic games" and "non-TV games" as distinct from devices that required use of a television screen. Handheld electronic games, in turn, find their origins in the synthesis of previous handheld and tabletop electro-mechanical devices such as Waco's Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe (1972) Cragstan's Periscope-Firing Range (1951), and the emerging optoelectronic-display-driven calculator market of the early 1970s. This synthesis happened in 1976, when "Mattel began work on a line of calculator-sized sports games that became the world's first handheld electronic games. The project began when Michael Katz, Mattel's new product category marketing director, told the engineers in the electronics group to design a game the size of a calculator, using LED (light-emitting diode) technology."
The result was the 1976 release of Auto Race. Followed by Football later in 1977, the two games were so successful that according to Katz, "these simple electronic handheld games turned into a '$400 million category.'" Mattel would later win the honor of being recognized by the industry for innovation in handheld game device displays. Soon, other manufacturers including Coleco, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Entex, and Bandai began following up with their own tabletop and handheld electronic games.
In 1979 the LCD-based Microvision, designed by Smith Engineering and distributed by Milton-Bradley, became the first handheld game console and the first to use interchangeable game cartridges. The Microvision game Cosmic Hunter (1981) also introduced the concept of a directional pad on handheld gaming devices, and is operated by using the thumb to manipulate the on-screen character in any of four directions.
In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. Starting in 1980, Nintendo began to release a series of electronic games designed by Yokoi called the Game & Watch games. Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen. For later, more complicated Game & Watch games, Yokoi invented a cross shaped directional pad or "D-pad" for control of on-screen characters. Yokoi also included his directional pad on the NES controllers, and the cross-shaped thumb controller soon became standard on game console controllers and ubiquitous across the video game industry since. When Yokoi began designing Nintendo's first handheld game console, he came up with a device that married the elements of his Game & Watch devices and the Famicom console, including both items' D-pad controller. The result was the Nintendo Game Boy.
In 1982, the Bandai LCD Solarpower was the first solar-powered gaming device. Some of its games, such as the horror-themed game Terror House, features two LCD panels, one stacked on the other, for an early 3D effect. In 1983, Takara Tomy's Tomytronic 3D simulates 3D by having two LCD panels that were lit by external light through a window on top of the device, making it the first dedicated home video 3D hardware.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the beginnings of the modern-day handheld game console industry, after the demise of the Microvision. As backlit LCD game consoles with color graphics consume a lot of power, they were not battery-friendly like the non-backlit original Game Boy whose monochrome graphics allowed longer battery life. By this point, rechargeable battery technology had not yet matured and so the more advanced game consoles of the time such as the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx did not have nearly as much success as the Game Boy.
Even though third-party rechargeable batteries were available for the battery-hungry alternatives to the Game Boy, these batteries employed a nickel-cadmium process and had to be completely discharged before being recharged to ensure maximum efficiency; lead-acid batteries could be used with automobile circuit limiters (cigarette lighter plug devices); but the batteries had mediocre portability. The later NiMH batteries, which do not share this requirement for maximum efficiency, were not released until the late 1990s, years after the Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and original Game Boy had been discontinued. During the time when technologically superior handhelds had strict technical limitations, batteries had a very low mAh rating since batteries with heavy power density were not yet available.
Modern game systems such as the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable have rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries with proprietary shapes. Other seventh-generation consoles, such as the GP2X, use standard alkaline batteries. Because the mAh rating of alkaline batteries has increased since the 1990s, the power needed for handhelds like the GP2X may be supplied by relatively few batteries.
Nintendo released the Game Boy on April 21, 1989 (September 1990 for the UK). The design team headed by Gunpei Yokoi had also been responsible for the Game & Watch system, as well as the Nintendo Entertainment System games Metroid and Kid Icarus. The Game Boy came under scrutiny by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, saying that the monochrome screen was too small, and the processing power was inadequate. The design team had felt that low initial cost and battery economy were more important concerns, and when compared to the Microvision, the Game Boy was a huge leap forward.
Yokoi recognized that the Game Boy needed a killer app—at least one game that would define the console, and persuade customers to buy it. In June 1988, Minoru Arakawa, then-CEO of Nintendo of America saw a demonstration of the game Tetris at a trade show. Nintendo purchased the rights for the game, and packaged it with the Game Boy system as a launch title. It was almost an immediate hit. By the end of the year more than a million units were sold in the US. As of March 31, 2005, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined to sell over 118 million units worldwide.
In 1987, Epyx created the Handy Game; a device that would become the Atari Lynx in 1989. It is the first color handheld console ever made, as well as the first with a backlit screen. It also features networking support with up to 17 other players, and advanced hardware that allows the zooming and scaling of sprites. The Lynx can also be turned upside down to accommodate left-handed players. However, all these features came at a very high price point, which drove consumers to seek cheaper alternatives. The Lynx is also very unwieldy, consumes batteries very quickly, and lacked the third-party support enjoyed by its competitors. Due to its high price, short battery life, production shortages, a dearth of compelling games, and Nintendo's aggressive marketing campaign, and despite a redesign in 1991, the Lynx became a commercial failure. Despite this, companies like Telegames helped to keep the system alive long past its commercial relevance, and when new owner Hasbro released the rights to develop for the public domain, independent developers like Songbird have managed to release new commercial games for the system every year until 2004's Winter Games.
The TurboExpress is a portable version of the TurboGrafx, released in 1990 for $249.99. Its Japanese equivalent is the PC Engine GT.
It is the most advanced handheld of its time and can play all the TurboGrafx-16's games (which are on a small, credit-card sized media called HuCards). It has a 66 mm (2.6 in.) screen, the same as the original Game Boy, but in a much higher resolution, and can display 64 sprites at once, 16 per scanline, in 512 colors. Although the hardware can only handle 481 simultaneous colors. It has 8 kilobytes of RAM. The Turbo runs the HuC6820 CPU at 1.79 or 7.16 MHz.
The optional "TurboVision" TV tuner includes RCA audio/video input, allowing users to use TurboExpress as a video monitor. The "TurboLink" allowed two-player play. Falcon, a flight simulator, included a "head-to-head" dogfight mode that can only be accessed via TurboLink. However, very few TG-16 games offered co-op play modes especially designed with the TurboExpress in mind.
The Bitcorp Gamate is one of the first handheld game systems created in response to the Nintendo Game Boy. It was released in Asia in 1990 and distributed worldwide by 1991.
Like the Sega Game Gear, it was horizontal in orientation and like the Game Boy, required 4 AA batteries. Unlike many later Game Boy clones, its internal components were professionally assembled (no "glop-top" chips). Unfortunately the system's fatal flaw is its screen. Even by the standards of the day, its screen is rather difficult to use, suffering from similar ghosting problems that were common complaints with the first generation Game Boys. Likely because of this fact sales were quite poor, and Bitcorp closed by 1992. However, new games continued to be published for the Asian market, possibly as late as 1994. The total number of games released for the system remains unknown.
Gamate games were designed for stereo sound, but the console is only equipped with a mono speaker.
The Game Gear is the third color handheld console, after the Lynx and the TurboExpress; produced by Sega. Released in Japan in 1990 and in North America and Europe in 1991, it is based on the Master System, which gave Sega the ability to quickly create Game Gear games from its large library of games for the Master System. While never reaching the level of success enjoyed by Nintendo, the Game Gear proved to be a fairly durable competitor, lasting longer than any other Game Boy rivals.
While the Game Gear is most frequently seen in black or navy blue, it was also released in a variety of additional colors: red, light blue, yellow, clear, and violet. All of these variations were released in small quantities and frequently only in the Asian market.
Following Sega's success with the Game Gear, they began development on a successor during the early 1990s, which was intended to feature a touchscreen interface, many years before the Nintendo DS. However, such a technology was very expensive at the time, and the handheld itself was estimated to have cost around $289 were it to be released. Sega eventually chose to shelve the idea and instead release the Genesis Nomad, a handheld version of the Genesis, as the successor.
The Watara Supervision was released in 1992 in an attempt to compete with the Nintendo Game Boy. The first model was designed very much like a Game Boy, but it is grey in color and has a slightly larger screen. The second model was made with a hinge across the center and can be bent slightly to provide greater comfort for the user. While the system did enjoy a modest degree of success, it never impacted the sales of Nintendo or Sega. The Supervision was redesigned a final time as "The Magnum". Released in limited quantities it was roughly equivalent to the Game Boy Pocket. It was available in three colors: yellow, green and grey. Watara designed many of the games themselves, but did receive some third party support, most notably from Sachen.
A TV adapter was available in both PAL and NTSC formats that could transfer the Supervision's black-and-white palette to 4 colors, similar in some regards to the Super Game Boy from Nintendo.
The Hartung Game Master is an obscure handheld released at an unknown point in the early 1990s. Its graphics fidelity was much lower than most of its contemporaries, displaying just 64x64 pixels. It was available in black, white, and purple, and was frequently rebranded by its distributors, such as Delplay, Videojet and Systema.
The exact number of games released is not known, but is likely around 20. The system most frequently turns up in Europe and Australia.
By this time, the lack of significant development in Nintendo's product line began allowing more advanced systems such as the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the WonderSwan Color to be developed.
The Nomad was released in October 1995 in North America only. The release was six years into the market span of the Genesis, with an existing library of more than 500 Genesis games. According to former Sega of America research and development head Joe Miller, the Nomad was not intended to be the Game Gear's replacement; he believed that there was little planning from Sega of Japan for the new handheld. Sega was supporting five different consoles: Saturn, Genesis, Game Gear, Pico, and the Master System, as well as the Sega CD and 32X add-ons. In Japan, the Mega Drive had never been successful and the Saturn was more successful than Sony's PlayStation, so Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama decided to focus on the Saturn. By 1999, the Nomad was being sold at less than a third of its original price.
The Game Boy Pocket is a redesigned version of the original Game Boy having the same features. It was released in 1996. Notably, this variation is smaller and lighter. It comes in seven different colors; red, yellow, green, black, clear, silver, blue, and pink. It has space for two AAA batteries, which provide approximately 10 hours of game play. The screen was changed to a true black-and-white display, rather than the "pea soup" monochromatic display of the original Game Boy. Although, like its predecessor, the Game Boy Pocket has no backlight to allow play in a darkened area, it did notably improve visibility and pixel response-time (mostly eliminating ghosting).
The first model of the Game Boy Pocket did not have an LED to show battery levels, but the feature was added due to public demand. The Game Boy Pocket was not a new software platform and played the same software as the original Game Boy model.
The Game.com (pronounced in TV commercials as "game com", not "game dot com", and not capitalized in marketing material) is a handheld game console released by Tiger Electronics in September 1997. It featured many new ideas for handheld consoles and was aimed at an older target audience, sporting PDA-style features and functions such as a touch screen and stylus. However, Tiger hoped it would also challenge Nintendo's Game Boy and gain a following among younger gamers too. Unlike other handheld game consoles, the first game.com consoles included two slots for game cartridges, which would not happen again until the Tapwave Zodiac, the DS and DS Lite, and could be connected to a 14.4 kbit/s modem. Later models had only a single cartridge slot.
The Game Boy Color (also referred to as GBC or CGB) is Nintendo's successor to the Game Boy and was released on October 21, 1998, in Japan and in November of the same year in the United States. It features a color screen, and is slightly bigger than the Game Boy Pocket. The processor is twice as fast as a Game Boy's and has twice as much memory. It also had an infrared communications port for wireless linking which did not appear in later versions of the Game Boy, such as the Game Boy Advance.
The Game Boy Color was a response to pressure from game developers for a new system, as they felt that the Game Boy, even in its latest incarnation, the Game Boy Pocket, was insufficient. The resulting product was backward compatible, a first for a handheld console system, and leveraged the large library of games and great installed base of the predecessor system. This became a major feature of the Game Boy line, since it allowed each new launch to begin with a significantly larger library than any of its competitors. As of March 31, 2005, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined to sell 118.69 million units worldwide.
The console is capable of displaying up to 56 different colors simultaneously on screen from its palette of 32,768, and can add basic four-color shading to games that had been developed for the original Game Boy. It can also give the sprites and backgrounds separate colors, for a total of more than four colors.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color (or NGPC) was released in 1999 in Japan, and later that year in the United States and Europe. It is a 16-bit color handheld game console designed by SNK, the maker of the Neo Geo home console and arcade machine. It came after SNK's original Neo Geo Pocket monochrome handheld, which debuted in 1998 in Japan.
In 2000 following SNK's purchase by Japanese Pachinko manufacturer Aruze, the Neo Geo Pocket Color was dropped from both the US and European markets, purportedly due to commercial failure.
The system seemed well on its way to being a success in the U.S. It was more successful than any Game Boy competitor since Sega's Game Gear, but was hurt by several factors, such as SNK's infamous lack of communication with third-party developers, and anticipation of the Game Boy Advance. The decision to ship U.S. games in cardboard boxes in a cost-cutting move rather than hard plastic cases that Japanese and European releases were shipped in may have also hurt US sales.
The WonderSwan Color is a handheld game console designed by Bandai. It was released on December 9, 2000, in Japan, Although the WonderSwan Color was slightly larger and heavier (7 mm and 2 g) compared to the original WonderSwan, the color version featured 512 KB of RAM and a larger color LCD screen. In addition, the WonderSwan Color is compatible with the original WonderSwan library of games.
Prior to WonderSwan's release, Nintendo had virtually a monopoly in the Japanese video game handheld market. After the release of the WonderSwan Color, Bandai took approximately 8% of the market share in Japan partly due to its low price of 6800 yen (approximately US$65). Another reason for the WonderSwan's success in Japan was the fact that Bandai managed to get a deal with Square to port over the original Famicom Final Fantasy games with improved graphics and controls. However, with the popularity of the Game Boy Advance and the reconciliation between Square and Nintendo, the WonderSwan Color and its successor, the SwanCrystal quickly lost its competitive advantage.
The 2000s saw a major leap in innovation, particularly in the second half with the release of the DS and PSP.
In 2001, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance (GBA or AGB), which added two shoulder buttons, a larger screen, and more computing power than the Game Boy Color.
The design was revised two years later when the Game Boy Advance SP (GBA SP), a more compact version, was released. The SP features a "clamshell" design (folding open and closed, like a laptop computer), as well as a frontlit color display and rechargeable battery. Despite the smaller form factor, the screen remained the same size as that of the original. In 2005, the Game Boy Micro was released. This revision sacrifices screen size and backwards compatibility with previous Game Boys for a dramatic reduction in total size and a brighter backlit screen. A new SP model with a backlit screen was released in some regions around the same time.
Along with the GameCube, the GBA also introduced the concept of "connectivity": using a handheld system as a console controller. A handful of games use this feature, most notably Animal Crossing, Pac-Man Vs., Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
As of December 31, 2007, the GBA, GBA SP, and the Game Boy Micro combined have sold 80.72 million units worldwide.
The original GP32 was released in 2001 by the South Korean company Game Park a few months after the launch of the Game Boy Advance. It featured a 32-bit CPU, 133 MHz processor, MP3 and Divx player, and e-book reader. SmartMedia cards were used for storage, and could hold up to 128mb of anything downloaded through a USB cable from a PC. The GP32 was redesigned in 2003. A front-lit screen was added and the new version was called GP32 FLU (Front Light Unit). In summer 2004, another redesign, the GP32 BLU, was made, and added a backlit screen. This version of the handheld was planned for release outside South Korea; in Europe, and it was released for example in Spain (VirginPlay was the distributor). While not a commercial success on a level with mainstream handhelds (only 30,000 units were sold), it ended up being used mainly as a platform for user-made applications and emulators of other systems, being popular with developers and more technically adept users.
Nokia released the N-Gage in 2003. It was designed as a combination MP3 player, cellphone, PDA, radio, and gaming device. The system received much criticism alleging defects in its physical design and layout, including its vertically oriented screen and requirement of removing the battery to change game cartridges. The most well known of these was "sidetalking", or the act of placing the phone speaker and receiver on an edge of the device instead of one of the flat sides, causing the user to appear as if they are speaking into a taco.
The N-Gage QD was later released to address the design flaws of the original. However, certain features available in the original N-Gage, including MP3 playback, FM radio reception, and USB connectivity were removed.
Second generation of N-Gage launched on April 3, 2008 in the form of a service for selected Nokia Smartphones.
In 2003, Tapwave released the Zodiac. It was designed to be a PDA-handheld game console hybrid. It supported photos, movies, music, Internet, and documents. The Zodiac used a special version Palm OS 5, 5.2T, that supported the special gaming buttons and graphics chip. Two versions were available, Zodiac 1 and 2, differing in memory and looks. The Zodiac line ended in July 2005 when Tapwave declared bankruptcy.
The Nintendo DS was released in November 2004. Among its new features were the incorporation of two screens, a touchscreen, wireless connectivity, and a microphone port. As with the Game Boy Advance SP, the DS features a clamshell design, with the two screens aligned vertically on either side of the hinge.
The DS's lower screen is touch sensitive, designed to be pressed with a stylus, a user's finger or a special "thumb pad" (a small plastic pad attached to the console's wrist strap, which can be affixed to the thumb to simulate an analog stick). More traditional controls include four face buttons, two shoulder buttons, a D-pad, and "Start" and "Select" buttons. The console also features online capabilities via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and ad-hoc wireless networking for multiplayer games with up to sixteen players. It is backwards-compatible with all Game Boy Advance games, but like the Game Boy Micro, it is not compatible with games designed for the Game Boy or Game Boy Color.
In January 2006, Nintendo revealed an updated version of the DS: the Nintendo DS Lite (released on March 2, 2006, in Japan) with an updated, smaller form factor (42% smaller and 21% lighter than the original Nintendo DS), a cleaner design, longer battery life, and brighter, higher-quality displays, with adjustable brightness. It is also able to connect wirelessly with Nintendo's Wii console.
On October 2, 2008, Nintendo announced the Nintendo DSi, with larger, 3.25-inch screens and two integrated cameras. It has an SD card storage slot in place of the Game Boy Advance slot, plus internal flash memory for storing downloaded games. It was released on November 1, 2008, in Japan, April 2, 2009 in Australia, April 3, 2009 in Europe, and April 5, 2009 in North America. On October 29, 2009, Nintendo announced a larger version of the DSi, called the DSi XL, which was released on November 21, 2009 in Japan, March 5, 2010 in Europe, March 28, 2010 in North America, and April 15, 2010 in Australia.
As of December 31, 2009, the Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite, and Nintendo DSi combined have sold 125.13 million units worldwide.
The GameKing is a handheld game console released by the Chinese company TimeTop in 2004. The first model while original in design owes a large debt to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. The second model, the GameKing 2, is believed to be inspired by Sony's PSP. This model also was upgraded with a backlit screen, with a distracting background transparency (which can be removed by opening up the console). A color model, the GameKing 3 apparently exists, but was only made for a brief time and was difficult to purchase outside of Asia. Whether intentionally or not, the GameKing has the most primitive graphics of any handheld released since the Game Boy of 1989.
As many of the games have an "old school" simplicity, the device has developed a small cult following. The Gameking's speaker is quite loud and the cartridges' sophisticated looping soundtracks (sampled from other sources) are seemingly at odds with its primitive graphics.
TimeTop made at least one additional device sometimes labeled as "GameKing", but while it seems to possess more advanced graphics, is essentially an emulator that plays a handful of multi-carts (like the GB Station Light II). Outside of Asia (especially China) however the Gameking remains relatively unheard of due to the enduring popularity of Japanese handhelds such as those manufactured by Nintendo and Sony.
The PlayStation Portable (officially abbreviated PSP) is a handheld game console manufactured and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. Development of the console was first announced during E3 2003, and it was unveiled on May 11, 2004, at a Sony press conference before E3 2004. The system was released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in the PAL region on September 1, 2005.
The PlayStation Portable is the first handheld video game console to use an optical disc format, Universal Media Disc (UMD), for distribution of its games. UMD Video discs with movies and television shows were also released. The PSP utilized the Sony/SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo format as its primary storage medium. Other distinguishing features of the console include its large viewing screen, multi-media capabilities, and connectivity with the PlayStation 3, other PSPs, and the Internet.
Tiger's Gizmondo came out in the UK during March 2005 and it was released in the U.S. during October 2005. It is designed to play music, movies, and games, have a camera for taking and storing photos, and have GPS functions. It also has Internet capabilities. It has a phone for sending text and multimedia messages. Email was promised at launch, but was never released before Gizmondo, and ultimately Tiger Telematics', downfall in early 2006. Users obtained a second service pack, unreleased, hoping to find such functionality. However, Service Pack B did not activate the e-mail functionality.
The GP2X is an open-source, Linux-based handheld video game console and media player created by GamePark Holdings of South Korea, designed for homebrew developers as well as commercial developers. It is commonly used to run emulators for game consoles such as Neo-Geo, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, TurboGrafx-16, MAME and others.
A new version called the "F200" was released October 30, 2007, and features a touchscreen, among other changes. Followed by GP2X Wiz (2009) and GP2X Caanoo (2010).
The Dingoo A320 is a micro-sized gaming handheld that resembles the Game Boy Micro and is open to game development. It also supports music, radio, emulators (8 bit and 16 bit) and video playing capabilities with its own interface much like the PSP. There is also an onboard radio and recording program. It is currently available in two colors — white and black. Other similar products from the same manufacturer are the Dingoo A330 (also known as Geimi), Dingoo A360, Dingoo A380, and Dingoo A320E.
The PSP Go is a version of the PlayStation Portable handheld game console manufactured by Sony. It was released on October 1, 2009, in American and European territories, and on November 1 in Japan. It was revealed prior to E3 2009 through Sony's Qore VOD service. Although its design is significantly different from other PSPs, it is not intended to replace the PSP 3000, which Sony continued to manufacture, sell, and support. On April 20, 2011, the manufacturer announced that the PSP Go would be discontinued so that they may concentrate on the PlayStation Vita. Sony later said that only the European and Japanese versions were being cut, and that the console would still be available in the US. Unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go does not feature a UMD drive, but instead has 16 GB of internal flash memory to store games, video, pictures, and other media. This can be extended by up to 32 GB with the use of a Memory Stick Micro (M2) flash card. Also unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go's rechargeable battery is not removable or replaceable by the user. The unit is 43% lighter and 56% smaller than the original PSP-1000, and 16% lighter and 35% smaller than the PSP-3000. It has a 3.8" 480 × 272 LCD (compared to the larger 4.3" 480 × 272 pixel LCD on previous PSP models). The screen slides up to reveal the main controls. The overall shape and sliding mechanism are similar to that of Sony's mylo COM-2 internet device.
The Pandora is a handheld game console/UMPC/PDA hybrid designed to take advantage of existing open source software and to be a target for home-brew development. It runs a full distribution of Linux, and in functionality is like a small PC with gaming controls. It is developed by OpenPandora, which is made up of former distributors and community members of the GP32 and GP2X handhelds.
OpenPandora began taking pre-orders for one batch of 4000 devices in November 2008 and after manufacturing delays, began shipping to customers on May 21, 2010.
The FC-16 Go is a portable Super NES hardware clone manufactured by Yobo Gameware in 2009. It features a 3.5-inch display, two wireless controllers, and CRT cables that allow cartridges to be played on a television screen. Unlike other Super NES clone consoles, it has region tabs that only allow NTSC North American cartridges to be played. Later revisions feature stereo sound output, larger shoulder buttons, and a slightly re-arranged button, power, and A/V output layout.
The Nintendo 3DS is the successor to Nintendo's DS handheld. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic three-dimensional effects without requirement of active shutter or passive polarized glasses, which are required by most current 3D televisions to display the 3D effect. The 3DS was released in Japan on February 26, 2011; in Europe on March 25, 2011; in North America on March 27, 2011, and in Australia on March 31, 2011. The system features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software except those that require the Game Boy Advance slot. It also features an online service called the Nintendo eShop, launched on June 6, 2011, in North America and June 7, 2011, in Europe and Japan, which allows owners to download games, demos, applications and information on upcoming film and game releases. On November 24, 2011, a limited edition Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary 3DS was released that contained a unique Cosmo Black unit decorated with gold Legend of Zelda related imagery, along with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.
There are also other models including the Nintendo 2DS and the New Nintendo 3DS, the latter with a larger (XL/LL) variant, like the original Nintendo 3DS, as well as the New Nintendo 2DS XL.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is a handheld game console smartphone produced by Sony Ericsson under the Xperia smartphone brand. The device runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and is the first to be part of the PlayStation Certified program which means that it can play PlayStation Suite games. The device is a horizontally sliding phone with its original form resembling the Xperia X10 while the slider below resembles the slider of the PSP Go. The slider features a D-pad on the left side, a set of standard PlayStation buttons (, , and ) on the right, a long rectangular touchpad in the middle, start and select buttons on the bottom right corner, a menu button on the bottom left corner, and two shoulder buttons (L and R) on the back of the device. It is powered by a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a Qualcomm Adreno 205 GPU, and features a display measuring 4.0 inches (100 mm) (854 × 480), an 8-megapixel camera, 512 MB RAM, 8 GB internal storage, and a micro-USB connector. It supports microSD cards, versus the Memory Stick variants used in PSP consoles. The device was revealed officially for the first time in a Super Bowl ad on Sunday, February 6, 2011. On February 13, 2011, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2011, it was announced that the device would be shipping globally in March 2011, with a launch lineup of around 50 software titles.
The PlayStation Vita is the successor to Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) Handheld series. It was released in Japan on December 17, 2011 and in Europe, Australia, North, and South America on February 22, 2012.
The handheld includes two analog sticks, a 5-inch (130 mm) OLED/LCD multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, and supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional 3G. Internally, the PS Vita features a 4 core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a 4 core SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit, as well as LiveArea software as its main user interface, which succeeds the XrossMediaBar.
The device is fully backwards-compatible with PlayStation Portable games digitally released on the PlayStation Network via the PlayStation Store. However, PSone Classics and PS2 titles were not compatible at the time of the primary public release in Japan. The Vita's dual analog sticks will be supported on selected PSP games. The graphics for PSP releases will be up-scaled, with a smoothing filter to reduce pixelation.
On September 20, 2018, Sony announced at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that the Vita would be discontinued in 2019, ending its hardware production. Production of Vita hardware officially ended on March 1, 2019.
The Razer Switchblade was a prototype pocket-sized like a Nintendo DSi XL designed to run Windows 7, featured a multi-touch LCD screen and an adaptive keyboard that changed keys depending on the game the user would play. It also was to feature a full mouse.
It was first unveiled on January 5, 2011, on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The Switchblade won The Best of CES 2011 People's Voice award. It has since been in development and the release date is still unknown. The device has likely been suspended indefinitely.
Project Shield is a handheld system developed by Nvidia announced at CES 2013. It runs on Android 4.2 and uses Nvidia Tegra 4 SoC. The hardware includes a 5-inches multitouch screen with support for HD graphics (720p). The console allows for the streaming of games running on a compatible desktop PC, or laptop.
Nvidia Shield Portable has received mixed reception from critics. Generally, reviewers praised the performance of the device, but criticized the cost and lack of worthwhile games. Engadget's review noted the system's "extremely impressive PC gaming", but also that due to its high price, the device was "a hard sell as a portable game console", especially when compared to similar handhelds on the market. CNET's Eric Franklin states in his review of the device that "The Nvidia Shield is an extremely well made device, with performance that pretty much obliterates any mobile product before it; but like most new console launches, there is currently a lack of available games worth your time." Eurogamer's comprehensive review of the device provides a detailed account of the device and its features; concluded by saying: "In the here and now, the first-gen Shield Portable is a gloriously niche, luxury product - the most powerful Android system on the market by a clear stretch and possessing a unique link to PC gaming that's seriously impressive in beta form, and can only get better."
The Nintendo Switch is a hybrid console that can either be used in a handheld form, or inserted into a docking station attached to a television to play on a bigger screen. The Switch features two detachable wireless controllers, called Joy-Con, which can be used individually or attached to a grip to provide a traditional gamepad form. A handheld-only revision named Nintendo Switch Lite was released on September 20, 2019.
The Switch Lite had sold about 1.95 million units worldwide by September 30, 2019, only 10 days after its launch.
Evercade is a handheld game console developed and manufactured by UK company Blaze Entertainment. It focuses on retrogaming with ROM cartridges that each contain a number of emulated games. Development began in 2018, and the console was released in May 2020, after a few delays. Upon its launch, the console offered 10 game cartridges with a combined total of 122 games.
Arc System Works, Atari, Data East, Interplay Entertainment, Bandai Namco Entertainment and Piko Interactive have released emulated versions of their games for the Evercade. Pre-existing homebrew games have also been re-released for the console by Mega Cat Studios. The Evercade is capable of playing games originally released for the Atari 2600, the Atari 7800, the Atari Lynx, the NES, the SNES, and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
The Analogue Pocket is a FPGA-based handheld game console designed and manufactured by Analogue, It is designed to play games designed for handhelds of the fourth, fifth and sixth generation of video game consoles. The console features a design reminiscent of the Game Boy, with additional buttons for the supported platforms. It features a 3.5" 1600x1440 LTPS LCD display, an SD card port, and a link cable port compatible with Game Boy link cables. The Analogue Pocket uses an Altera Cyclone V processor, and is compatible with the original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges out of the box. With cartridge adapters (sold separately) the Analogue Pocket can play Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx game cartridges. The Analogue Pocket includes an additional FPGA, allowing 3rd party FPGA development. The Analogue Pocket was released in December 2021.
The Steam Deck is a handheld computer device, developed by Valve, which runs SteamOS 3.0, a tailored distro of Arch Linux and includes support for Proton, a compatibility layer that allows most Microsoft Windows games to be played on the Linux-based operating system. In terms of hardware, the Deck includes a custom AMD APU based on their Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures, with the CPU running a four-core/eight-thread unit and the GPU running on eight compute units with a total estimated performance of 1.6 TFLOPS. Both the CPU and GPU use variable timing frequencies, with the CPU running between 2.4 and 3.5 GHz and the GPU between 1.0 and 1.6 GHz based on current processor needs. Valve stated that the CPU has comparable performance to Ryzen 3000 desktop computer processors and the GPU performance to the Radeon RX 6000 series. The Deck includes 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM in a quad channel configuration.
Valve revealed the Steam Deck on July 15, 2021, with pre-orders being made option the next day. The Deck was expected to ship in December 2021 to the US, Canada, the EU and the UK but was delayed to February 2022, with other regions to follow in 2022. Pre-orders were limited to those with Steam accounts opened before June 2021 to prevent resellers from controlling access to the device. Pre-orders reservations on July 16, 2021 through the Steam storefront briefly crashed the servers due to the demand. While initial shipments are still planned by February 2022, Valve has reported to new purchasers that wider availability will be later, with the 64 GB model and 256 GB NVMe model due in Q2 2022, and the 512 GB NVMe model by Q3 2022. Steam Deck was released on February 25, 2022. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the console, screen, speakers, and controls in one unit, allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1976, Mattel introduced the first handheld electronic game with the release of Auto Race. Later, several companies—including Coleco and Milton Bradley—made their own single-game, lightweight table-top or handheld electronic game devices. The first commercial successful handheld console was Merlin from 1978 which sold more than 5 million units. The first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges is the Milton Bradley Microvision in 1979.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Nintendo is credited with popularizing the handheld console concept with the release of the Game Boy in 1989 and continues to dominate the handheld console market. The first internet-enabled handheld console and the first with a touchscreen was the Game.com released by Tiger Electronics in 1997. The Nintendo DS, released in 2004, introduced touchscreen controls and wireless online gaming to a wider audience, becoming the best-selling handheld console with over 150 million units sold worldwide.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "This table describes handheld games consoles over video game generations with over 1 million sales.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The origins of handheld game consoles are found in handheld and tabletop electronic game devices of the 1970s and early 1980s. These electronic devices are capable of playing only a single game, they fit in the palm of the hand or on a tabletop, and they may make use of a variety of video displays such as LED, VFD, or LCD. In 1978, handheld electronic games were described by Popular Electronics magazine as \"nonvideo electronic games\" and \"non-TV games\" as distinct from devices that required use of a television screen. Handheld electronic games, in turn, find their origins in the synthesis of previous handheld and tabletop electro-mechanical devices such as Waco's Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe (1972) Cragstan's Periscope-Firing Range (1951), and the emerging optoelectronic-display-driven calculator market of the early 1970s. This synthesis happened in 1976, when \"Mattel began work on a line of calculator-sized sports games that became the world's first handheld electronic games. The project began when Michael Katz, Mattel's new product category marketing director, told the engineers in the electronics group to design a game the size of a calculator, using LED (light-emitting diode) technology.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The result was the 1976 release of Auto Race. Followed by Football later in 1977, the two games were so successful that according to Katz, \"these simple electronic handheld games turned into a '$400 million category.'\" Mattel would later win the honor of being recognized by the industry for innovation in handheld game device displays. Soon, other manufacturers including Coleco, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Entex, and Bandai began following up with their own tabletop and handheld electronic games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1979 the LCD-based Microvision, designed by Smith Engineering and distributed by Milton-Bradley, became the first handheld game console and the first to use interchangeable game cartridges. The Microvision game Cosmic Hunter (1981) also introduced the concept of a directional pad on handheld gaming devices, and is operated by using the thumb to manipulate the on-screen character in any of four directions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. Starting in 1980, Nintendo began to release a series of electronic games designed by Yokoi called the Game & Watch games. Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen. For later, more complicated Game & Watch games, Yokoi invented a cross shaped directional pad or \"D-pad\" for control of on-screen characters. Yokoi also included his directional pad on the NES controllers, and the cross-shaped thumb controller soon became standard on game console controllers and ubiquitous across the video game industry since. When Yokoi began designing Nintendo's first handheld game console, he came up with a device that married the elements of his Game & Watch devices and the Famicom console, including both items' D-pad controller. The result was the Nintendo Game Boy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1982, the Bandai LCD Solarpower was the first solar-powered gaming device. Some of its games, such as the horror-themed game Terror House, features two LCD panels, one stacked on the other, for an early 3D effect. In 1983, Takara Tomy's Tomytronic 3D simulates 3D by having two LCD panels that were lit by external light through a window on top of the device, making it the first dedicated home video 3D hardware.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the beginnings of the modern-day handheld game console industry, after the demise of the Microvision. As backlit LCD game consoles with color graphics consume a lot of power, they were not battery-friendly like the non-backlit original Game Boy whose monochrome graphics allowed longer battery life. By this point, rechargeable battery technology had not yet matured and so the more advanced game consoles of the time such as the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx did not have nearly as much success as the Game Boy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Even though third-party rechargeable batteries were available for the battery-hungry alternatives to the Game Boy, these batteries employed a nickel-cadmium process and had to be completely discharged before being recharged to ensure maximum efficiency; lead-acid batteries could be used with automobile circuit limiters (cigarette lighter plug devices); but the batteries had mediocre portability. The later NiMH batteries, which do not share this requirement for maximum efficiency, were not released until the late 1990s, years after the Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and original Game Boy had been discontinued. During the time when technologically superior handhelds had strict technical limitations, batteries had a very low mAh rating since batteries with heavy power density were not yet available.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Modern game systems such as the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable have rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries with proprietary shapes. Other seventh-generation consoles, such as the GP2X, use standard alkaline batteries. Because the mAh rating of alkaline batteries has increased since the 1990s, the power needed for handhelds like the GP2X may be supplied by relatively few batteries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Nintendo released the Game Boy on April 21, 1989 (September 1990 for the UK). The design team headed by Gunpei Yokoi had also been responsible for the Game & Watch system, as well as the Nintendo Entertainment System games Metroid and Kid Icarus. The Game Boy came under scrutiny by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, saying that the monochrome screen was too small, and the processing power was inadequate. The design team had felt that low initial cost and battery economy were more important concerns, and when compared to the Microvision, the Game Boy was a huge leap forward.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Yokoi recognized that the Game Boy needed a killer app—at least one game that would define the console, and persuade customers to buy it. In June 1988, Minoru Arakawa, then-CEO of Nintendo of America saw a demonstration of the game Tetris at a trade show. Nintendo purchased the rights for the game, and packaged it with the Game Boy system as a launch title. It was almost an immediate hit. By the end of the year more than a million units were sold in the US. As of March 31, 2005, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined to sell over 118 million units worldwide.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1987, Epyx created the Handy Game; a device that would become the Atari Lynx in 1989. It is the first color handheld console ever made, as well as the first with a backlit screen. It also features networking support with up to 17 other players, and advanced hardware that allows the zooming and scaling of sprites. The Lynx can also be turned upside down to accommodate left-handed players. However, all these features came at a very high price point, which drove consumers to seek cheaper alternatives. The Lynx is also very unwieldy, consumes batteries very quickly, and lacked the third-party support enjoyed by its competitors. Due to its high price, short battery life, production shortages, a dearth of compelling games, and Nintendo's aggressive marketing campaign, and despite a redesign in 1991, the Lynx became a commercial failure. Despite this, companies like Telegames helped to keep the system alive long past its commercial relevance, and when new owner Hasbro released the rights to develop for the public domain, independent developers like Songbird have managed to release new commercial games for the system every year until 2004's Winter Games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The TurboExpress is a portable version of the TurboGrafx, released in 1990 for $249.99. Its Japanese equivalent is the PC Engine GT.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "It is the most advanced handheld of its time and can play all the TurboGrafx-16's games (which are on a small, credit-card sized media called HuCards). It has a 66 mm (2.6 in.) screen, the same as the original Game Boy, but in a much higher resolution, and can display 64 sprites at once, 16 per scanline, in 512 colors. Although the hardware can only handle 481 simultaneous colors. It has 8 kilobytes of RAM. The Turbo runs the HuC6820 CPU at 1.79 or 7.16 MHz.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The optional \"TurboVision\" TV tuner includes RCA audio/video input, allowing users to use TurboExpress as a video monitor. The \"TurboLink\" allowed two-player play. Falcon, a flight simulator, included a \"head-to-head\" dogfight mode that can only be accessed via TurboLink. However, very few TG-16 games offered co-op play modes especially designed with the TurboExpress in mind.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Bitcorp Gamate is one of the first handheld game systems created in response to the Nintendo Game Boy. It was released in Asia in 1990 and distributed worldwide by 1991.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Like the Sega Game Gear, it was horizontal in orientation and like the Game Boy, required 4 AA batteries. Unlike many later Game Boy clones, its internal components were professionally assembled (no \"glop-top\" chips). Unfortunately the system's fatal flaw is its screen. Even by the standards of the day, its screen is rather difficult to use, suffering from similar ghosting problems that were common complaints with the first generation Game Boys. Likely because of this fact sales were quite poor, and Bitcorp closed by 1992. However, new games continued to be published for the Asian market, possibly as late as 1994. The total number of games released for the system remains unknown.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Gamate games were designed for stereo sound, but the console is only equipped with a mono speaker.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Game Gear is the third color handheld console, after the Lynx and the TurboExpress; produced by Sega. Released in Japan in 1990 and in North America and Europe in 1991, it is based on the Master System, which gave Sega the ability to quickly create Game Gear games from its large library of games for the Master System. While never reaching the level of success enjoyed by Nintendo, the Game Gear proved to be a fairly durable competitor, lasting longer than any other Game Boy rivals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "While the Game Gear is most frequently seen in black or navy blue, it was also released in a variety of additional colors: red, light blue, yellow, clear, and violet. All of these variations were released in small quantities and frequently only in the Asian market.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Following Sega's success with the Game Gear, they began development on a successor during the early 1990s, which was intended to feature a touchscreen interface, many years before the Nintendo DS. However, such a technology was very expensive at the time, and the handheld itself was estimated to have cost around $289 were it to be released. Sega eventually chose to shelve the idea and instead release the Genesis Nomad, a handheld version of the Genesis, as the successor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Watara Supervision was released in 1992 in an attempt to compete with the Nintendo Game Boy. The first model was designed very much like a Game Boy, but it is grey in color and has a slightly larger screen. The second model was made with a hinge across the center and can be bent slightly to provide greater comfort for the user. While the system did enjoy a modest degree of success, it never impacted the sales of Nintendo or Sega. The Supervision was redesigned a final time as \"The Magnum\". Released in limited quantities it was roughly equivalent to the Game Boy Pocket. It was available in three colors: yellow, green and grey. Watara designed many of the games themselves, but did receive some third party support, most notably from Sachen.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A TV adapter was available in both PAL and NTSC formats that could transfer the Supervision's black-and-white palette to 4 colors, similar in some regards to the Super Game Boy from Nintendo.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Hartung Game Master is an obscure handheld released at an unknown point in the early 1990s. Its graphics fidelity was much lower than most of its contemporaries, displaying just 64x64 pixels. It was available in black, white, and purple, and was frequently rebranded by its distributors, such as Delplay, Videojet and Systema.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The exact number of games released is not known, but is likely around 20. The system most frequently turns up in Europe and Australia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "By this time, the lack of significant development in Nintendo's product line began allowing more advanced systems such as the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the WonderSwan Color to be developed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Nomad was released in October 1995 in North America only. The release was six years into the market span of the Genesis, with an existing library of more than 500 Genesis games. According to former Sega of America research and development head Joe Miller, the Nomad was not intended to be the Game Gear's replacement; he believed that there was little planning from Sega of Japan for the new handheld. Sega was supporting five different consoles: Saturn, Genesis, Game Gear, Pico, and the Master System, as well as the Sega CD and 32X add-ons. In Japan, the Mega Drive had never been successful and the Saturn was more successful than Sony's PlayStation, so Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama decided to focus on the Saturn. By 1999, the Nomad was being sold at less than a third of its original price.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Game Boy Pocket is a redesigned version of the original Game Boy having the same features. It was released in 1996. Notably, this variation is smaller and lighter. It comes in seven different colors; red, yellow, green, black, clear, silver, blue, and pink. It has space for two AAA batteries, which provide approximately 10 hours of game play. The screen was changed to a true black-and-white display, rather than the \"pea soup\" monochromatic display of the original Game Boy. Although, like its predecessor, the Game Boy Pocket has no backlight to allow play in a darkened area, it did notably improve visibility and pixel response-time (mostly eliminating ghosting).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The first model of the Game Boy Pocket did not have an LED to show battery levels, but the feature was added due to public demand. The Game Boy Pocket was not a new software platform and played the same software as the original Game Boy model.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Game.com (pronounced in TV commercials as \"game com\", not \"game dot com\", and not capitalized in marketing material) is a handheld game console released by Tiger Electronics in September 1997. It featured many new ideas for handheld consoles and was aimed at an older target audience, sporting PDA-style features and functions such as a touch screen and stylus. However, Tiger hoped it would also challenge Nintendo's Game Boy and gain a following among younger gamers too. Unlike other handheld game consoles, the first game.com consoles included two slots for game cartridges, which would not happen again until the Tapwave Zodiac, the DS and DS Lite, and could be connected to a 14.4 kbit/s modem. Later models had only a single cartridge slot.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Game Boy Color (also referred to as GBC or CGB) is Nintendo's successor to the Game Boy and was released on October 21, 1998, in Japan and in November of the same year in the United States. It features a color screen, and is slightly bigger than the Game Boy Pocket. The processor is twice as fast as a Game Boy's and has twice as much memory. It also had an infrared communications port for wireless linking which did not appear in later versions of the Game Boy, such as the Game Boy Advance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Game Boy Color was a response to pressure from game developers for a new system, as they felt that the Game Boy, even in its latest incarnation, the Game Boy Pocket, was insufficient. The resulting product was backward compatible, a first for a handheld console system, and leveraged the large library of games and great installed base of the predecessor system. This became a major feature of the Game Boy line, since it allowed each new launch to begin with a significantly larger library than any of its competitors. As of March 31, 2005, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined to sell 118.69 million units worldwide.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The console is capable of displaying up to 56 different colors simultaneously on screen from its palette of 32,768, and can add basic four-color shading to games that had been developed for the original Game Boy. It can also give the sprites and backgrounds separate colors, for a total of more than four colors.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Neo Geo Pocket Color (or NGPC) was released in 1999 in Japan, and later that year in the United States and Europe. It is a 16-bit color handheld game console designed by SNK, the maker of the Neo Geo home console and arcade machine. It came after SNK's original Neo Geo Pocket monochrome handheld, which debuted in 1998 in Japan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2000 following SNK's purchase by Japanese Pachinko manufacturer Aruze, the Neo Geo Pocket Color was dropped from both the US and European markets, purportedly due to commercial failure.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The system seemed well on its way to being a success in the U.S. It was more successful than any Game Boy competitor since Sega's Game Gear, but was hurt by several factors, such as SNK's infamous lack of communication with third-party developers, and anticipation of the Game Boy Advance. The decision to ship U.S. games in cardboard boxes in a cost-cutting move rather than hard plastic cases that Japanese and European releases were shipped in may have also hurt US sales.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The WonderSwan Color is a handheld game console designed by Bandai. It was released on December 9, 2000, in Japan, Although the WonderSwan Color was slightly larger and heavier (7 mm and 2 g) compared to the original WonderSwan, the color version featured 512 KB of RAM and a larger color LCD screen. In addition, the WonderSwan Color is compatible with the original WonderSwan library of games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Prior to WonderSwan's release, Nintendo had virtually a monopoly in the Japanese video game handheld market. After the release of the WonderSwan Color, Bandai took approximately 8% of the market share in Japan partly due to its low price of 6800 yen (approximately US$65). Another reason for the WonderSwan's success in Japan was the fact that Bandai managed to get a deal with Square to port over the original Famicom Final Fantasy games with improved graphics and controls. However, with the popularity of the Game Boy Advance and the reconciliation between Square and Nintendo, the WonderSwan Color and its successor, the SwanCrystal quickly lost its competitive advantage.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The 2000s saw a major leap in innovation, particularly in the second half with the release of the DS and PSP.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 2001, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance (GBA or AGB), which added two shoulder buttons, a larger screen, and more computing power than the Game Boy Color.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The design was revised two years later when the Game Boy Advance SP (GBA SP), a more compact version, was released. The SP features a \"clamshell\" design (folding open and closed, like a laptop computer), as well as a frontlit color display and rechargeable battery. Despite the smaller form factor, the screen remained the same size as that of the original. In 2005, the Game Boy Micro was released. This revision sacrifices screen size and backwards compatibility with previous Game Boys for a dramatic reduction in total size and a brighter backlit screen. A new SP model with a backlit screen was released in some regions around the same time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Along with the GameCube, the GBA also introduced the concept of \"connectivity\": using a handheld system as a console controller. A handful of games use this feature, most notably Animal Crossing, Pac-Man Vs., Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "As of December 31, 2007, the GBA, GBA SP, and the Game Boy Micro combined have sold 80.72 million units worldwide.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The original GP32 was released in 2001 by the South Korean company Game Park a few months after the launch of the Game Boy Advance. It featured a 32-bit CPU, 133 MHz processor, MP3 and Divx player, and e-book reader. SmartMedia cards were used for storage, and could hold up to 128mb of anything downloaded through a USB cable from a PC. The GP32 was redesigned in 2003. A front-lit screen was added and the new version was called GP32 FLU (Front Light Unit). In summer 2004, another redesign, the GP32 BLU, was made, and added a backlit screen. This version of the handheld was planned for release outside South Korea; in Europe, and it was released for example in Spain (VirginPlay was the distributor). While not a commercial success on a level with mainstream handhelds (only 30,000 units were sold), it ended up being used mainly as a platform for user-made applications and emulators of other systems, being popular with developers and more technically adept users.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Nokia released the N-Gage in 2003. It was designed as a combination MP3 player, cellphone, PDA, radio, and gaming device. The system received much criticism alleging defects in its physical design and layout, including its vertically oriented screen and requirement of removing the battery to change game cartridges. The most well known of these was \"sidetalking\", or the act of placing the phone speaker and receiver on an edge of the device instead of one of the flat sides, causing the user to appear as if they are speaking into a taco.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The N-Gage QD was later released to address the design flaws of the original. However, certain features available in the original N-Gage, including MP3 playback, FM radio reception, and USB connectivity were removed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Second generation of N-Gage launched on April 3, 2008 in the form of a service for selected Nokia Smartphones.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 2003, Tapwave released the Zodiac. It was designed to be a PDA-handheld game console hybrid. It supported photos, movies, music, Internet, and documents. The Zodiac used a special version Palm OS 5, 5.2T, that supported the special gaming buttons and graphics chip. Two versions were available, Zodiac 1 and 2, differing in memory and looks. The Zodiac line ended in July 2005 when Tapwave declared bankruptcy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The Nintendo DS was released in November 2004. Among its new features were the incorporation of two screens, a touchscreen, wireless connectivity, and a microphone port. As with the Game Boy Advance SP, the DS features a clamshell design, with the two screens aligned vertically on either side of the hinge.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The DS's lower screen is touch sensitive, designed to be pressed with a stylus, a user's finger or a special \"thumb pad\" (a small plastic pad attached to the console's wrist strap, which can be affixed to the thumb to simulate an analog stick). More traditional controls include four face buttons, two shoulder buttons, a D-pad, and \"Start\" and \"Select\" buttons. The console also features online capabilities via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and ad-hoc wireless networking for multiplayer games with up to sixteen players. It is backwards-compatible with all Game Boy Advance games, but like the Game Boy Micro, it is not compatible with games designed for the Game Boy or Game Boy Color.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In January 2006, Nintendo revealed an updated version of the DS: the Nintendo DS Lite (released on March 2, 2006, in Japan) with an updated, smaller form factor (42% smaller and 21% lighter than the original Nintendo DS), a cleaner design, longer battery life, and brighter, higher-quality displays, with adjustable brightness. It is also able to connect wirelessly with Nintendo's Wii console.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "On October 2, 2008, Nintendo announced the Nintendo DSi, with larger, 3.25-inch screens and two integrated cameras. It has an SD card storage slot in place of the Game Boy Advance slot, plus internal flash memory for storing downloaded games. It was released on November 1, 2008, in Japan, April 2, 2009 in Australia, April 3, 2009 in Europe, and April 5, 2009 in North America. On October 29, 2009, Nintendo announced a larger version of the DSi, called the DSi XL, which was released on November 21, 2009 in Japan, March 5, 2010 in Europe, March 28, 2010 in North America, and April 15, 2010 in Australia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As of December 31, 2009, the Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite, and Nintendo DSi combined have sold 125.13 million units worldwide.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The GameKing is a handheld game console released by the Chinese company TimeTop in 2004. The first model while original in design owes a large debt to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. The second model, the GameKing 2, is believed to be inspired by Sony's PSP. This model also was upgraded with a backlit screen, with a distracting background transparency (which can be removed by opening up the console). A color model, the GameKing 3 apparently exists, but was only made for a brief time and was difficult to purchase outside of Asia. Whether intentionally or not, the GameKing has the most primitive graphics of any handheld released since the Game Boy of 1989.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "As many of the games have an \"old school\" simplicity, the device has developed a small cult following. The Gameking's speaker is quite loud and the cartridges' sophisticated looping soundtracks (sampled from other sources) are seemingly at odds with its primitive graphics.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "TimeTop made at least one additional device sometimes labeled as \"GameKing\", but while it seems to possess more advanced graphics, is essentially an emulator that plays a handful of multi-carts (like the GB Station Light II). Outside of Asia (especially China) however the Gameking remains relatively unheard of due to the enduring popularity of Japanese handhelds such as those manufactured by Nintendo and Sony.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The PlayStation Portable (officially abbreviated PSP) is a handheld game console manufactured and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. Development of the console was first announced during E3 2003, and it was unveiled on May 11, 2004, at a Sony press conference before E3 2004. The system was released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in the PAL region on September 1, 2005.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The PlayStation Portable is the first handheld video game console to use an optical disc format, Universal Media Disc (UMD), for distribution of its games. UMD Video discs with movies and television shows were also released. The PSP utilized the Sony/SanDisk Memory Stick Pro Duo format as its primary storage medium. Other distinguishing features of the console include its large viewing screen, multi-media capabilities, and connectivity with the PlayStation 3, other PSPs, and the Internet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Tiger's Gizmondo came out in the UK during March 2005 and it was released in the U.S. during October 2005. It is designed to play music, movies, and games, have a camera for taking and storing photos, and have GPS functions. It also has Internet capabilities. It has a phone for sending text and multimedia messages. Email was promised at launch, but was never released before Gizmondo, and ultimately Tiger Telematics', downfall in early 2006. Users obtained a second service pack, unreleased, hoping to find such functionality. However, Service Pack B did not activate the e-mail functionality.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The GP2X is an open-source, Linux-based handheld video game console and media player created by GamePark Holdings of South Korea, designed for homebrew developers as well as commercial developers. It is commonly used to run emulators for game consoles such as Neo-Geo, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, TurboGrafx-16, MAME and others.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "A new version called the \"F200\" was released October 30, 2007, and features a touchscreen, among other changes. Followed by GP2X Wiz (2009) and GP2X Caanoo (2010).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Dingoo A320 is a micro-sized gaming handheld that resembles the Game Boy Micro and is open to game development. It also supports music, radio, emulators (8 bit and 16 bit) and video playing capabilities with its own interface much like the PSP. There is also an onboard radio and recording program. It is currently available in two colors — white and black. Other similar products from the same manufacturer are the Dingoo A330 (also known as Geimi), Dingoo A360, Dingoo A380, and Dingoo A320E.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The PSP Go is a version of the PlayStation Portable handheld game console manufactured by Sony. It was released on October 1, 2009, in American and European territories, and on November 1 in Japan. It was revealed prior to E3 2009 through Sony's Qore VOD service. Although its design is significantly different from other PSPs, it is not intended to replace the PSP 3000, which Sony continued to manufacture, sell, and support. On April 20, 2011, the manufacturer announced that the PSP Go would be discontinued so that they may concentrate on the PlayStation Vita. Sony later said that only the European and Japanese versions were being cut, and that the console would still be available in the US. Unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go does not feature a UMD drive, but instead has 16 GB of internal flash memory to store games, video, pictures, and other media. This can be extended by up to 32 GB with the use of a Memory Stick Micro (M2) flash card. Also unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go's rechargeable battery is not removable or replaceable by the user. The unit is 43% lighter and 56% smaller than the original PSP-1000, and 16% lighter and 35% smaller than the PSP-3000. It has a 3.8\" 480 × 272 LCD (compared to the larger 4.3\" 480 × 272 pixel LCD on previous PSP models). The screen slides up to reveal the main controls. The overall shape and sliding mechanism are similar to that of Sony's mylo COM-2 internet device.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Pandora is a handheld game console/UMPC/PDA hybrid designed to take advantage of existing open source software and to be a target for home-brew development. It runs a full distribution of Linux, and in functionality is like a small PC with gaming controls. It is developed by OpenPandora, which is made up of former distributors and community members of the GP32 and GP2X handhelds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "OpenPandora began taking pre-orders for one batch of 4000 devices in November 2008 and after manufacturing delays, began shipping to customers on May 21, 2010.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The FC-16 Go is a portable Super NES hardware clone manufactured by Yobo Gameware in 2009. It features a 3.5-inch display, two wireless controllers, and CRT cables that allow cartridges to be played on a television screen. Unlike other Super NES clone consoles, it has region tabs that only allow NTSC North American cartridges to be played. Later revisions feature stereo sound output, larger shoulder buttons, and a slightly re-arranged button, power, and A/V output layout.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Nintendo 3DS is the successor to Nintendo's DS handheld. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic three-dimensional effects without requirement of active shutter or passive polarized glasses, which are required by most current 3D televisions to display the 3D effect. The 3DS was released in Japan on February 26, 2011; in Europe on March 25, 2011; in North America on March 27, 2011, and in Australia on March 31, 2011. The system features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software except those that require the Game Boy Advance slot. It also features an online service called the Nintendo eShop, launched on June 6, 2011, in North America and June 7, 2011, in Europe and Japan, which allows owners to download games, demos, applications and information on upcoming film and game releases. On November 24, 2011, a limited edition Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary 3DS was released that contained a unique Cosmo Black unit decorated with gold Legend of Zelda related imagery, along with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "There are also other models including the Nintendo 2DS and the New Nintendo 3DS, the latter with a larger (XL/LL) variant, like the original Nintendo 3DS, as well as the New Nintendo 2DS XL.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is a handheld game console smartphone produced by Sony Ericsson under the Xperia smartphone brand. The device runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and is the first to be part of the PlayStation Certified program which means that it can play PlayStation Suite games. The device is a horizontally sliding phone with its original form resembling the Xperia X10 while the slider below resembles the slider of the PSP Go. The slider features a D-pad on the left side, a set of standard PlayStation buttons (, , and ) on the right, a long rectangular touchpad in the middle, start and select buttons on the bottom right corner, a menu button on the bottom left corner, and two shoulder buttons (L and R) on the back of the device. It is powered by a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a Qualcomm Adreno 205 GPU, and features a display measuring 4.0 inches (100 mm) (854 × 480), an 8-megapixel camera, 512 MB RAM, 8 GB internal storage, and a micro-USB connector. It supports microSD cards, versus the Memory Stick variants used in PSP consoles. The device was revealed officially for the first time in a Super Bowl ad on Sunday, February 6, 2011. On February 13, 2011, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2011, it was announced that the device would be shipping globally in March 2011, with a launch lineup of around 50 software titles.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The PlayStation Vita is the successor to Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) Handheld series. It was released in Japan on December 17, 2011 and in Europe, Australia, North, and South America on February 22, 2012.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The handheld includes two analog sticks, a 5-inch (130 mm) OLED/LCD multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, and supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional 3G. Internally, the PS Vita features a 4 core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a 4 core SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit, as well as LiveArea software as its main user interface, which succeeds the XrossMediaBar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The device is fully backwards-compatible with PlayStation Portable games digitally released on the PlayStation Network via the PlayStation Store. However, PSone Classics and PS2 titles were not compatible at the time of the primary public release in Japan. The Vita's dual analog sticks will be supported on selected PSP games. The graphics for PSP releases will be up-scaled, with a smoothing filter to reduce pixelation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "On September 20, 2018, Sony announced at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that the Vita would be discontinued in 2019, ending its hardware production. Production of Vita hardware officially ended on March 1, 2019.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Razer Switchblade was a prototype pocket-sized like a Nintendo DSi XL designed to run Windows 7, featured a multi-touch LCD screen and an adaptive keyboard that changed keys depending on the game the user would play. It also was to feature a full mouse.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "It was first unveiled on January 5, 2011, on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The Switchblade won The Best of CES 2011 People's Voice award. It has since been in development and the release date is still unknown. The device has likely been suspended indefinitely.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Project Shield is a handheld system developed by Nvidia announced at CES 2013. It runs on Android 4.2 and uses Nvidia Tegra 4 SoC. The hardware includes a 5-inches multitouch screen with support for HD graphics (720p). The console allows for the streaming of games running on a compatible desktop PC, or laptop.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Nvidia Shield Portable has received mixed reception from critics. Generally, reviewers praised the performance of the device, but criticized the cost and lack of worthwhile games. Engadget's review noted the system's \"extremely impressive PC gaming\", but also that due to its high price, the device was \"a hard sell as a portable game console\", especially when compared to similar handhelds on the market. CNET's Eric Franklin states in his review of the device that \"The Nvidia Shield is an extremely well made device, with performance that pretty much obliterates any mobile product before it; but like most new console launches, there is currently a lack of available games worth your time.\" Eurogamer's comprehensive review of the device provides a detailed account of the device and its features; concluded by saying: \"In the here and now, the first-gen Shield Portable is a gloriously niche, luxury product - the most powerful Android system on the market by a clear stretch and possessing a unique link to PC gaming that's seriously impressive in beta form, and can only get better.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The Nintendo Switch is a hybrid console that can either be used in a handheld form, or inserted into a docking station attached to a television to play on a bigger screen. The Switch features two detachable wireless controllers, called Joy-Con, which can be used individually or attached to a grip to provide a traditional gamepad form. A handheld-only revision named Nintendo Switch Lite was released on September 20, 2019.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Switch Lite had sold about 1.95 million units worldwide by September 30, 2019, only 10 days after its launch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Evercade is a handheld game console developed and manufactured by UK company Blaze Entertainment. It focuses on retrogaming with ROM cartridges that each contain a number of emulated games. Development began in 2018, and the console was released in May 2020, after a few delays. Upon its launch, the console offered 10 game cartridges with a combined total of 122 games.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Arc System Works, Atari, Data East, Interplay Entertainment, Bandai Namco Entertainment and Piko Interactive have released emulated versions of their games for the Evercade. Pre-existing homebrew games have also been re-released for the console by Mega Cat Studios. The Evercade is capable of playing games originally released for the Atari 2600, the Atari 7800, the Atari Lynx, the NES, the SNES, and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The Analogue Pocket is a FPGA-based handheld game console designed and manufactured by Analogue, It is designed to play games designed for handhelds of the fourth, fifth and sixth generation of video game consoles. The console features a design reminiscent of the Game Boy, with additional buttons for the supported platforms. It features a 3.5\" 1600x1440 LTPS LCD display, an SD card port, and a link cable port compatible with Game Boy link cables. The Analogue Pocket uses an Altera Cyclone V processor, and is compatible with the original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges out of the box. With cartridge adapters (sold separately) the Analogue Pocket can play Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx game cartridges. The Analogue Pocket includes an additional FPGA, allowing 3rd party FPGA development. The Analogue Pocket was released in December 2021.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Steam Deck is a handheld computer device, developed by Valve, which runs SteamOS 3.0, a tailored distro of Arch Linux and includes support for Proton, a compatibility layer that allows most Microsoft Windows games to be played on the Linux-based operating system. In terms of hardware, the Deck includes a custom AMD APU based on their Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures, with the CPU running a four-core/eight-thread unit and the GPU running on eight compute units with a total estimated performance of 1.6 TFLOPS. Both the CPU and GPU use variable timing frequencies, with the CPU running between 2.4 and 3.5 GHz and the GPU between 1.0 and 1.6 GHz based on current processor needs. Valve stated that the CPU has comparable performance to Ryzen 3000 desktop computer processors and the GPU performance to the Radeon RX 6000 series. The Deck includes 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM in a quad channel configuration.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Valve revealed the Steam Deck on July 15, 2021, with pre-orders being made option the next day. The Deck was expected to ship in December 2021 to the US, Canada, the EU and the UK but was delayed to February 2022, with other regions to follow in 2022. Pre-orders were limited to those with Steam accounts opened before June 2021 to prevent resellers from controlling access to the device. Pre-orders reservations on July 16, 2021 through the Steam storefront briefly crashed the servers due to the demand. While initial shipments are still planned by February 2022, Valve has reported to new purchasers that wider availability will be later, with the 64 GB model and 256 GB NVMe model due in Q2 2022, and the 512 GB NVMe model by Q3 2022. Steam Deck was released on February 25, 2022.",
"title": "History"
}
]
| A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the console, screen, speakers, and controls in one unit, allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place. In 1976, Mattel introduced the first handheld electronic game with the release of Auto Race. Later, several companies—including Coleco and Milton Bradley—made their own single-game, lightweight table-top or handheld electronic game devices. The first commercial successful handheld console was Merlin from 1978 which sold more than 5 million units. The first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges is the Milton Bradley Microvision in 1979. Nintendo is credited with popularizing the handheld console concept with the release of the Game Boy in 1989 and continues to dominate the handheld console market. The first internet-enabled handheld console and the first with a touchscreen was the Game.com released by Tiger Electronics in 1997. The Nintendo DS, released in 2004, introduced touchscreen controls and wireless online gaming to a wider audience, becoming the best-selling handheld console with over 150 million units sold worldwide. | 2001-11-26T02:43:16Z | 2023-12-28T20:02:15Z | [
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14,200 | Heinrich Abeken | Heinrich Abeken (19 August 1809 – 8 August 1872) was a German theologian and Prussian Privy Legation Councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin.
Abeken was born and raised in the city of Osnabrück as a son of a merchant, he was incited to a higher education by the example of his uncle Bernhard Rudolf Abeken. After finishing the college in Osnabrück, he moved in 1827 to visit the University of Berlin to study theology. He combined philosophical and philological studies and was interested in art and modern literature.
In 1831, Abeken acquired a licenciate of theology. At the end of the year he visited Rome, and was welcomed in the house of Christian Karl Josias, Freiherr von Bunsen. Abeken participated in Bunsen's works, namely an evangelical prayer and hymn-book. In 1834 he became chaplain to the Prussian embassy in Rome. He married his first wife, who died soon thereafter. Bunsen left Rome in 1838 and Abeken followed soon thereafter to Germany. In 1841, he was sent to England to help in founding a German-English missionary bishopric in Jerusalem. In the same year, he was sent by Frederick William IV of Prussia to Egypt and Ethiopia, where he joined an expedition led by professor Karl Richard Lepsius. In 1845 and 1846 he returned via Jerusalem and Rome to Germany. He became Legation Councillor in Berlin, later Council Referee at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 1848 he received an appointment in the Prussian ministry for foreign affairs, and in 1853, he was promoted to be privy councillor of legation (Geheimer Legationsrath). Abeken remained in charge for more than twenty years of Prussian politics, assisting Otto Theodor Freiherr von Manteuffel and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The latter was so much pleased with Abeken's work that officials started to call Abeken "the quill [i.e., the scribe] of Bismarck." Abeken married again in 1866; his second wife was Hedwig von Olfers, daughter of the general director of the royal museums, Privy Councilor von Olfers.
He was much employed by Bismarck in the writing of official despatches, and stood high in the favour of King William, whom he often accompanied on his journeys as representative of the foreign office. He was present with the king during the campaigns of 1866 and 1870–71. In 1851, he published anonymously Babylon und Jerusalem, a scathing criticism of the views of Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn.
During the war against Austria in 1866 as well as in the wars against France in 1870 and 1871, Abeken stayed in the Prussian headquarters. A major part of the dispatches of the time have been written by him. Unfortunately his health was damaged by the endeavours of these travels, and he died after an illness of several months. Emperor Wilhelm I described Abeken in a condolence letter to his widow: "One of my most reliable advisors, standing on my side in the most decisive moments; His loss is irreplaceable to me; In him his fatherland has lost one of the most noble and most loyal men and officials".
Despite his engagement in politics, Abeken never lost his interest in theology and continued to publish and speak in this sector during all of his life. He was interested in art and archeology, and was sponsor of the Archeological Institute of Rome and member of the Archeological Society of Rome. He founded a Circle of Friends of the Greek Literature in Berlin and was member of the prize commission for the royal Schiller-Prize. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Heinrich Abeken (19 August 1809 – 8 August 1872) was a German theologian and Prussian Privy Legation Councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Abeken was born and raised in the city of Osnabrück as a son of a merchant, he was incited to a higher education by the example of his uncle Bernhard Rudolf Abeken. After finishing the college in Osnabrück, he moved in 1827 to visit the University of Berlin to study theology. He combined philosophical and philological studies and was interested in art and modern literature.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1831, Abeken acquired a licenciate of theology. At the end of the year he visited Rome, and was welcomed in the house of Christian Karl Josias, Freiherr von Bunsen. Abeken participated in Bunsen's works, namely an evangelical prayer and hymn-book. In 1834 he became chaplain to the Prussian embassy in Rome. He married his first wife, who died soon thereafter. Bunsen left Rome in 1838 and Abeken followed soon thereafter to Germany. In 1841, he was sent to England to help in founding a German-English missionary bishopric in Jerusalem. In the same year, he was sent by Frederick William IV of Prussia to Egypt and Ethiopia, where he joined an expedition led by professor Karl Richard Lepsius. In 1845 and 1846 he returned via Jerusalem and Rome to Germany. He became Legation Councillor in Berlin, later Council Referee at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1848 he received an appointment in the Prussian ministry for foreign affairs, and in 1853, he was promoted to be privy councillor of legation (Geheimer Legationsrath). Abeken remained in charge for more than twenty years of Prussian politics, assisting Otto Theodor Freiherr von Manteuffel and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The latter was so much pleased with Abeken's work that officials started to call Abeken \"the quill [i.e., the scribe] of Bismarck.\" Abeken married again in 1866; his second wife was Hedwig von Olfers, daughter of the general director of the royal museums, Privy Councilor von Olfers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "He was much employed by Bismarck in the writing of official despatches, and stood high in the favour of King William, whom he often accompanied on his journeys as representative of the foreign office. He was present with the king during the campaigns of 1866 and 1870–71. In 1851, he published anonymously Babylon und Jerusalem, a scathing criticism of the views of Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During the war against Austria in 1866 as well as in the wars against France in 1870 and 1871, Abeken stayed in the Prussian headquarters. A major part of the dispatches of the time have been written by him. Unfortunately his health was damaged by the endeavours of these travels, and he died after an illness of several months. Emperor Wilhelm I described Abeken in a condolence letter to his widow: \"One of my most reliable advisors, standing on my side in the most decisive moments; His loss is irreplaceable to me; In him his fatherland has lost one of the most noble and most loyal men and officials\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Despite his engagement in politics, Abeken never lost his interest in theology and continued to publish and speak in this sector during all of his life. He was interested in art and archeology, and was sponsor of the Archeological Institute of Rome and member of the Archeological Society of Rome. He founded a Circle of Friends of the Greek Literature in Berlin and was member of the prize commission for the royal Schiller-Prize.",
"title": "Career"
}
]
| Heinrich Abeken was a German theologian and Prussian Privy Legation Councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. | 2023-06-09T15:38:08Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Abeken |
|
14,201 | Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare | Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare GCB, PC, JP, DL, FRS, FRHistS (16 April 1815 – 25 February 1895), was a British Liberal Party politician, who served in government most notably as Home Secretary (1868–1873) and as Lord President of the Council.
Henry Bruce was born at Duffryn, Aberdare, Glamorganshire, the son of John Bruce, a Glamorganshire landowner, and his first wife Sarah, daughter of Reverend Hugh Williams Austin. John Bruce's original family name was Knight, but on coming of age in 1805 he assumed the name of Bruce: his mother, through whom he inherited the Duffryn estate, was the daughter of William Bruce, high sheriff of Glamorganshire.
Henry was educated from the age of twelve at the Bishop Gore School, Swansea (Swansea Grammar School). In 1837 he was called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn. Shortly after he had begun to practice, the discovery of coal beneath the Duffryn and other Aberdare Valley estates brought his family great wealth. From 1847 to 1854 Bruce was stipendiary magistrate for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare, resigning the position in the latter year, after entering parliament as Liberal member for Merthyr Tydfil.
Bruce was returned unopposed as MP for Merthyr Tydfil in December 1852, following the death of Sir John Guest. He did so with the enthusiastic support of the late member's political allies, notably the iron masters of Dowlais, and he was thereafter regarded by his political opponents, most notably in the Aberdare Valley, as their nominee. Even so, Bruce's parliamentary record demonstrated support for liberal policies, with the exception of the ballot. The electorate in the constituency at this time remained relatively small, excluding the vast majority of the working classes.
Significantly, however, Bruce's relationship with the miners of the Aberdare Valley, in particular, deteriorated as a result of the Aberdare Strike of 1857–58. In a speech to a large audience of miners at the Aberdare Market Hall, Bruce sought to strike a conciliatory tone in persuading the miners to return to work. In a second speech, however, he delivered a broadside against the trade union movement generally, referring to the violence engendered elsewhere as a result of strikes and to alleged examples of intimidation and violence in the immediate locality. The strike damaged his reputation and may well have contributed to his eventual election defeat ten years later. In 1855, Bruce was appointed a trustee of the Dowlais Iron Company and played a role in the further development of the iron industry.
In November 1862, after nearly ten years in Parliament, he became Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, and held that office until April 1864. He became a Privy Councillor and a Charity Commissioner for England and Wales in 1864, when he was moved to be vice-president of the Council of Education.
At the 1868 general election, Merthyr Tydfil became a two-member constituency with a much-increased electorate as a result of the Second Reform Act of 1867. Since the formation of the constituency, Merthyr Tydfil had dominated representation as the vast majority of the electorate lived in the town and its vicinity, whereas there was a much lower number of electors in the neighbouring Aberdare Valley. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, the population of Aberdare grew rapidly, and the franchise changes in 1867 gave the vote to large numbers of miners in that valley. Amongst these new electors, Bruce remained unpopular as a result of his actions during the 1857–58 dispute. Initially, it appeared that the Aberdare iron master, Richard Fothergill, would be elected to the second seat alongside Bruce. However, the appearance of a third Liberal candidate, Henry Richard, a nonconformist radical popular in both Merthyr and Aberdare, left Bruce on the defensive and he was ultimately defeated, finishing in third place behind both Richard and Fothergill.
After losing his seat, Bruce was elected for Renfrewshire on 25 January 1869, and was made Home Secretary by William Ewart Gladstone. His tenure of this office was conspicuous for a reform of the licensing laws, and he was responsible for the Licensing Act 1872, which made the magistrates the licensing authority, increased the penalties for misconduct in public-houses and shortened the number of hours for the sale of drink. In 1873 Bruce relinquished the home secretaryship, at Gladstone's request, to become Lord President of the Council, and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Aberdare, of Duffryn in the County of Glamorgan, on 23 August that year. Being a Gladstonian Liberal, Aberdare had hoped for a much more radical proposal to keep existing licensee holders for a further ten years, and to prevent any new applicants. Its unpopularity pricked his nonconformist's conscience, when like Gladstone himself he had a strong leaning towards Temperance. He had already pursued 'moral improvement' on miners in the regulations attempting to further ban boys from the pits. The Trades Union Act 1871 was another more liberal regime giving further rights to unions, and protection from malicious prosecutions.
The defeat of the Liberal government in the following year terminated Lord Aberdare's official political life, and he subsequently devoted himself to social, educational and economic questions. Education became one of Lord Aberdare's main interests in later life. His interest had been shown by the speech on Welsh education which he had made on 5 May 1862. In 1880, he was appointed to chair the Departmental Committee on Intermediate and Higher Education in Wales and Monmouthshire, whose report ultimately led to the Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889. The report also stimulated the campaign for the provision of university education in Wales. In 1883, Lord Aberdare was elected the first president of the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. In his inaugural address he declared that the framework of Welsh education would not be complete until there was a University of Wales. The university was eventually founded in 1893 and Aberdare became its first chancellor.
In 1876 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; from 1878 to 1891 he was president of the Royal Historical Society. and in 1881 he became president of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Girls' Day School Trust. In 1888 he headed the commission that established the Official Table of Drops, listing how far a person of a particular weight should be dropped when hanged for a capital offence (the only method of 'judicial execution' in the United Kingdom at that time), to ensure an instant and painless death, by cleanly breaking the neck between the 2nd and 3rd vertebrae, an 'exacting science', eventually brought to perfection by Chief Executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Prisoners health, clothing and discipline was a particular concern even at the end of his career. In the Lords he spoke at some length to the Home Affairs Committee chaired by Arthur Balfour about the prison rules system. Aberdare had always expressed concern about intemperate working-classes; in 1878 urging greater vigilance against the vice of excessive drinking, he took evidence on miners and railway colliers drinking habits. The committee tried to establish special legislation based on a link between Sunday Opening and absenteeism established in 1868. Aberdare had been interested in the plight of working class drinkers since Gladstone had appointed him Home Secretary. The defeat of the Licensing Bill by the Tory 'beerage' and publicans was drafted to limit hours and protect the public, but it persuaded a convinced Anglican forever more of the iniquities.
In 1882 he began a connection with West Africa which lasted the rest of his life, by accepting the chairmanship of the National African Company, formed by Sir George Goldie, which in 1886 received a charter under the title of the Royal Niger Company and in 1899 was taken over by the British government, its territories being constituted the protectorate of Nigeria. West African affairs, however, by no means exhausted Lord Aberdare's energies, and it was principally through his efforts that a charter was in 1894 obtained for the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, a constituent institution of the University of Wales. This is now Cardiff University. Lord Aberdare, who in 1885 was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, presided over several Royal Commissions at different times.
Henry Bruce married firstly Annabella, daughter of Richard Beadon, of Clifton by Annabella à Court, sister of the 1st Baron Heytesbury, on 6 January 1846. They had one son and three daughters.
After her death on 28 July 1852 he married secondly on 17 August 1854 Norah Creina Blanche, youngest daughter of Lt-Gen Sir William Napier, KCB the historian of the Peninsular War, whose biography he edited, by Caroline Amelia, second daughter of Gen. Henry Edward Fox, son of the Earl of Ilchester. They had seven daughters and two sons, of whom:
Lord Aberdare died at his London home, 39 Princes Gardens, South Kensington, on 25 February 1895, aged 79, and was succeeded in the barony by his only son by his first marriage, Henry. He was survived by his wife, Lady Aberdare, born 1827, who died on 27 April 1897. She was a proponent of women's education and active in the establishment of Aberdare Hall in Cardiff.
Henry Austin Bruce is buried at Aberffrwd Cemetery in Mountain Ash, Wales. His large family plot is surrounded by a chain, and his gravestone is a simple Celtic cross with double plinth and kerb. In place is written "To God the Judge of all and to the spirits of just men more perfect." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare GCB, PC, JP, DL, FRS, FRHistS (16 April 1815 – 25 February 1895), was a British Liberal Party politician, who served in government most notably as Home Secretary (1868–1873) and as Lord President of the Council.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Henry Bruce was born at Duffryn, Aberdare, Glamorganshire, the son of John Bruce, a Glamorganshire landowner, and his first wife Sarah, daughter of Reverend Hugh Williams Austin. John Bruce's original family name was Knight, but on coming of age in 1805 he assumed the name of Bruce: his mother, through whom he inherited the Duffryn estate, was the daughter of William Bruce, high sheriff of Glamorganshire.",
"title": "Background and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Henry was educated from the age of twelve at the Bishop Gore School, Swansea (Swansea Grammar School). In 1837 he was called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn. Shortly after he had begun to practice, the discovery of coal beneath the Duffryn and other Aberdare Valley estates brought his family great wealth. From 1847 to 1854 Bruce was stipendiary magistrate for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare, resigning the position in the latter year, after entering parliament as Liberal member for Merthyr Tydfil.",
"title": "Background and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Bruce was returned unopposed as MP for Merthyr Tydfil in December 1852, following the death of Sir John Guest. He did so with the enthusiastic support of the late member's political allies, notably the iron masters of Dowlais, and he was thereafter regarded by his political opponents, most notably in the Aberdare Valley, as their nominee. Even so, Bruce's parliamentary record demonstrated support for liberal policies, with the exception of the ballot. The electorate in the constituency at this time remained relatively small, excluding the vast majority of the working classes.",
"title": "Industrialist and politician, 1852–1868"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Significantly, however, Bruce's relationship with the miners of the Aberdare Valley, in particular, deteriorated as a result of the Aberdare Strike of 1857–58. In a speech to a large audience of miners at the Aberdare Market Hall, Bruce sought to strike a conciliatory tone in persuading the miners to return to work. In a second speech, however, he delivered a broadside against the trade union movement generally, referring to the violence engendered elsewhere as a result of strikes and to alleged examples of intimidation and violence in the immediate locality. The strike damaged his reputation and may well have contributed to his eventual election defeat ten years later. In 1855, Bruce was appointed a trustee of the Dowlais Iron Company and played a role in the further development of the iron industry.",
"title": "Industrialist and politician, 1852–1868"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In November 1862, after nearly ten years in Parliament, he became Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, and held that office until April 1864. He became a Privy Councillor and a Charity Commissioner for England and Wales in 1864, when he was moved to be vice-president of the Council of Education.",
"title": "Industrialist and politician, 1852–1868"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At the 1868 general election, Merthyr Tydfil became a two-member constituency with a much-increased electorate as a result of the Second Reform Act of 1867. Since the formation of the constituency, Merthyr Tydfil had dominated representation as the vast majority of the electorate lived in the town and its vicinity, whereas there was a much lower number of electors in the neighbouring Aberdare Valley. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, the population of Aberdare grew rapidly, and the franchise changes in 1867 gave the vote to large numbers of miners in that valley. Amongst these new electors, Bruce remained unpopular as a result of his actions during the 1857–58 dispute. Initially, it appeared that the Aberdare iron master, Richard Fothergill, would be elected to the second seat alongside Bruce. However, the appearance of a third Liberal candidate, Henry Richard, a nonconformist radical popular in both Merthyr and Aberdare, left Bruce on the defensive and he was ultimately defeated, finishing in third place behind both Richard and Fothergill.",
"title": "1868 general election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After losing his seat, Bruce was elected for Renfrewshire on 25 January 1869, and was made Home Secretary by William Ewart Gladstone. His tenure of this office was conspicuous for a reform of the licensing laws, and he was responsible for the Licensing Act 1872, which made the magistrates the licensing authority, increased the penalties for misconduct in public-houses and shortened the number of hours for the sale of drink. In 1873 Bruce relinquished the home secretaryship, at Gladstone's request, to become Lord President of the Council, and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Aberdare, of Duffryn in the County of Glamorgan, on 23 August that year. Being a Gladstonian Liberal, Aberdare had hoped for a much more radical proposal to keep existing licensee holders for a further ten years, and to prevent any new applicants. Its unpopularity pricked his nonconformist's conscience, when like Gladstone himself he had a strong leaning towards Temperance. He had already pursued 'moral improvement' on miners in the regulations attempting to further ban boys from the pits. The Trades Union Act 1871 was another more liberal regime giving further rights to unions, and protection from malicious prosecutions.",
"title": "Later political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The defeat of the Liberal government in the following year terminated Lord Aberdare's official political life, and he subsequently devoted himself to social, educational and economic questions. Education became one of Lord Aberdare's main interests in later life. His interest had been shown by the speech on Welsh education which he had made on 5 May 1862. In 1880, he was appointed to chair the Departmental Committee on Intermediate and Higher Education in Wales and Monmouthshire, whose report ultimately led to the Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889. The report also stimulated the campaign for the provision of university education in Wales. In 1883, Lord Aberdare was elected the first president of the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. In his inaugural address he declared that the framework of Welsh education would not be complete until there was a University of Wales. The university was eventually founded in 1893 and Aberdare became its first chancellor.",
"title": "Later political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1876 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; from 1878 to 1891 he was president of the Royal Historical Society. and in 1881 he became president of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Girls' Day School Trust. In 1888 he headed the commission that established the Official Table of Drops, listing how far a person of a particular weight should be dropped when hanged for a capital offence (the only method of 'judicial execution' in the United Kingdom at that time), to ensure an instant and painless death, by cleanly breaking the neck between the 2nd and 3rd vertebrae, an 'exacting science', eventually brought to perfection by Chief Executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Prisoners health, clothing and discipline was a particular concern even at the end of his career. In the Lords he spoke at some length to the Home Affairs Committee chaired by Arthur Balfour about the prison rules system. Aberdare had always expressed concern about intemperate working-classes; in 1878 urging greater vigilance against the vice of excessive drinking, he took evidence on miners and railway colliers drinking habits. The committee tried to establish special legislation based on a link between Sunday Opening and absenteeism established in 1868. Aberdare had been interested in the plight of working class drinkers since Gladstone had appointed him Home Secretary. The defeat of the Licensing Bill by the Tory 'beerage' and publicans was drafted to limit hours and protect the public, but it persuaded a convinced Anglican forever more of the iniquities.",
"title": "Later political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1882 he began a connection with West Africa which lasted the rest of his life, by accepting the chairmanship of the National African Company, formed by Sir George Goldie, which in 1886 received a charter under the title of the Royal Niger Company and in 1899 was taken over by the British government, its territories being constituted the protectorate of Nigeria. West African affairs, however, by no means exhausted Lord Aberdare's energies, and it was principally through his efforts that a charter was in 1894 obtained for the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, a constituent institution of the University of Wales. This is now Cardiff University. Lord Aberdare, who in 1885 was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, presided over several Royal Commissions at different times.",
"title": "Later political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Henry Bruce married firstly Annabella, daughter of Richard Beadon, of Clifton by Annabella à Court, sister of the 1st Baron Heytesbury, on 6 January 1846. They had one son and three daughters.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After her death on 28 July 1852 he married secondly on 17 August 1854 Norah Creina Blanche, youngest daughter of Lt-Gen Sir William Napier, KCB the historian of the Peninsular War, whose biography he edited, by Caroline Amelia, second daughter of Gen. Henry Edward Fox, son of the Earl of Ilchester. They had seven daughters and two sons, of whom:",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Lord Aberdare died at his London home, 39 Princes Gardens, South Kensington, on 25 February 1895, aged 79, and was succeeded in the barony by his only son by his first marriage, Henry. He was survived by his wife, Lady Aberdare, born 1827, who died on 27 April 1897. She was a proponent of women's education and active in the establishment of Aberdare Hall in Cardiff.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Henry Austin Bruce is buried at Aberffrwd Cemetery in Mountain Ash, Wales. His large family plot is surrounded by a chain, and his gravestone is a simple Celtic cross with double plinth and kerb. In place is written \"To God the Judge of all and to the spirits of just men more perfect.\"",
"title": "Memorial"
}
]
| Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare, was a British Liberal Party politician, who served in government most notably as Home Secretary (1868–1873) and as Lord President of the Council. | 2001-11-26T03:22:08Z | 2023-08-28T16:43:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bruce,_1st_Baron_Aberdare |
14,203 | Harpers Ferry (disambiguation) | Harpers Ferry is the name of several places in the United States of America:
Harpers Ferry may also refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harpers Ferry is the name of several places in the United States of America:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Harpers Ferry may also refer to:",
"title": ""
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| Harpers Ferry is the name of several places in the United States of America: Harpers Ferry, Iowa, a city in Allamakee County, Iowa
Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a town in Jefferson County, West Virginia
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859)
Harpers Ferry Armory, second federal armory and site of John Brown's slave revolt of 1859
Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
Battle of Harpers Ferry, a battle in the American Civil War that took place around what is now Harpers Ferry, West Virginia Harpers Ferry may also refer to: Harpers Ferry class dock landing ship, a ship class in the United States Navy
USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), a Harpers Ferry class dock landing ship of the United States Navy, commissioned in 1995
Harpers Ferry (nightclub), a music venue and nightclub in Boston
Harper's Ferry flintlock pistol | 2021-09-19T04:18:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpers_Ferry_(disambiguation) |
|
14,204 | Halophile | A halophile (from the Greek word for 'salt-loving') is an extremophile that thrives in high salt concentrations. In chemical terms, halophile refers to a Lewis acidic species that has some ability to extract halides from other chemical species.
While most halophiles are classified into the domain Archaea, there are also bacterial halophiles and some eukaryotic species, such as the alga Dunaliella salina and fungus Wallemia ichthyophaga. Some well-known species give off a red color from carotenoid compounds, notably bacteriorhodopsin.
Halophiles can be found in water bodies with salt concentration more than five times greater than that of the ocean, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Owens Lake in California, the Lake Urmia in Iran, the Dead Sea, and in evaporation ponds. They are theorized to be a possible analogues for modeling extremophiles that might live in the salty subsurface water ocean of Jupiter's Europa and similar moons.
Halophiles are categorized by the extent of their halotolerance: slight, moderate, or extreme. Slight halophiles prefer 0.3 to 0.8 M (1.7 to 4.8%—seawater is 0.6 M or 3.5%), moderate halophiles 0.8 to 3.4 M (4.7 to 20%), and extreme halophiles 3.4 to 5.1 M (20 to 30%) salt content. Halophiles require sodium chloride (salt) for growth, in contrast to halotolerant organisms, which do not require salt but can grow under saline conditions.
High salinity represents an extreme environment in which relatively few organisms have been able to adapt and survive. Most halophilic and all halotolerant organisms expend energy to exclude salt from their cytoplasm to avoid protein aggregation ('salting out'). To survive the high salinities, halophiles employ two differing strategies to prevent desiccation through osmotic movement of water out of their cytoplasm. Both strategies work by increasing the internal osmolarity of the cell. The first strategy is employed by some archaea, the majority of halophilic bacteria, yeasts, algae, and fungi; the organism accumulates organic compounds in the cytoplasm—osmoprotectants which are known as compatible solutes. These can be either synthesised or accumulated from the environment. The most common compatible solutes are neutral or zwitterionic, and include amino acids, sugars, polyols, betaines, and ectoines, as well as derivatives of some of these compounds.
The second, more radical adaptation involves selectively absorbing potassium (K) ions into the cytoplasm. This adaptation is restricted to the extremely halophilic archaeal family Halobacteriaceae, the moderately halophilic bacterial order Halanaerobiales, and the extremely halophilic bacterium Salinibacter ruber. The presence of this adaptation in three distinct evolutionary lineages suggests convergent evolution of this strategy, it being unlikely to be an ancient characteristic retained in only scattered groups or passed on through massive lateral gene transfer. The primary reason for this is the entire intracellular machinery (enzymes, structural proteins, etc.) must be adapted to high salt levels, whereas in the compatible solute adaptation, little or no adjustment is required to intracellular macromolecules; in fact, the compatible solutes often act as more general stress protectants, as well as just osmoprotectants.
Of particular note are the extreme halophiles or haloarchaea (often known as halobacteria), a group of archaea, which require at least a 2 M salt concentration and are usually found in saturated solutions (about 36% w/v salts). These are the primary inhabitants of salt lakes, inland seas, and evaporating ponds of seawater, such as the deep salterns, where they tint the water column and sediments bright colors. These species most likely perish if they are exposed to anything other than a very high-concentration, salt-conditioned environment. These prokaryotes require salt for growth. The high concentration of sodium chloride in their environment limits the availability of oxygen for respiration. Their cellular machinery is adapted to high salt concentrations by having charged amino acids on their surfaces, allowing the retention of water molecules around these components. They are heterotrophs that normally respire by aerobic means. Most halophiles are unable to survive outside their high-salt native environments. Many halophiles are so fragile that when they are placed in distilled water, they immediately lyse from the change in osmotic conditions.
Halophiles use a variety of energy sources and can be aerobic or anaerobic; anaerobic halophiles include phototrophic, fermentative, sulfate-reducing, homoacetogenic, and methanogenic species.
The Haloarchaea, and particularly the family Halobacteriaceae, are members of the domain Archaea, and comprise the majority of the prokaryotic population in hypersaline environments. Currently, 15 recognised genera are in the family. The domain Bacteria (mainly Salinibacter ruber) can comprise up to 25% of the prokaryotic community, but is more commonly a much lower percentage of the overall population. At times, the alga Dunaliella salina can also proliferate in this environment.
A comparatively wide range of taxa has been isolated from saltern crystalliser ponds, including members of these genera: Haloferax, Halogeometricum, Halococcus, Haloterrigena, Halorubrum, Haloarcula, and Halobacterium. However, the viable counts in these cultivation studies have been small when compared to total counts, and the numerical significance of these isolates has been unclear. Only recently has it become possible to determine the identities and relative abundances of organisms in natural populations, typically using PCR-based strategies that target 16S small subunit ribosomal ribonucleic acid (16S rRNA) genes. While comparatively few studies of this type have been performed, results from these suggest that some of the most readily isolated and studied genera may not in fact be significant in the in situ community. This is seen in cases such as the genus Haloarcula, which is estimated to make up less than 0.1% of the in situ community, but commonly appears in isolation studies.
The comparative genomic and proteomic analysis showed distinct molecular signatures exist for the environmental adaptation of halophiles. At the protein level, the halophilic species are characterized by low hydrophobicity, an overrepresentation of acidic residues, underrepresentation of Cys, lower propensities for helix formation, and higher propensities for coil structure. The core of these proteins is less hydrophobic, such as DHFR, that was found to have narrower β-strands. In one study, the net charges (at pH 7.4) of the ribosomal proteins (r-proteins) that comprise the S10-spc cluster were observed to have an inverse relationship with the halophilicity/halotolerance levels in both bacteria and archaea. At the DNA level, the halophiles exhibit distinct dinucleotide and codon usage.
Halobacteriaceae is a family that includes a large part of halophilic archaea. The genus Halobacterium under it has a high tolerance for elevated levels of salinity. Some species of halobacteria have acidic proteins that resist the denaturing effects of salts. Halococcus is another genus of the family Halobacteriaceae.
Some hypersaline lakes are habitat to numerous families of halophiles. For example, the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana form a vast, seasonal, high-salinity water body that manifests halophilic species within the diatom genus Nitzschia in the family Bacillariaceae, as well as species within the genus Lovenula in the family Diaptomidae. Owens Lake in California also contains a large population of the halophilic bacterium Halobacterium halobium.
Wallemia ichthyophaga is a basidiomycetous fungus, which requires at least 1.5 M sodium chloride for in vitro growth, and it thrives even in media saturated with salt. Obligate requirement for salt is an exception in fungi. Even species that can tolerate salt concentrations close to saturation (for example Hortaea werneckii) in almost all cases grow well in standard microbiological media without the addition of salt.
The fermentation of salty foods (such as soy sauce, Chinese fermented beans, salted cod, salted anchovies, sauerkraut, etc.) often involves halophiles as either essential ingredients or accidental contaminants. One example is Chromohalobacter beijerinckii, found in salted beans preserved in brine and in salted herring. Tetragenococcus halophilus is found in salted anchovies and soy sauce.
Artemia is a ubiquitous genus of small halophilic crustaceans living in salt lakes (such as Great Salt Lake) and solar salterns that can exist in water approaching the precipitation point of NaCl (340 g/L) and can withstand strong osmotic shocks due to its mitigating strategies for fluctuating salinity levels, such as its unique larval salt gland and osmoregulatory capacity.
North Ronaldsay sheep are a breed of sheep originating from Orkney, Scotland. They have limited access to freshwater sources on the island and their only food source is seaweed. They have adapted to handle salt concentrations that would kill other breeds of sheep. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A halophile (from the Greek word for 'salt-loving') is an extremophile that thrives in high salt concentrations. In chemical terms, halophile refers to a Lewis acidic species that has some ability to extract halides from other chemical species.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "While most halophiles are classified into the domain Archaea, there are also bacterial halophiles and some eukaryotic species, such as the alga Dunaliella salina and fungus Wallemia ichthyophaga. Some well-known species give off a red color from carotenoid compounds, notably bacteriorhodopsin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Halophiles can be found in water bodies with salt concentration more than five times greater than that of the ocean, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Owens Lake in California, the Lake Urmia in Iran, the Dead Sea, and in evaporation ponds. They are theorized to be a possible analogues for modeling extremophiles that might live in the salty subsurface water ocean of Jupiter's Europa and similar moons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Halophiles are categorized by the extent of their halotolerance: slight, moderate, or extreme. Slight halophiles prefer 0.3 to 0.8 M (1.7 to 4.8%—seawater is 0.6 M or 3.5%), moderate halophiles 0.8 to 3.4 M (4.7 to 20%), and extreme halophiles 3.4 to 5.1 M (20 to 30%) salt content. Halophiles require sodium chloride (salt) for growth, in contrast to halotolerant organisms, which do not require salt but can grow under saline conditions.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "High salinity represents an extreme environment in which relatively few organisms have been able to adapt and survive. Most halophilic and all halotolerant organisms expend energy to exclude salt from their cytoplasm to avoid protein aggregation ('salting out'). To survive the high salinities, halophiles employ two differing strategies to prevent desiccation through osmotic movement of water out of their cytoplasm. Both strategies work by increasing the internal osmolarity of the cell. The first strategy is employed by some archaea, the majority of halophilic bacteria, yeasts, algae, and fungi; the organism accumulates organic compounds in the cytoplasm—osmoprotectants which are known as compatible solutes. These can be either synthesised or accumulated from the environment. The most common compatible solutes are neutral or zwitterionic, and include amino acids, sugars, polyols, betaines, and ectoines, as well as derivatives of some of these compounds.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The second, more radical adaptation involves selectively absorbing potassium (K) ions into the cytoplasm. This adaptation is restricted to the extremely halophilic archaeal family Halobacteriaceae, the moderately halophilic bacterial order Halanaerobiales, and the extremely halophilic bacterium Salinibacter ruber. The presence of this adaptation in three distinct evolutionary lineages suggests convergent evolution of this strategy, it being unlikely to be an ancient characteristic retained in only scattered groups or passed on through massive lateral gene transfer. The primary reason for this is the entire intracellular machinery (enzymes, structural proteins, etc.) must be adapted to high salt levels, whereas in the compatible solute adaptation, little or no adjustment is required to intracellular macromolecules; in fact, the compatible solutes often act as more general stress protectants, as well as just osmoprotectants.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Of particular note are the extreme halophiles or haloarchaea (often known as halobacteria), a group of archaea, which require at least a 2 M salt concentration and are usually found in saturated solutions (about 36% w/v salts). These are the primary inhabitants of salt lakes, inland seas, and evaporating ponds of seawater, such as the deep salterns, where they tint the water column and sediments bright colors. These species most likely perish if they are exposed to anything other than a very high-concentration, salt-conditioned environment. These prokaryotes require salt for growth. The high concentration of sodium chloride in their environment limits the availability of oxygen for respiration. Their cellular machinery is adapted to high salt concentrations by having charged amino acids on their surfaces, allowing the retention of water molecules around these components. They are heterotrophs that normally respire by aerobic means. Most halophiles are unable to survive outside their high-salt native environments. Many halophiles are so fragile that when they are placed in distilled water, they immediately lyse from the change in osmotic conditions.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Halophiles use a variety of energy sources and can be aerobic or anaerobic; anaerobic halophiles include phototrophic, fermentative, sulfate-reducing, homoacetogenic, and methanogenic species.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Haloarchaea, and particularly the family Halobacteriaceae, are members of the domain Archaea, and comprise the majority of the prokaryotic population in hypersaline environments. Currently, 15 recognised genera are in the family. The domain Bacteria (mainly Salinibacter ruber) can comprise up to 25% of the prokaryotic community, but is more commonly a much lower percentage of the overall population. At times, the alga Dunaliella salina can also proliferate in this environment.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "A comparatively wide range of taxa has been isolated from saltern crystalliser ponds, including members of these genera: Haloferax, Halogeometricum, Halococcus, Haloterrigena, Halorubrum, Haloarcula, and Halobacterium. However, the viable counts in these cultivation studies have been small when compared to total counts, and the numerical significance of these isolates has been unclear. Only recently has it become possible to determine the identities and relative abundances of organisms in natural populations, typically using PCR-based strategies that target 16S small subunit ribosomal ribonucleic acid (16S rRNA) genes. While comparatively few studies of this type have been performed, results from these suggest that some of the most readily isolated and studied genera may not in fact be significant in the in situ community. This is seen in cases such as the genus Haloarcula, which is estimated to make up less than 0.1% of the in situ community, but commonly appears in isolation studies.",
"title": "Lifestyle"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The comparative genomic and proteomic analysis showed distinct molecular signatures exist for the environmental adaptation of halophiles. At the protein level, the halophilic species are characterized by low hydrophobicity, an overrepresentation of acidic residues, underrepresentation of Cys, lower propensities for helix formation, and higher propensities for coil structure. The core of these proteins is less hydrophobic, such as DHFR, that was found to have narrower β-strands. In one study, the net charges (at pH 7.4) of the ribosomal proteins (r-proteins) that comprise the S10-spc cluster were observed to have an inverse relationship with the halophilicity/halotolerance levels in both bacteria and archaea. At the DNA level, the halophiles exhibit distinct dinucleotide and codon usage.",
"title": "Genomic and proteomic signature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Halobacteriaceae is a family that includes a large part of halophilic archaea. The genus Halobacterium under it has a high tolerance for elevated levels of salinity. Some species of halobacteria have acidic proteins that resist the denaturing effects of salts. Halococcus is another genus of the family Halobacteriaceae.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Some hypersaline lakes are habitat to numerous families of halophiles. For example, the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana form a vast, seasonal, high-salinity water body that manifests halophilic species within the diatom genus Nitzschia in the family Bacillariaceae, as well as species within the genus Lovenula in the family Diaptomidae. Owens Lake in California also contains a large population of the halophilic bacterium Halobacterium halobium.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Wallemia ichthyophaga is a basidiomycetous fungus, which requires at least 1.5 M sodium chloride for in vitro growth, and it thrives even in media saturated with salt. Obligate requirement for salt is an exception in fungi. Even species that can tolerate salt concentrations close to saturation (for example Hortaea werneckii) in almost all cases grow well in standard microbiological media without the addition of salt.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The fermentation of salty foods (such as soy sauce, Chinese fermented beans, salted cod, salted anchovies, sauerkraut, etc.) often involves halophiles as either essential ingredients or accidental contaminants. One example is Chromohalobacter beijerinckii, found in salted beans preserved in brine and in salted herring. Tetragenococcus halophilus is found in salted anchovies and soy sauce.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Artemia is a ubiquitous genus of small halophilic crustaceans living in salt lakes (such as Great Salt Lake) and solar salterns that can exist in water approaching the precipitation point of NaCl (340 g/L) and can withstand strong osmotic shocks due to its mitigating strategies for fluctuating salinity levels, such as its unique larval salt gland and osmoregulatory capacity.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "North Ronaldsay sheep are a breed of sheep originating from Orkney, Scotland. They have limited access to freshwater sources on the island and their only food source is seaweed. They have adapted to handle salt concentrations that would kill other breeds of sheep.",
"title": "Examples"
}
]
| A halophile is an extremophile that thrives in high salt concentrations. In chemical terms, halophile refers to a Lewis acidic species that has some ability to extract halides from other chemical species. While most halophiles are classified into the domain Archaea, there are also bacterial halophiles and some eukaryotic species, such as the alga Dunaliella salina and fungus Wallemia ichthyophaga. Some well-known species give off a red color from carotenoid compounds, notably bacteriorhodopsin. Halophiles can be found in water bodies with salt concentration more than five times greater than that of the ocean, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Owens Lake in California, the Lake Urmia in Iran, the Dead Sea, and in evaporation ponds. They are theorized to be a possible analogues for modeling extremophiles that might live in the salty subsurface water ocean of Jupiter's Europa and similar moons. | 2001-11-26T17:35:37Z | 2023-11-25T23:17:20Z | [
"Template:Cite journal",
"Template:Refbegin",
"Template:Refend",
"Template:Extremophile",
"Template:Portal bar",
"Template:Short description",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:Salt topics"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophile |
14,205 | Herbert A. Simon | Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.
Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.
Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. Simon's father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948), was a Jewish electrical engineer who came to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. An inventor, Arthur also was an independent patent attorney. Simon's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel (1888–1969), was an accomplished pianist whose Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestors came from Braunschweig, Prague and Cologne. Simon's European ancestors were piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners.
Simon attended Milwaukee Public Schools, where he developed an interest in science and established himself as an atheist. While attending middle school, Simon wrote a letter to "the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists". Unlike most children, Simon's family introduced him to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically; his mother's younger brother, Harold Merkel (1892–1922), who studied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under John R. Commons, became one of his earliest influences. Through Harold's books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered social science. Among his earliest influences, Simon cited Norman Angell for his book The Great Illusion and Henry George for his book Progress and Poverty. While attending high school, Simon joined the debate team, where he argued "from conviction, rather than cussedness" in favor of George's single tax.
In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and, following his early influences, decided to study social science and mathematics. Simon was interested in studying biology but chose not to pursue the field because of his "color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory". At an early age, Simon learned he was color blind and discovered the external world is not the same as the perceived world. While in college, Simon focused on political science and economics. Simon's most important mentor was Henry Schultz, an econometrician and mathematical economist. Simon received both his B.A. (1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell, Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam. After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments," Simon became a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, and the two co-authored Measuring Municipal Activities: A Survey of Suggested Criteria for Appraising Administration in 1938. Simon's studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which became the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
After receiving his undergraduate degree, Simon obtained a research assistantship in municipal administration that turned into the directorship of an operations research group at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1939 to 1942. By arrangement with the University of Chicago, during his years at Berkeley, he took his doctoral exams by mail and worked on his dissertation after hours.
From 1942 to 1949, Simon was a professor of political science and also served as department chairman at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. There, he began participating in the seminars held by the staff of the Cowles Commission who at that time included Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans. He thus began an in-depth study of economics in the area of institutionalism. Marschak brought Simon in to assist in the study he was currently undertaking with Sam Schurr of the "prospective economic effects of atomic energy".
From 1949 to 2001, Simon was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949, Simon became a professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at Carnegie Institute of Technology ("Carnegie Tech"), which, in 1967, became Carnegie-Mellon University. Simon later also taught psychology and computer science in the same university, (occasionally visiting other universities).
Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior. In this book he based his concepts with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making. His organization and administration interest allowed him to not only serve three times as a university department chairman, but he also played a big part in the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948; administrative team that administered aid to the Marshall Plan for the U.S. government, serving on President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee, and also the National Academy of Sciences. Simon has made a great number of contributions to both economic analysis and applications. Because of this, his work can be found in a number of economic literary works, making contributions to areas such as mathematical economics including theorem-proving, human rationality, behavioral study of firms, theory of casual ordering, and the analysis of the parameter identification problem in econometrics.
Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 and updated across the years, was based on Simon's doctoral dissertation. It served as the foundation for his life's work. The centerpiece of this book is the behavioral and cognitive processes of humans making rational decisions. By his definition, an operational administrative decision should be correct, efficient, and practical to implement with a set of coordinated means.
Simon recognized that a theory of administration is largely a theory of human decision making, and as such must be based on both economics and on psychology. He states:
[If] there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals. (p xxviii)
Contrary to the "homo economicus" model, Simon argued that alternatives and consequences may be partly known, and means and ends imperfectly differentiated, incompletely related, or poorly detailed.
Simon defined the task of rational decision making as selecting the alternative that results in the more preferred set of all the possible consequences. Correctness of administrative decisions was thus measured by:
The task of choice was divided into three required steps:
Any given individual or organization attempting to implement this model in a real situation would be unable to comply with the three requirements. Simon argued that knowledge of all alternatives, or all consequences that follow from each alternative is impossible in many realistic cases.
Simon attempted to determine the techniques and/or behavioral processes that a person or organization could bring to bear to achieve approximately the best result given limits on rational decision making. Simon writes:
The human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences.
Therefore, Simon describes work in terms of an economic framework, conditioned on human cognitive limitations: Economic man and Administrative man.
Administrative Behavior addresses a wide range of human behaviors, cognitive abilities, management techniques, personnel policies, training goals and procedures, specialized roles, criteria for evaluation of accuracy and efficiency, and all of the ramifications of communication processes. Simon is particularly interested in how these factors influence the making of decisions, both directly and indirectly.
Simon argued that the two outcomes of a choice require monitoring and that many members of the organization would be expected to focus on adequacy, but that administrative management must pay particular attention to the efficiency with which the desired result was obtained.
Simon followed Chester Barnard, who stated "the decisions that an individual makes as a member of an organization are quite distinct from his personal decisions". Personal choices may be determined whether an individual joins a particular organization and continue to be made in his or her extra–organizational private life. As a member of an organization, however, that individual makes decisions not in relationship to personal needs and results, but in an impersonal sense as part of the organizational intent, purpose, and effect. Organizational inducements, rewards, and sanctions are all designed to form, strengthen, and maintain this identification.
Simon saw two universal elements of human social behavior as key to creating the possibility of organizational behavior in human individuals: Authority (addressed in Chapter VII—The Role of Authority) and in Loyalties and Identification (Addressed in Chapter X: Loyalties, and Organizational Identification).
Authority is a well-studied, primary mark of organizational behavior, straightforwardly defined in the organizational context as the ability and right of an individual of higher rank to guide the decisions of an individual of lower rank. The actions, attitudes, and relationships of the dominant and subordinate individuals constitute components of role behavior that may vary widely in form, style, and content, but do not vary in the expectation of obedience by the one of superior status, and willingness to obey from the subordinate.
Loyalty was defined by Simon as the "process whereby the individual substitutes organizational objectives (service objectives or conservation objectives) for his own aims as the value-indices which determine his organizational decisions". This entailed evaluating alternative choices in terms of their consequences for the group rather than only for oneself or one's family.
Decisions can be complex admixtures of facts and values. Information about facts, especially empirically proven facts or facts derived from specialized experience, are more easily transmitted in the exercise of authority than are the expressions of values. Simon is primarily interested in seeking identification of the individual employee with the organizational goals and values. Following Lasswell, he states that "a person identifies himself with a group when, in making a decision, he evaluates the several alternatives of choice in terms of their consequences for the specified group".
Simon has been critical of traditional economics' elementary understanding of decision-making, and argues it "is too quick to build an idealistic, unrealistic picture of the decision-making process and then prescribe on the basis of such unrealistic picture".
Herbert Simon rediscovered path diagrams, which were originally invented by Sewall Wright around 1920.
Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs. GPS may possibly be the first method developed for separating problem solving strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were developed using the Information Processing Language (IPL) (1956) developed by Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Simon. Donald Knuth mentions the development of list processing in IPL, with the linked list originally called "NSS memory" for its inventors. In 1957, Simon predicted that computer chess would surpass human chess abilities within "ten years" when, in reality, that transition took about forty years. He also predicted in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
In the early 1960s psychologist Ulric Neisser asserted that while machines are capable of replicating "cold cognition" behaviors such as reasoning, planning, perceiving, and deciding, they would never be able to replicate "hot cognition" behaviors such as pain, pleasure, desire, and other emotions. Simon responded to Neisser's views in 1963 by writing a paper on emotional cognition, which he updated in 1967 and published in Psychological Review. Simon's work on emotional cognition was largely ignored by the artificial intelligence research community for several years, but subsequent work on emotions by Sloman and Picard helped refocus attention on Simon's paper and eventually, made it highly influential on the topic.
Simon also collaborated with James G. March on several works in organization theory.
With Allen Newell, Simon developed a theory for the simulation of human problem solving behavior using production rules. The study of human problem solving required new kinds of human measurements and, with Anders Ericsson, Simon developed the experimental technique of verbal protocol analysis. Simon was interested in the role of knowledge in expertise. He said that to become an expert on a topic required about ten years of experience and he and colleagues estimated that expertise was the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information. A chess expert was said to have learned about 50,000 chunks or chess position patterns.
He was awarded the ACM Turing Award, along with Allen Newell, in 1975. "In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. (Cliff) Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially [sic] with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing."
Simon was interested in how humans learn and, with Edward Feigenbaum, he developed the EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer) theory, one of the first theories of learning to be implemented as a computer program. EPAM was able to explain a large number of phenomena in the field of verbal learning. Later versions of the model were applied to concept formation and the acquisition of expertise. With Fernand Gobet, he has expanded the EPAM theory into the CHREST computational model. The theory explains how simple chunks of information form the building blocks of schemata, which are more complex structures. CHREST has been used predominantly, to simulate aspects of chess expertise.
Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational decision-making as it is known today. He was the first to rigorously examine how administrators made decisions when they did not have perfect and complete information. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.
At the Cowles Commission, Simon's main goal was to link economic theory to mathematics and statistics. His main contributions were to the fields of general equilibrium and econometrics. He was greatly influenced by the marginalist debate that began in the 1930s. The popular work of the time argued that it was not apparent empirically that entrepreneurs needed to follow the marginalist principles of profit-maximization/cost-minimization in running organizations. The argument went on to note that profit maximization was not accomplished, in part, because of the lack of complete information. In decision-making, Simon believed that agents face uncertainty about the future and costs in acquiring information in the present. These factors limit the extent to which agents may make a fully rational decision, thus they possess only "bounded rationality" and must make decisions by "satisficing", or choosing that which might not be optimal, but which will make them happy enough. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decision. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory.
Further, Simon emphasized that psychologists invoke a "procedural" definition of rationality, whereas economists employ a "substantive" definition. Gustavos Barros argued that the procedural rationality concept does not have a significant presence in the economics field and has never had nearly as much weight as the concept of bounded rationality. However, in an earlier article, Bhargava (1997) noted the importance of Simon's arguments and emphasized that there are several applications of the "procedural" definition of rationality in econometric analyses of data on health. In particular, economists should employ "auxiliary assumptions" that reflect the knowledge in the relevant biomedical fields, and guide the specification of econometric models for health outcomes.
Simon was also known for his research on industrial organization. He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof, did not conform to the neoclassical theories of "rational" decision-making. Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life, mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed "bounded rationality". "Rational behavior, in economics, means that individuals maximize their utility function under the constraints they face (e.g., their budget constraint, limited choices, ...) in pursuit of their self-interest. This is reflected in the theory of subjective expected utility. The term, bounded rationality, is used to designate rational choice that takes into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decisions. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory".
Simon determined that the best way to study these areas was through computer simulations. As such, he developed an interest in computer science. Simon's main interests in computer science were in artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, principles of the organization of humans and machines as information processing systems, the use of computers to study (by modeling) philosophical problems of the nature of intelligence and of epistemology, and the social implications of computer technology.
In his youth, Simon took an interest in land economics and Georgism, an idea known at the time as "single tax". The system is meant to redistribute unearned economic rent to the public and improve land use. In 1979, Simon still maintained these ideas and argued that land value tax should replace taxes on wages.
Some of Simon's economic research was directed toward understanding technological change in general and the information processing revolution in particular.
Simon's work has strongly influenced John Mighton, developer of a program that has achieved significant success in improving mathematics performance among elementary and high school students. Mighton cites a 2000 paper by Simon and two coauthors that counters arguments by French mathematics educator, Guy Brousseau, and others suggesting that excessive practice hampers children's understanding:
[The] criticism of practice (called "drill and kill," as if this phrase constituted empirical evaluation) is prominent in constructivist writings. Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the assertion that practice is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice... In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest.
Simon received many top-level honors in life, including becoming a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959; election as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967; APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1969); the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing" (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993); ACM fellow (1994); and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1995).
Simon was a prolific writer and authored 27 books and almost a thousand papers. As of 2016, Simon was the most cited person in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology on Google Scholar. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.
Simon married Dorothea Pye in 1938. Their marriage lasted 63 years until his death. In January 2001, Simon underwent surgery at UPMC Presbyterian to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Although the surgery was successful, Simon later died from the complications that followed. They had three children, Katherine, Peter, and Barbara. His wife died a year later in 2002.
From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics and during this time, together with David Hawkins, discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the "conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices". He also developed theorems on near-decomposability and aggregation. Having begun to apply these theorems to organizations, by 1954 Simon determined that the best way to study problem-solving was to simulate it with computer programs, which led to his interest in computer simulation of human cognition. Founded during the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.
Simon was a pianist and had a keen interest in the arts. He was a friend of Robert Lepper and Richard Rappaport. Rappaport also painted Simon's commissioned portrait at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a keen mountain climber. As a testament to his wide interests, he at one point taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of \"bounded rationality\" and \"satisficing\". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.",
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},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. Simon's father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948), was a Jewish electrical engineer who came to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. An inventor, Arthur also was an independent patent attorney. Simon's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel (1888–1969), was an accomplished pianist whose Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestors came from Braunschweig, Prague and Cologne. Simon's European ancestors were piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Simon attended Milwaukee Public Schools, where he developed an interest in science and established himself as an atheist. While attending middle school, Simon wrote a letter to \"the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists\". Unlike most children, Simon's family introduced him to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically; his mother's younger brother, Harold Merkel (1892–1922), who studied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under John R. Commons, became one of his earliest influences. Through Harold's books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered social science. Among his earliest influences, Simon cited Norman Angell for his book The Great Illusion and Henry George for his book Progress and Poverty. While attending high school, Simon joined the debate team, where he argued \"from conviction, rather than cussedness\" in favor of George's single tax.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and, following his early influences, decided to study social science and mathematics. Simon was interested in studying biology but chose not to pursue the field because of his \"color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory\". At an early age, Simon learned he was color blind and discovered the external world is not the same as the perceived world. While in college, Simon focused on political science and economics. Simon's most important mentor was Henry Schultz, an econometrician and mathematical economist. Simon received both his B.A. (1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell, Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam. After enrolling in a course on \"Measuring Municipal Governments,\" Simon became a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, and the two co-authored Measuring Municipal Activities: A Survey of Suggested Criteria for Appraising Administration in 1938. Simon's studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which became the subject of his doctoral dissertation.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After receiving his undergraduate degree, Simon obtained a research assistantship in municipal administration that turned into the directorship of an operations research group at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1939 to 1942. By arrangement with the University of Chicago, during his years at Berkeley, he took his doctoral exams by mail and worked on his dissertation after hours.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "From 1942 to 1949, Simon was a professor of political science and also served as department chairman at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. There, he began participating in the seminars held by the staff of the Cowles Commission who at that time included Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans. He thus began an in-depth study of economics in the area of institutionalism. Marschak brought Simon in to assist in the study he was currently undertaking with Sam Schurr of the \"prospective economic effects of atomic energy\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "From 1949 to 2001, Simon was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949, Simon became a professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at Carnegie Institute of Technology (\"Carnegie Tech\"), which, in 1967, became Carnegie-Mellon University. Simon later also taught psychology and computer science in the same university, (occasionally visiting other universities).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior. In this book he based his concepts with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making. His organization and administration interest allowed him to not only serve three times as a university department chairman, but he also played a big part in the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948; administrative team that administered aid to the Marshall Plan for the U.S. government, serving on President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee, and also the National Academy of Sciences. Simon has made a great number of contributions to both economic analysis and applications. Because of this, his work can be found in a number of economic literary works, making contributions to areas such as mathematical economics including theorem-proving, human rationality, behavioral study of firms, theory of casual ordering, and the analysis of the parameter identification problem in econometrics.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 and updated across the years, was based on Simon's doctoral dissertation. It served as the foundation for his life's work. The centerpiece of this book is the behavioral and cognitive processes of humans making rational decisions. By his definition, an operational administrative decision should be correct, efficient, and practical to implement with a set of coordinated means.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Simon recognized that a theory of administration is largely a theory of human decision making, and as such must be based on both economics and on psychology. He states:",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "[If] there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals. (p xxviii)",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Contrary to the \"homo economicus\" model, Simon argued that alternatives and consequences may be partly known, and means and ends imperfectly differentiated, incompletely related, or poorly detailed.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Simon defined the task of rational decision making as selecting the alternative that results in the more preferred set of all the possible consequences. Correctness of administrative decisions was thus measured by:",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The task of choice was divided into three required steps:",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Any given individual or organization attempting to implement this model in a real situation would be unable to comply with the three requirements. Simon argued that knowledge of all alternatives, or all consequences that follow from each alternative is impossible in many realistic cases.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Simon attempted to determine the techniques and/or behavioral processes that a person or organization could bring to bear to achieve approximately the best result given limits on rational decision making. Simon writes:",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Therefore, Simon describes work in terms of an economic framework, conditioned on human cognitive limitations: Economic man and Administrative man.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Administrative Behavior addresses a wide range of human behaviors, cognitive abilities, management techniques, personnel policies, training goals and procedures, specialized roles, criteria for evaluation of accuracy and efficiency, and all of the ramifications of communication processes. Simon is particularly interested in how these factors influence the making of decisions, both directly and indirectly.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Simon argued that the two outcomes of a choice require monitoring and that many members of the organization would be expected to focus on adequacy, but that administrative management must pay particular attention to the efficiency with which the desired result was obtained.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Simon followed Chester Barnard, who stated \"the decisions that an individual makes as a member of an organization are quite distinct from his personal decisions\". Personal choices may be determined whether an individual joins a particular organization and continue to be made in his or her extra–organizational private life. As a member of an organization, however, that individual makes decisions not in relationship to personal needs and results, but in an impersonal sense as part of the organizational intent, purpose, and effect. Organizational inducements, rewards, and sanctions are all designed to form, strengthen, and maintain this identification.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Simon saw two universal elements of human social behavior as key to creating the possibility of organizational behavior in human individuals: Authority (addressed in Chapter VII—The Role of Authority) and in Loyalties and Identification (Addressed in Chapter X: Loyalties, and Organizational Identification).",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Authority is a well-studied, primary mark of organizational behavior, straightforwardly defined in the organizational context as the ability and right of an individual of higher rank to guide the decisions of an individual of lower rank. The actions, attitudes, and relationships of the dominant and subordinate individuals constitute components of role behavior that may vary widely in form, style, and content, but do not vary in the expectation of obedience by the one of superior status, and willingness to obey from the subordinate.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Loyalty was defined by Simon as the \"process whereby the individual substitutes organizational objectives (service objectives or conservation objectives) for his own aims as the value-indices which determine his organizational decisions\". This entailed evaluating alternative choices in terms of their consequences for the group rather than only for oneself or one's family.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Decisions can be complex admixtures of facts and values. Information about facts, especially empirically proven facts or facts derived from specialized experience, are more easily transmitted in the exercise of authority than are the expressions of values. Simon is primarily interested in seeking identification of the individual employee with the organizational goals and values. Following Lasswell, he states that \"a person identifies himself with a group when, in making a decision, he evaluates the several alternatives of choice in terms of their consequences for the specified group\".",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Simon has been critical of traditional economics' elementary understanding of decision-making, and argues it \"is too quick to build an idealistic, unrealistic picture of the decision-making process and then prescribe on the basis of such unrealistic picture\".",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Herbert Simon rediscovered path diagrams, which were originally invented by Sewall Wright around 1920.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs. GPS may possibly be the first method developed for separating problem solving strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were developed using the Information Processing Language (IPL) (1956) developed by Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Simon. Donald Knuth mentions the development of list processing in IPL, with the linked list originally called \"NSS memory\" for its inventors. In 1957, Simon predicted that computer chess would surpass human chess abilities within \"ten years\" when, in reality, that transition took about forty years. He also predicted in 1965 that \"machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.\"",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the early 1960s psychologist Ulric Neisser asserted that while machines are capable of replicating \"cold cognition\" behaviors such as reasoning, planning, perceiving, and deciding, they would never be able to replicate \"hot cognition\" behaviors such as pain, pleasure, desire, and other emotions. Simon responded to Neisser's views in 1963 by writing a paper on emotional cognition, which he updated in 1967 and published in Psychological Review. Simon's work on emotional cognition was largely ignored by the artificial intelligence research community for several years, but subsequent work on emotions by Sloman and Picard helped refocus attention on Simon's paper and eventually, made it highly influential on the topic.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Simon also collaborated with James G. March on several works in organization theory.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "With Allen Newell, Simon developed a theory for the simulation of human problem solving behavior using production rules. The study of human problem solving required new kinds of human measurements and, with Anders Ericsson, Simon developed the experimental technique of verbal protocol analysis. Simon was interested in the role of knowledge in expertise. He said that to become an expert on a topic required about ten years of experience and he and colleagues estimated that expertise was the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information. A chess expert was said to have learned about 50,000 chunks or chess position patterns.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "He was awarded the ACM Turing Award, along with Allen Newell, in 1975. \"In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. (Cliff) Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially [sic] with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.\"",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Simon was interested in how humans learn and, with Edward Feigenbaum, he developed the EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer) theory, one of the first theories of learning to be implemented as a computer program. EPAM was able to explain a large number of phenomena in the field of verbal learning. Later versions of the model were applied to concept formation and the acquisition of expertise. With Fernand Gobet, he has expanded the EPAM theory into the CHREST computational model. The theory explains how simple chunks of information form the building blocks of schemata, which are more complex structures. CHREST has been used predominantly, to simulate aspects of chess expertise.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational decision-making as it is known today. He was the first to rigorously examine how administrators made decisions when they did not have perfect and complete information. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "At the Cowles Commission, Simon's main goal was to link economic theory to mathematics and statistics. His main contributions were to the fields of general equilibrium and econometrics. He was greatly influenced by the marginalist debate that began in the 1930s. The popular work of the time argued that it was not apparent empirically that entrepreneurs needed to follow the marginalist principles of profit-maximization/cost-minimization in running organizations. The argument went on to note that profit maximization was not accomplished, in part, because of the lack of complete information. In decision-making, Simon believed that agents face uncertainty about the future and costs in acquiring information in the present. These factors limit the extent to which agents may make a fully rational decision, thus they possess only \"bounded rationality\" and must make decisions by \"satisficing\", or choosing that which might not be optimal, but which will make them happy enough. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decision. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Further, Simon emphasized that psychologists invoke a \"procedural\" definition of rationality, whereas economists employ a \"substantive\" definition. Gustavos Barros argued that the procedural rationality concept does not have a significant presence in the economics field and has never had nearly as much weight as the concept of bounded rationality. However, in an earlier article, Bhargava (1997) noted the importance of Simon's arguments and emphasized that there are several applications of the \"procedural\" definition of rationality in econometric analyses of data on health. In particular, economists should employ \"auxiliary assumptions\" that reflect the knowledge in the relevant biomedical fields, and guide the specification of econometric models for health outcomes.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Simon was also known for his research on industrial organization. He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof, did not conform to the neoclassical theories of \"rational\" decision-making. Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life, mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed \"bounded rationality\". \"Rational behavior, in economics, means that individuals maximize their utility function under the constraints they face (e.g., their budget constraint, limited choices, ...) in pursuit of their self-interest. This is reflected in the theory of subjective expected utility. The term, bounded rationality, is used to designate rational choice that takes into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decisions. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory\".",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Simon determined that the best way to study these areas was through computer simulations. As such, he developed an interest in computer science. Simon's main interests in computer science were in artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, principles of the organization of humans and machines as information processing systems, the use of computers to study (by modeling) philosophical problems of the nature of intelligence and of epistemology, and the social implications of computer technology.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In his youth, Simon took an interest in land economics and Georgism, an idea known at the time as \"single tax\". The system is meant to redistribute unearned economic rent to the public and improve land use. In 1979, Simon still maintained these ideas and argued that land value tax should replace taxes on wages.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Some of Simon's economic research was directed toward understanding technological change in general and the information processing revolution in particular.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Simon's work has strongly influenced John Mighton, developer of a program that has achieved significant success in improving mathematics performance among elementary and high school students. Mighton cites a 2000 paper by Simon and two coauthors that counters arguments by French mathematics educator, Guy Brousseau, and others suggesting that excessive practice hampers children's understanding:",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "[The] criticism of practice (called \"drill and kill,\" as if this phrase constituted empirical evaluation) is prominent in constructivist writings. Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the assertion that practice is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice... In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to \"kill\" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Simon received many top-level honors in life, including becoming a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959; election as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967; APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1969); the ACM's Turing Award for making \"basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing\" (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics \"for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations\" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993); ACM fellow (1994); and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1995).",
"title": "Awards and honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Simon was a prolific writer and authored 27 books and almost a thousand papers. As of 2016, Simon was the most cited person in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology on Google Scholar. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.",
"title": "Selected publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Simon married Dorothea Pye in 1938. Their marriage lasted 63 years until his death. In January 2001, Simon underwent surgery at UPMC Presbyterian to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Although the surgery was successful, Simon later died from the complications that followed. They had three children, Katherine, Peter, and Barbara. His wife died a year later in 2002.",
"title": "Personal life and interests"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics and during this time, together with David Hawkins, discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the \"conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices\". He also developed theorems on near-decomposability and aggregation. Having begun to apply these theorems to organizations, by 1954 Simon determined that the best way to study problem-solving was to simulate it with computer programs, which led to his interest in computer simulation of human cognition. Founded during the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.",
"title": "Personal life and interests"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Simon was a pianist and had a keen interest in the arts. He was a friend of Robert Lepper and Richard Rappaport. Rappaport also painted Simon's commissioned portrait at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a keen mountain climber. As a testament to his wide interests, he at one point taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution.",
"title": "Personal life and interests"
}
]
| Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world. Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-31T20:12:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon |
14,207 | Hematite | Hematite (/ˈhiːməˌtaɪt, ˈhɛmə-/), also spelled as haematite, is a common iron oxide compound with the formula, Fe2O3 and is widely found in rocks and soils. Hematite crystals belong to the rhombohedral lattice system which is designated the alpha polymorph of Fe2O3. It has the same crystal structure as corundum (Al2O3) and ilmenite (FeTiO3). With this it forms a complete solid solution at temperatures above 950 °C (1,740 °F).
Hematite naturally occurs in black to steel or silver-gray, brown to reddish-brown, or red colors. It is mined as an important ore mineral of iron. It is electrically conductive. Hematite varieties include kidney ore, martite (pseudomorphs after magnetite), iron rose and specularite (specular hematite). While these forms vary, they all have a rust-red streak. Hematite is not only harder than pure iron, but also much more brittle. Maghemite is a polymorph of hematite (γ-Fe2O3) with the same chemical formula, but with a spinel structure like magnetite.
Large deposits of hematite are found in banded iron formations. Gray hematite is typically found in places that have still, standing water or mineral hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in North America. The mineral can precipitate in the water and collect in layers at the bottom of the lake, spring, or other standing water. Hematite can also occur in the absence of water, usually as the result of volcanic activity.
Clay-sized hematite crystals can also occur as a secondary mineral formed by weathering processes in soil, and along with other iron oxides or oxyhydroxides such as goethite, which is responsible for the red color of many tropical, ancient, or otherwise highly weathered soils.
The name hematite is derived from the Greek word for blood αἷμα (haima), due to the red coloration found in some varieties of hematite. The color of hematite is often used as a pigment. The English name of the stone is derived from Middle French hématite pierre, which was taken from Latin lapis haematites c. the 15th century, which originated from Ancient Greek αἱματίτης λίθος (haimatitēs lithos, "blood-red stone").
Ochre is a clay that is colored by varying amounts of hematite, varying between 20% and 70%. Red ochre contains unhydrated hematite, whereas yellow ochre contains hydrated hematite (Fe2O3 · H2O). The principal use of ochre is for tinting with a permanent color.
The red chalk writing of this mineral was one of the earliest in the human history. The powdery mineral was first used 164,000 years ago by the Pinnacle-Point man, possibly for social purposes. Hematite residues are also found in graves from 80,000 years ago. Near Rydno in Poland and Lovas in Hungary red chalk mines have been found that are from 5000 BC, belonging to the Linear Pottery culture at the Upper Rhine.
Rich deposits of hematite have been found on the island of Elba that have been mined since the time of the Etruscans.
Hematite shows only a very feeble response to a magnetic field. Unlike magnetite, it is not noticeably attracted to an ordinary magnet. Hematite is an antiferromagnetic material below the Morin transition at 250 K (−23 °C), and a canted antiferromagnet or weakly ferromagnetic above the Morin transition and below its Néel temperature at 948 K (675 °C), above which it is paramagnetic.
The magnetic structure of α-hematite was the subject of considerable discussion and debate during the 1950s, as it appeared to be ferromagnetic with a Curie temperature of approximately 1,000 K (730 °C), but with an extremely small magnetic moment (0.002 Bohr magnetons). Adding to the surprise was a transition with a decrease in temperature at around 260 K (−13 °C) to a phase with no net magnetic moment. It was shown that the system is essentially antiferromagnetic, but that the low symmetry of the cation sites allows spin–orbit coupling to cause canting of the moments when they are in the plane perpendicular to the c axis. The disappearance of the moment with a decrease in temperature at 260 K (−13 °C) is caused by a change in the anisotropy which causes the moments to align along the c axis. In this configuration, spin canting does not reduce the energy. The magnetic properties of bulk hematite differ from their nanoscale counterparts. For example, the Morin transition temperature of hematite decreases with a decrease in the particle size. The suppression of this transition has been observed in hematite nanoparticles and is attributed to the presence of impurities, water molecules and defects in the crystals lattice. Hematite is part of a complex solid solution oxyhydroxide system having various contents of H2O (water), hydroxyl groups and vacancy substitutions that affect the mineral's magnetic and crystal chemical properties. Two other end-members are referred to as protohematite and hydrohematite.
Enhanced magnetic coercivities for hematite have been achieved by dry-heating a two-line ferrihydrite precursor prepared from solution. Hematite exhibited temperature-dependent magnetic coercivity values ranging from 289 to 5,027 oersteds (23–400 kA/m). The origin of these high coercivity values has been interpreted as a consequence of the subparticle structure induced by the different particle and crystallite size growth rates at increasing annealing temperature. These differences in the growth rates are translated into a progressive development of a subparticle structure at the nanoscale (super small). At lower temperatures (350–600 °C), single particles crystallize. However, at higher temperatures (600–1000 °C), the growth of crystalline aggregates and a subparticle structure is favored.
Hematite is present in the waste tailings of iron mines. A recently developed process, magnetation, uses magnets to glean waste hematite from old mine tailings in Minnesota's vast Mesabi Range iron district. Falu red is a pigment used in traditional Swedish house paints. Originally, it was made from tailings of the Falu mine.
The spectral signature of hematite was seen on the planet Mars by the infrared spectrometer on the NASA Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft in orbit around Mars. The mineral was seen in abundance at two sites on the planet, the Terra Meridiani site, near the Martian equator at 0° longitude, and the Aram Chaos site near the Valles Marineris. Several other sites also showed hematite, such as Aureum Chaos. Because terrestrial hematite is typically a mineral formed in aqueous environments or by aqueous alteration, this detection was scientifically interesting enough that the second of the two Mars Exploration Rovers was sent to a site in the Terra Meridiani region designated Meridiani Planum. In-situ investigations by the Opportunity rover showed a significant amount of hematite, much of it in the form of small "Martian spherules" that were informally named "blueberries" by the science team. Analysis indicates that these spherules are apparently concretions formed from a water solution. "Knowing just how the hematite on Mars was formed will help us characterize the past environment and determine whether that environment was favorable for life".
Hematite is often shaped into beads, tumbling stones, and other jewellery components. Hematite was once used as mourning jewelry. Certain types of hematite- or iron-oxide-rich clay, especially Armenian bole, have been used in gilding. Hematite is also used in art such as in the creation of intaglio engraved gems. Hematine is a synthetic material sold as magnetic hematite.
Hematite has been sourced to make pigments since earlier origins of human pictorial depictions, such as on cave linings and other surfaces, and has been continually employed in artwork through the eras. It forms the basis for red, purple and brown iron-oxide pigments, as well as being an important component of ochre, sienna and umber pigments.
As mentioned earlier, hematite is an important mineral for iron ore. The physical properties of hematite are also employed in the areas of medical equipment, shipping industries and coal production. Having high density and capable as an effective barrier for X-ray passage, it is often incorporated into radiation shielding. As with other iron ores, it is often a component of ship ballasts for its density and economy. In the coal industry, it can be formed into a high specific density solution, to help separate coal powder from impurities. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hematite (/ˈhiːməˌtaɪt, ˈhɛmə-/), also spelled as haematite, is a common iron oxide compound with the formula, Fe2O3 and is widely found in rocks and soils. Hematite crystals belong to the rhombohedral lattice system which is designated the alpha polymorph of Fe2O3. It has the same crystal structure as corundum (Al2O3) and ilmenite (FeTiO3). With this it forms a complete solid solution at temperatures above 950 °C (1,740 °F).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hematite naturally occurs in black to steel or silver-gray, brown to reddish-brown, or red colors. It is mined as an important ore mineral of iron. It is electrically conductive. Hematite varieties include kidney ore, martite (pseudomorphs after magnetite), iron rose and specularite (specular hematite). While these forms vary, they all have a rust-red streak. Hematite is not only harder than pure iron, but also much more brittle. Maghemite is a polymorph of hematite (γ-Fe2O3) with the same chemical formula, but with a spinel structure like magnetite.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Large deposits of hematite are found in banded iron formations. Gray hematite is typically found in places that have still, standing water or mineral hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in North America. The mineral can precipitate in the water and collect in layers at the bottom of the lake, spring, or other standing water. Hematite can also occur in the absence of water, usually as the result of volcanic activity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Clay-sized hematite crystals can also occur as a secondary mineral formed by weathering processes in soil, and along with other iron oxides or oxyhydroxides such as goethite, which is responsible for the red color of many tropical, ancient, or otherwise highly weathered soils.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name hematite is derived from the Greek word for blood αἷμα (haima), due to the red coloration found in some varieties of hematite. The color of hematite is often used as a pigment. The English name of the stone is derived from Middle French hématite pierre, which was taken from Latin lapis haematites c. the 15th century, which originated from Ancient Greek αἱματίτης λίθος (haimatitēs lithos, \"blood-red stone\").",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Ochre is a clay that is colored by varying amounts of hematite, varying between 20% and 70%. Red ochre contains unhydrated hematite, whereas yellow ochre contains hydrated hematite (Fe2O3 · H2O). The principal use of ochre is for tinting with a permanent color.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The red chalk writing of this mineral was one of the earliest in the human history. The powdery mineral was first used 164,000 years ago by the Pinnacle-Point man, possibly for social purposes. Hematite residues are also found in graves from 80,000 years ago. Near Rydno in Poland and Lovas in Hungary red chalk mines have been found that are from 5000 BC, belonging to the Linear Pottery culture at the Upper Rhine.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Rich deposits of hematite have been found on the island of Elba that have been mined since the time of the Etruscans.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hematite shows only a very feeble response to a magnetic field. Unlike magnetite, it is not noticeably attracted to an ordinary magnet. Hematite is an antiferromagnetic material below the Morin transition at 250 K (−23 °C), and a canted antiferromagnet or weakly ferromagnetic above the Morin transition and below its Néel temperature at 948 K (675 °C), above which it is paramagnetic.",
"title": "Magnetism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The magnetic structure of α-hematite was the subject of considerable discussion and debate during the 1950s, as it appeared to be ferromagnetic with a Curie temperature of approximately 1,000 K (730 °C), but with an extremely small magnetic moment (0.002 Bohr magnetons). Adding to the surprise was a transition with a decrease in temperature at around 260 K (−13 °C) to a phase with no net magnetic moment. It was shown that the system is essentially antiferromagnetic, but that the low symmetry of the cation sites allows spin–orbit coupling to cause canting of the moments when they are in the plane perpendicular to the c axis. The disappearance of the moment with a decrease in temperature at 260 K (−13 °C) is caused by a change in the anisotropy which causes the moments to align along the c axis. In this configuration, spin canting does not reduce the energy. The magnetic properties of bulk hematite differ from their nanoscale counterparts. For example, the Morin transition temperature of hematite decreases with a decrease in the particle size. The suppression of this transition has been observed in hematite nanoparticles and is attributed to the presence of impurities, water molecules and defects in the crystals lattice. Hematite is part of a complex solid solution oxyhydroxide system having various contents of H2O (water), hydroxyl groups and vacancy substitutions that affect the mineral's magnetic and crystal chemical properties. Two other end-members are referred to as protohematite and hydrohematite.",
"title": "Magnetism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Enhanced magnetic coercivities for hematite have been achieved by dry-heating a two-line ferrihydrite precursor prepared from solution. Hematite exhibited temperature-dependent magnetic coercivity values ranging from 289 to 5,027 oersteds (23–400 kA/m). The origin of these high coercivity values has been interpreted as a consequence of the subparticle structure induced by the different particle and crystallite size growth rates at increasing annealing temperature. These differences in the growth rates are translated into a progressive development of a subparticle structure at the nanoscale (super small). At lower temperatures (350–600 °C), single particles crystallize. However, at higher temperatures (600–1000 °C), the growth of crystalline aggregates and a subparticle structure is favored.",
"title": "Magnetism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hematite is present in the waste tailings of iron mines. A recently developed process, magnetation, uses magnets to glean waste hematite from old mine tailings in Minnesota's vast Mesabi Range iron district. Falu red is a pigment used in traditional Swedish house paints. Originally, it was made from tailings of the Falu mine.",
"title": "Mine tailings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The spectral signature of hematite was seen on the planet Mars by the infrared spectrometer on the NASA Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft in orbit around Mars. The mineral was seen in abundance at two sites on the planet, the Terra Meridiani site, near the Martian equator at 0° longitude, and the Aram Chaos site near the Valles Marineris. Several other sites also showed hematite, such as Aureum Chaos. Because terrestrial hematite is typically a mineral formed in aqueous environments or by aqueous alteration, this detection was scientifically interesting enough that the second of the two Mars Exploration Rovers was sent to a site in the Terra Meridiani region designated Meridiani Planum. In-situ investigations by the Opportunity rover showed a significant amount of hematite, much of it in the form of small \"Martian spherules\" that were informally named \"blueberries\" by the science team. Analysis indicates that these spherules are apparently concretions formed from a water solution. \"Knowing just how the hematite on Mars was formed will help us characterize the past environment and determine whether that environment was favorable for life\".",
"title": "Mars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hematite is often shaped into beads, tumbling stones, and other jewellery components. Hematite was once used as mourning jewelry. Certain types of hematite- or iron-oxide-rich clay, especially Armenian bole, have been used in gilding. Hematite is also used in art such as in the creation of intaglio engraved gems. Hematine is a synthetic material sold as magnetic hematite.",
"title": "Jewelry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Hematite has been sourced to make pigments since earlier origins of human pictorial depictions, such as on cave linings and other surfaces, and has been continually employed in artwork through the eras. It forms the basis for red, purple and brown iron-oxide pigments, as well as being an important component of ochre, sienna and umber pigments.",
"title": "Pigment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "As mentioned earlier, hematite is an important mineral for iron ore. The physical properties of hematite are also employed in the areas of medical equipment, shipping industries and coal production. Having high density and capable as an effective barrier for X-ray passage, it is often incorporated into radiation shielding. As with other iron ores, it is often a component of ship ballasts for its density and economy. In the coal industry, it can be formed into a high specific density solution, to help separate coal powder from impurities.",
"title": "Industrial purposes"
}
]
| Hematite, also spelled as haematite, is a common iron oxide compound with the formula, Fe2O3 and is widely found in rocks and soils. Hematite crystals belong to the rhombohedral lattice system which is designated the alpha polymorph of Fe2O3. It has the same crystal structure as corundum (Al2O3) and ilmenite (FeTiO3). With this it forms a complete solid solution at temperatures above 950 °C (1,740 °F). Hematite naturally occurs in black to steel or silver-gray, brown to reddish-brown, or red colors. It is mined as an important ore mineral of iron. It is electrically conductive. Hematite varieties include kidney ore, martite, iron rose and specularite. While these forms vary, they all have a rust-red streak. Hematite is not only harder than pure iron, but also much more brittle. Maghemite is a polymorph of hematite (γ-Fe2O3) with the same chemical formula, but with a spinel structure like magnetite. Large deposits of hematite are found in banded iron formations. Gray hematite is typically found in places that have still, standing water or mineral hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in North America. The mineral can precipitate in the water and collect in layers at the bottom of the lake, spring, or other standing water. Hematite can also occur in the absence of water, usually as the result of volcanic activity. Clay-sized hematite crystals can also occur as a secondary mineral formed by weathering processes in soil, and along with other iron oxides or oxyhydroxides such as goethite, which is responsible for the red color of many tropical, ancient, or otherwise highly weathered soils. | 2001-11-27T12:03:17Z | 2023-12-27T14:50:34Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite |
14,208 | Holocene extinction | The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the "Big Five" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event.
The Holocene extinction follows the extinction of many large (megafaunal) animals during the preceding Late Pleistocene as part of the Quaternary extinction event. It has been suggested that megafauna outside of the African mainland, which did not evolve alongside modern humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of human predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth. The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the Holocene extinction coincides with human colonization of many new areas around the world. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation and habitat loss affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with the onset of human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene.
In the twentieth century, human numbers quadrupled, and the size of the global economy increased twenty-five-fold. This Great Acceleration or Anthropocene epoch has also accelerated species extinction. Ecologically, humanity is now an unprecedented "global superpredator", which consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, takes over other species' essential habitats and displaces them, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands.
Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with human population growth, increasing per capita consumption (especially by the super-affluent), and meat production and consumption, among others, being the primary drivers of mass extinction. Deforestation, overfishing, ocean acidification, the destruction of wetlands, and the decline in amphibian populations, among others, are a few broader examples of global biodiversity loss.
Mass extinctions are characterized by the loss of at least 75% of species within a geologically short period of time (i.e., less than 2 million years). The Holocene extinction is also known as the "sixth extinction", as it is possibly the sixth mass extinction event, after the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, and the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. If the Capitanian extinction event is included among the first-order mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction would correspondingly be known as the "seventh extinction". The Holocene is the current geological epoch.
There is no general agreement on where the Holocene, or anthropogenic, extinction begins, and the Quaternary extinction event, which includes climate change resulting in the end of the last ice age, ends, or if they should be considered separate events at all. The Holocene extinction is mainly caused by human activities. Some have suggested that anthropogenic extinctions may have begun as early as when the first modern humans spread out of Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago; this is supported by rapid megafaunal extinction following recent human colonization in Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar. In many cases, it is suggested that even minimal hunting pressure was enough to wipe out large fauna, particularly on geographically isolated islands. Only during the most recent parts of the extinction have plants also suffered large losses.
The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth. One scientist estimates the current extinction rate may be 10,000 times the background extinction rate, although most scientists predict a much lower extinction rate than this outlying estimate. Theoretical ecologist Stuart Pimm stated that the extinction rate for plants is 100 times higher than normal.
Some contend that contemporary extinction has yet to reach the level of the previous five mass extinctions, and that this comparison downplays how severe the first five mass extinctions were. John Briggs argues that there is inadequate data to determine the real rate of extinctions, and shows that estimates of current species extinctions varies enormously, ranging from 1.5 species to 40,000 species going extinct due to human activities each year. Both papers from Barnosky et al. (2011) and Hull et al. (2015) point out that the real rate of extinction during previous mass extinctions is unknown, both as only some organisms leave fossil remains, and as the temporal resolution of the fossil layer is larger than the time frame of the extinction events. However, all these authors agree that there is a modern biodiversity crisis with population declines affecting numerous species, and that a future anthropogenic mass extinction event is a big risk. The 2011 study by Barnosky et al. confirms that "current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record" and adds that anthropogenic ecological stressors, including climate change, habitat fragmentation, pollution, overfishing, overhunting, invasive species, and expanding human biomass, will intensify and accelerate extinction rates in the future without significant mitigation efforts.
In The Future of Life (2002), Edward Osborne Wilson of Harvard calculated that, if the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere continues, one-half of Earth's higher lifeforms will be extinct by 2100. A 1998 poll conducted by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists acknowledge an ongoing anthropogenic extinction event.
In a pair of studies published in 2015, extrapolation from observed extinction of Hawaiian snails led to the conclusion that 7% of all species on Earth may have been lost already. A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change found that only around 3% of the planet's terrestrial surface is ecologically and faunally intact, meaning areas with healthy populations of native animal species and little to no human footprint.
The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), posits that out of around eight million species of plants and animals, roughly one million species face extinction within decades as the result of human actions. Organized human existence is jeopardized by increasingly rapid destruction of the systems that support life on Earth, according to the report, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies of the health of the planet ever conducted. Moreover, the 2021 Economics of Biodiversity review, published by the UK government, asserts that "biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history." According to a 2022 study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a survey of more than 3,000 experts says that the extent of the mass extinction might be greater than previously thought, and estimates that roughly 30% of species "have been globally threatened or driven extinct since the year 1500." In a 2022 report, IPBES listed unsustainable fishing, hunting, and logging as being some of the primary drivers of the global extinction crisis. A 2022 study published in Science Advances suggests that if global warming reaches 2.7 °C (4.9 °F) or 4.4 °C (7.9 °F) by 2100, then 13% and 27% of terrestrial vertebrate species will go extinct by then, largely due to climate change (62%), with anthropogenic land conversion and co-extinctions accounting for the rest. A 2023 study published in PLOS One shows that around two million species are threatened with extinction, double the estimate put forward in the 2019 IPBES report.
According to a 2023 study published in PNAS, at least 73 genera of animals have gone extinct since 1500. If humans had never existed, the study estimates it would have taken 18,000 years for the same genera to have disappeared naturally, leading the authors to conclude that "the current generic extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts" and that human civilization is causing the "rapid mutilation of the tree of life."
We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings.
—Anne Larigauderie, IPBES executive secretary
There is widespread consensus among scientists that human activity is accelerating the extinction of many animal species through the destruction of habitats, the consumption of animals as resources, and the elimination of species that humans view as threats or competitors. Rising extinction trends impacting numerous animal groups including mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have prompted some scientists to declare a biodiversity crisis.
Characterization of recent extinction as a mass extinction has been debated among scientists. Stuart Pimm, for example, asserts that the sixth mass extinction "is something that hasn't happened yet – we are on the edge of it." Several studies posit that the earth has entered a sixth mass extinction event, including a 2015 paper by Barnosky et al. and a November 2017 statement titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice", led by eight authors and signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries which asserted that, among other things, "we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be extirpated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century." The World Wide Fund for Nature's 2020 Living Planet Report says that wildlife populations have declined by 68% since 1970 as a result of overconsumption, population growth, and intensive farming, which is further evidence that humans have unleashed a sixth mass extinction event; however, this finding has been disputed by one 2020 study, which posits that this major decline was primarily driven by a few extreme outlier populations, and that when these outliers are removed, the trend shifts to that of a decline between the 1980s and 2000s, but a roughly positive trend after 2000. A 2021 report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which cites both of the aforementioned studies, says "population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades, with certain population clusters in extreme decline, thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species," and asserts "that we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now scientifically undeniable." A January 2022 review article published in Biological Reviews builds upon previous studies documenting biodiversity decline to assert that a sixth mass extinction event caused by anthropogenic activity is currently underway. A December 2022 study published in Science Advances states that "the planet has entered the sixth mass extinction" and warns that current anthropogenic trends, particularly regarding climate and land-use changes, could result in the loss of more than a tenth of plant and animal species by the end of the century. A 2023 study published in Biological Reviews found that, of 70,000 monitored species, some 48% are experiencing population declines from anthropogenic pressures, whereas only 3% have increasing populations.
According to the UNDP's 2020 Human Development Report, The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene:
The planet's biodiversity is plunging, with a quarter of species facing extinction, many within decades. Numerous experts believe we are living through, or on the cusp of, a mass species extinction event, the sixth in the history of the planet and the first to be caused by a single organism—us.
The 2022 Living Planet Report found that vertebrate wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of almost 70% since 1970, with agriculture and fishing being the primary drivers of this decline.
Some scientists, including Rodolfo Dirzo and Paul R. Ehrlich, contend that the sixth mass extinction is largely unknown to most people globally and is also misunderstood by many in the scientific community. They say it is not the disappearance of species, which gets the most attention, that is at the heart of the crisis, but "the existential threat of myriad population extinctions."
The abundance of species extinctions considered anthropogenic, or due to human activity, has sometimes (especially when referring to hypothesized future events) been collectively called the "Anthropocene extinction". Anthropocene is a term introduced in 2000. Some now postulate that a new geological epoch has begun, with the most abrupt and widespread extinction of species since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.
The term "anthropocene" is being used more frequently by scientists, and some commentators may refer to the current and projected future extinctions as part of a longer Holocene extinction. The Holocene–Anthropocene boundary is contested, with some commentators asserting significant human influence on climate for much of what is normally regarded as the Holocene Epoch. Other commentators place the Holocene–Anthropocene boundary at the industrial revolution and also say that "[f]ormal adoption of this term in the near future will largely depend on its utility, particularly to earth scientists working on late Holocene successions."
It has been suggested that human activity has made the period starting from the mid-20th century different enough from the rest of the Holocene to consider it a new geological epoch, known as the Anthropocene, a term which was considered for inclusion in the timeline of Earth's history by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2016. In order to constitute the Holocene as an extinction event, scientists must determine exactly when anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions began to measurably alter natural atmospheric levels on a global scale, and when these alterations caused changes to global climate. Using chemical proxies from Antarctic ice cores, researchers have estimated the fluctuations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) gases in the Earth's atmosphere during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Estimates of the fluctuations of these two gases in the atmosphere, using chemical proxies from Antarctic ice cores, generally indicate that the peak of the Anthropocene occurred within the previous two centuries: typically beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when the highest greenhouse gas levels were recorded.
A 2015 article in Science suggested that humans are unique in ecology as an unprecedented "global superpredator", regularly preying on large numbers of fully grown terrestrial and marine apex predators, and with a great deal of influence over food webs and climatic systems worldwide. Although significant debate exists as to how much human predation and indirect effects contributed to prehistoric extinctions, certain population crashes have been directly correlated with human arrival. Human activity has been the main cause of mammalian extinctions since the Late Pleistocene. A 2018 study published in PNAS found that since the dawn of human civilization, the biomass of wild mammals has decreased by 83%. The biomass decrease is 80% for marine mammals, 50% for plants, and 15% for fish. Currently, livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). As for birds, 70% are domesticated, such as poultry, whereas only 30% are wild.
Extinction of animals, plants, and other organisms caused by human actions may go as far back as the late Pleistocene, over 12,000 years ago. There is a correlation between megafaunal extinction and the arrival of humans. Megafauna that are still extant also suffered severe declines that were highly correlated with human expansion and activity. Over the past 125,000 years, the average body size of wildlife has fallen by 14% as actions by prehistoric humans eradicated megafauna on all continents with the exception of Africa.
Human civilization was founded on and grew from agriculture. The more land used for farming, the greater the population a civilization could sustain, and subsequent popularization of farming led to widespread habitat conversion.
Habitat destruction by humans, thus replacing the original local ecosystems, is a major driver of extinction. The sustained conversion of biodiversity rich forests and wetlands into poorer fields and pastures (of lesser carrying capacity for wild species), over the last 10,000 years, has considerably reduced the Earth's carrying capacity for wild birds and mammals, among other organisms, in both population size and species count.
Other, related human causes of the extinction event include deforestation, hunting, pollution, the introduction in various regions of non-native species, and the widespread transmission of infectious diseases spread through livestock and crops.
Recent investigations into the practice of landscape burning during the Neolithic Revolution have a major implication for the current debate about the timing of the Anthropocene and the role that humans may have played in the production of greenhouse gases prior to the Industrial Revolution. Studies of early hunter-gatherers raise questions about the current use of population size or density as a proxy for the amount of land clearance and anthropogenic burning that took place in pre-industrial times. Scientists have questioned the correlation between population size and early territorial alterations. Ruddiman and Ellis' research paper in 2009 makes the case that early farmers involved in systems of agriculture used more land per capita than growers later in the Holocene, who intensified their labor to produce more food per unit of area (thus, per laborer); arguing that agricultural involvement in rice production implemented thousands of years ago by relatively small populations created significant environmental impacts through large-scale means of deforestation.
While a number of human-derived factors are recognized as contributing to rising atmospheric concentrations of CH4 (methane) and CO2 (carbon dioxide), deforestation and territorial clearance practices associated with agricultural development may have contributed most to these concentrations globally in earlier millennia. Scientists that are employing a variance of archaeological and paleoecological data argue that the processes contributing to substantial human modification of the environment spanned many thousands of years on a global scale and thus, not originating as late as the Industrial Revolution. Palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued that in the early Holocene 11,000 years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels fluctuated in a pattern which was different from the Pleistocene epoch before it. He argued that the patterns of the significant decline of CO2 levels during the last ice age of the Pleistocene inversely correlate to the Holocene where there have been dramatic increases of CO2 around 8000 years ago and CH4 levels 3000 years after that. The correlation between the decrease of CO2 in the Pleistocene and the increase of it during the Holocene implies that the causation of this spark of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was the growth of human agriculture during the Holocene.
One of the main theories explaining early Holocene extinctions is historic climate change. The climate change theory has suggested that a change in climate near the end of the late Pleistocene stressed the megafauna to the point of extinction. Some scientists favor abrupt climate change as the catalyst for the extinction of the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene, most who believe increased hunting from early modern humans also played a part, with others even suggesting that the two interacted. In the Americas, a controversial explanation for the shift in climate is presented under the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which states that the impact of comets cooled global temperatures. Despite its popularity among nonscientists, this hypothesis never been accepted by relevant experts, who dismiss it as a fringe theory.
Contemporary human overpopulation and continued population growth, along with per-capita consumption growth, prominently in the past two centuries, are regarded as the underlying causes of extinction. Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, stated that "we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure. As far as biodiversity is concerned, we are at war with nature."
Some scholars assert that the emergence of capitalism as the dominant economic system has accelerated ecological exploitation and destruction, and has also exacerbated mass species extinction. CUNY professor David Harvey, for example, posits that the neoliberal era "happens to be the era of the fastest mass extinction of species in the Earth's recent history". Ecologist William E. Rees concludes that the "neoliberal paradigm contributes significantly to planetary unraveling" by treating the economy and the ecosphere as totally separate systems, and by neglecting the latter. Major lobbying organizations representing corporations in the agriculture, fisheries, forestry and paper, mining, and oil and gas industries, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, have been pushing back against legislation that could address the extinction crisis. A 2022 report by the climate think tank InfluenceMap stated that "although industry associations, especially in the US, appear reluctant to discuss the biodiversity crisis, they are clearly engaged on a wide range of policies with significant impacts on biodiversity loss."
The loss of animal species from ecological communities, defaunation, is primarily driven by human activity. This has resulted in empty forests, ecological communities depleted of large vertebrates. This is not to be confused with extinction, as it includes both the disappearance of species and declines in abundance. Defaunation effects were first implied at the Symposium of Plant-Animal Interactions at the University of Campinas, Brazil in 1988 in the context of Neotropical forests. Since then, the term has gained broader usage in conservation biology as a global phenomenon.
Big cat populations have severely declined over the last half-century and could face extinction in the following decades. According to 2011 IUCN estimates: lions are down to 25,000, from 450,000; leopards are down to 50,000, from 750,000; cheetahs are down to 12,000, from 45,000; tigers are down to 3,000 in the wild, from 50,000. A December 2016 study by the Zoological Society of London, Panthera Corporation and Wildlife Conservation Society showed that cheetahs are far closer to extinction than previously thought, with only 7,100 remaining in the wild, existing within only 9% of their historic range. Human pressures are to blame for the cheetah population crash, including prey loss due to overhunting by people, retaliatory killing from farmers, habitat loss and the illegal wildlife trade. Populations of brown bears have experienced similar population decline.
The term pollinator decline refers to the reduction in abundance of insect and other animal pollinators in many ecosystems worldwide beginning at the end of the twentieth century, and continuing into the present day. Pollinators, which are necessary for 75% of food crops, are declining globally in both abundance and diversity. A 2017 study led by Radboud University's Hans de Kroon indicated that the biomass of insect life in Germany had declined by three-quarters in the previous 25 years. Participating researcher Dave Goulson of Sussex University stated that their study suggested that humans are making large parts of the planet uninhabitable for wildlife. Goulson characterized the situation as an approaching "ecological Armageddon", adding that "if we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse." A 2019 study found that over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. The most significant drivers in the decline of insect populations are associated with intensive farming practices, along with pesticide use and climate change. The world's insect population decreases by around 1 to 2% per year.
We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century.
Various species are predicted to become extinct in the near future, among them some species of rhinoceros, primates, and pangolins. Others, including several species of giraffe, are considered "vulnerable" and are experiencing significant population declines from anthropogenic impacts including hunting, deforestation and conflict. Hunting alone threatens bird and mammalian populations around the world. The direct killing of megafauna for meat and body parts is the primary driver of their destruction, with 70% of the 362 megafauna species in decline as of 2019. Mammals in particular have suffered such severe losses as the result of human activity (mainly during the Quaternary extinction event, but partly during the Holocene) that it could take several million years for them to recover. Contemporary assessments have discovered that roughly 41% of amphibians, 25% of mammals, 21% of reptiles and 14% of birds are threatened with extinction, which could disrupt ecosystems on a global scale and eliminate billions of years of phylogenetic diversity. 189 countries, which are signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio Accord), have committed to preparing a Biodiversity Action Plan, a first step at identifying specific endangered species and habitats, country by country.
For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife. We ignore the decline of other species at our peril – for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us.
A 2023 study published in Current Biology concluded that current biodiversity loss rates could reach a tipping point and inevitably trigger a total ecosystem collapse.
Recent extinctions are more directly attributable to human influences, whereas prehistoric extinctions can be attributed to other factors, such as global climate change. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) characterizes 'recent' extinction as those that have occurred past the cut-off point of 1500, and at least 875 plant and animal species have gone extinct since that time and 2009. Some species, such as the Père David's deer and the Hawaiian crow, are extinct in the wild, and survive solely in captive populations. Other populations are only locally extinct (extirpated), still existent elsewhere, but reduced in distribution, as with the extinction of gray whales in the Atlantic, and of the leatherback sea turtle in Malaysia.
Since the Late Pleistocene, humans (together with other factors) have been rapidly driving the largest vertebrate animals towards extinction, and in the process interrupting a 66-million-year-old feature of ecosystems, the relationship between diet and body mass, which researchers suggest could have unpredictable consequences. A 2019 study published in Nature Communications found that rapid biodiversity loss is impacting larger mammals and birds to a much greater extent than smaller ones, with the body mass of such animals expected to shrink by 25% over the next century. Another 2019 study published in Biology Letters found that extinction rates are perhaps much higher than previously estimated, in particular for bird species.
The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services lists the primary causes of contemporary extinctions in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use (primarily agriculture and overfishing respectively); (2) direct exploitation of organisms such as hunting; (3) anthropogenic climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species spread by human trade. This report, along with the 2020 Living Planet Report by the WWF, both project that climate change will be the leading cause in the next several decades.
A June 2020 study published in PNAS posits that the contemporary extinction crisis "may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible" and that its acceleration "is certain because of the still fast growth in human numbers and consumption rates." The study found that more than 500 vertebrate species are poised to be lost in the next two decades.
Biomass of mammals on Earth as of 2018
Humans both create and destroy crop cultivar and domesticated animal varieties. Advances in transportation and industrial farming has led to monoculture and the extinction of many cultivars. The use of certain plants and animals for food has also resulted in their extinction, including silphium and the passenger pigeon. It was estimated in 2012 that 13% of Earth's ice-free land surface is used as row-crop agricultural sites, 26% used as pastures, and 4% urban-industrial areas.
In March 2019, Nature Climate Change published a study by ecologists from Yale University, who found that over the next half century, human land use will reduce the habitats of 1,700 species by up to 50%, pushing them closer to extinction. That same month PLOS Biology published a similar study drawing on work at the University of Queensland, which found that "more than 1,200 species globally face threats to their survival in more than 90% of their habitat and will almost certainly face extinction without conservation intervention".
Since 1970, the populations of migratory freshwater fish have declined by 76%, according to research published by the Zoological Society of London in July 2020. Overall, around one in three freshwater fish species are threatened with extinction due to human-driven habitat degradation and overfishing.
Some scientists and academics assert that industrial agriculture and the growing demand for meat is contributing to significant global biodiversity loss as this is a significant driver of deforestation and habitat destruction; species-rich habitats, such as the Amazon region and Indonesia being converted to agriculture. A 2017 study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation required to rear tens of billions of farm animals. Moreover, a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Livestock's Long Shadow, also found that the livestock sector is a "leading player" in biodiversity loss. More recently, in 2019, the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services attributed much of this ecological destruction to agriculture and fishing, with the meat and dairy industries having a very significant impact. Since the 1970s food production has soared in order to feed a growing human population and bolster economic growth, but at a huge price to the environment and other species. The report says some 25% of the earth's ice-free land is used for cattle grazing. A 2020 study published in Nature Communications warned that human impacts from housing, industrial agriculture and in particular meat consumption are wiping out a combined 50 billion years of earth's evolutionary history (defined as phylogenetic diversity) and driving to extinction some of the "most unique animals on the planet," among them the Aye-aye lemur, the Chinese crocodile lizard and the pangolin. Said lead author Rikki Gumbs:
We know from all the data we have for threatened species, that the biggest threats are agriculture expansion and the global demand for meat. Pasture land, and the clearing of rainforests for production of soy, for me, are the largest drivers – and the direct consumption of animals.
Urbanization has also been cited as a significant driver of biodiversity loss, particularly of plant life. A 1999 study of local plant extirpations in Great Britain found that urbanization contributed at least as much to local plant extinction as did agriculture.
Climate change is expected to be a major driver of extinctions from the 21st century. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are resulting in influx of this gas into the ocean, increasing its acidity. Marine organisms which possess calcium carbonate shells or exoskeletons experience physiological pressure as the carbonate reacts with acid. For example, this is already resulting in coral bleaching on various coral reefs worldwide, which provide valuable habitat and maintain a high biodiversity. Marine gastropods, bivalves, and other invertebrates are also affected, as are the organisms that feed on them. Some studies have suggested that it is not climate change that is driving the current extinction crisis, but the demands of contemporary human civilization on nature. However, a rise in average global temperatures greater than 5.2 °C is projected to cause a mass extinction similar to the "Big Five" mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, even without other anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity.
Overhunting can reduce the local population of game animals by more than half, as well as reducing population density, and may lead to extinction for some species. Populations located nearer to villages are significantly more at risk of depletion. Several conservationist organizations, among them IFAW and HSUS, assert that trophy hunters, particularly from the United States, are playing a significant role in the decline of giraffes, which they refer to as a "silent extinction".
The surge in the mass killings by poachers involved in the illegal ivory trade along with habitat loss is threatening African elephant populations. In 1979, their populations stood at 1.7 million; at present there are fewer than 400,000 remaining. Prior to European colonization, scientists believe Africa was home to roughly 20 million elephants. According to the Great Elephant Census, 30% of African elephants (or 144,000 individuals) disappeared over a seven-year period, 2007 to 2014. African elephants could become extinct by 2035 if poaching rates continue.
Fishing has had a devastating effect on marine organism populations for several centuries even before the explosion of destructive and highly effective fishing practices like trawling. Humans are unique among predators in that they regularly prey on other adult apex predators, particularly in marine environments; bluefin tuna, blue whales, North Atlantic right whales, and over fifty species of sharks and rays are vulnerable to predation pressure from human fishing, in particular commercial fishing. A 2016 study published in Science concludes that humans tend to hunt larger species, and this could disrupt ocean ecosystems for millions of years. A 2020 study published in Science Advances found that around 18% of marine megafauna, including iconic species such as the Great white shark, are at risk of extinction from human pressures over the next century. In a worst-case scenario, 40% could go extinct over the same time period. According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 71% of oceanic shark and ray populations have been destroyed by overfishing (the primary driver of ocean defaunation) from 1970 to 2018, and are nearing the "point of no return" as 24 of the 31 species are now threatened with extinction, with several being classified as critically endangered. Almost two thirds of sharks and rays around coral reefs are threatened with extinction from overfishing, with 14 of 134 species being critically endangered.
If this pattern goes unchecked, the future oceans would lack many of the largest species in today's oceans. Many large species play critical roles in ecosystems and so their extinctions could lead to ecological cascades that would influence the structure and function of future ecosystems beyond the simple fact of losing those species.
The decline of amphibian populations has also been identified as an indicator of environmental degradation. As well as habitat loss, introduced predators and pollution, Chytridiomycosis, a fungal infection accidentally spread by human travel, globalization, and the wildlife trade, has caused severe population drops of over 500 amphibian species, and perhaps 90 extinctions, including (among many others) the extinction of the golden toad in Costa Rica, the Gastric-brooding frog in Australia, the Rabb's fringe-limbed treefrog and the extinction of the Panamanian golden frog in the wild. Chytrid fungus has spread across Australia, New Zealand, Central America and Africa, including countries with high amphibian diversity such as cloud forests in Honduras and Madagascar. Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans is a similar infection currently threatening salamanders. Amphibians are now the most endangered vertebrate group, having existed for more than 300 million years through three other mass extinctions.
Millions of bats in the US have been dying off since 2012 due to a fungal infection known as white-nose syndrome that spread from European bats, who appear to be immune. Population drops have been as great as 90% within five years, and extinction of at least one bat species is predicted. There is currently no form of treatment, and such declines have been described as "unprecedented" in bat evolutionary history by Alan Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Between 2007 and 2013, over ten million beehives were abandoned due to colony collapse disorder, which causes worker bees to abandon the queen. Though no single cause has gained widespread acceptance by the scientific community, proposals include infections with Varroa and Acarapis mites; malnutrition; various pathogens; genetic factors; immunodeficiencies; loss of habitat; changing beekeeping practices; or a combination of factors.
Megafauna were once found on every continent of the world, but are now almost exclusively found on the continent of Africa. In some regions, megafauna experienced population crashes and trophic cascades shortly after the earliest human settlers. Worldwide, 178 species of the world's largest mammals died out between 52,000 and 9,000 BC; it has been suggested that a higher proportion of African megafauna survived because they evolved alongside humans. The timing of South American megafaunal extinction appears to precede human arrival, although the possibility that human activity at the time impacted the global climate enough to cause such an extinction has been suggested.
Africa experienced the smallest decline in megafauna compared to the other continents. This is presumably due to the idea that Afroeurasian megafauna evolved alongside humans, and thus developed a healthy fear of them, unlike the comparatively tame animals of other continents.
Unlike other continents, the megafauna of Eurasia went extinct over a relatively long period of time, possibly due to climate fluctuations fragmenting and decreasing populations, leaving them vulnerable to over-exploitation, as with the steppe bison (Bison priscus). The warming of the arctic region caused the rapid decline of grasslands, which had a negative effect on the grazing megafauna of Eurasia. Most of what once was mammoth steppe was converted to mire, rendering the environment incapable of supporting them, notably the woolly mammoth.
In the western Mediterranean region, anthropogenic forest degradation began around 4,000 BP, during the Chalcolithic, and became especially pronounced during the Roman era. The reasons for the decline of forest ecosystems stem from agriculture, grazing, and mining. During the twilight years of the Western Roman Empire, forests in northwestern Europe rebounded from losses incurred throughout the Roman period, though deforestation on a large scale resumed once again around 800 BP, during the High Middle Ages.
In southern China, human land use is believed to have permanently altered the trend of vegetation dynamics in the region, which was previously governed by temperature. This is evidenced by high fluxes of charcoal from that time interval.
There has been a debate as to the extent to which the disappearance of megafauna at the end of the last glacial period can be attributed to human activities by hunting, or even by slaughter of prey populations. Discoveries at Monte Verde in South America and at Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania have caused a controversy regarding the Clovis culture. There likely would have been human settlements prior to the Clovis culture, and the history of humans in the Americas may extend back many thousands of years before the Clovis culture. The amount of correlation between human arrival and megafauna extinction is still being debated: for example, in Wrangel Island in Siberia the extinction of dwarf woolly mammoths (approximately 2000 BCE) did not coincide with the arrival of humans, nor did megafaunal mass extinction on the South American continent, although it has been suggested climate changes induced by anthropogenic effects elsewhere in the world may have contributed.
Comparisons are sometimes made between recent extinctions (approximately since the industrial revolution) and the Pleistocene extinction near the end of the last glacial period. The latter is exemplified by the extinction of large herbivores such as the woolly mammoth and the carnivores that preyed on them. Humans of this era actively hunted the mammoth and the mastodon, but it is not known if this hunting was the cause of the subsequent massive ecological changes, widespread extinctions and climate changes.
The ecosystems encountered by the first Americans had not been exposed to human interaction, and may have been far less resilient to human made changes than the ecosystems encountered by industrial era humans. Therefore, the actions of the Clovis people, despite seeming insignificant by today's standards could indeed have had a profound effect on the ecosystems and wild life which was entirely unused to human influence.
In the Yukon, the mammoth steppe ecosystem collapsed between 13,500 and 10,000 BP, though wild horses and woolly mammoths somehow persisted in the region for millennia after this collapse. In what is now Texas, a drop in local plant and animal biodiversity occurred during the Younger Dryas cooling, though while plant diversity recovered after the Younger Dryas, animal diversity did not. In the Channel Islands, multiple terrestrial species went extinct around the same time as human arrival, but direct evidence for an anthropogenic cause of their extinction remains lacking. In the montane forests of the Colombian Andes, spores of coprophilous fungi indicate megafaunal extinction occurred in two waves, the first occurring around 22,900 BP and the second around 10,990 BP. A 2023 study of megafaunal extinctions in the Junín Plateau of Peru found that the timing of the disappearance of megafauna was concurrent with a large uptick in fire activity attributed to human actions, implicating humans as the cause of their local extinction on the plateau.
Australia was once home to a large assemblage of megafauna, with many parallels to those found on the African continent today. Australia's fauna is characterized by primarily marsupial mammals, and many reptiles and birds, all existing as giant forms until recently. Humans arrived on the continent very early, about 50,000 years ago. The extent human arrival contributed is controversial; climatic drying of Australia 40,000–60,000 years ago was an unlikely cause, as it was less severe in speed or magnitude than previous regional climate change which failed to kill off megafauna. Extinctions in Australia continued from original settlement until today in both plants and animals, whilst many more animals and plants have declined or are endangered.
Due to the older timeframe and the soil chemistry on the continent, very little subfossil preservation evidence exists relative to elsewhere. However, continent-wide extinction of all genera weighing over 100 kilograms, and six of seven genera weighing between 45 and 100 kilograms occurred around 46,400 years ago (4,000 years after human arrival) and the fact that megafauna survived until a later date on the island of Tasmania following the establishment of a land bridge suggest direct hunting or anthropogenic ecosystem disruption such as fire-stick farming as likely causes. The first evidence of direct human predation leading to extinction in Australia was published in 2016.
A 2021 study found that the rate of extinction of Australia's megafauna is rather unusual, with some generalistic species having gone extinct earlier while highly specialized ones having become extinct later or even still surviving today. A mosaic cause of extinction with different anthropogenic and environmental pressures has been proposed.
Human arrival in the Caribbean around 6,000 years ago is correlated with the extinction of many species. These include many different genera of ground and arboreal sloths across all islands. These sloths were generally smaller than those found on the South American continent. Megalocnus were the largest genus at up to 90 kilograms (200 lb), Acratocnus were medium-sized relatives of modern two-toed sloths endemic to Cuba, Imagocnus also of Cuba, Neocnus and many others.
The arrival of the first human settlers in the Azores saw the introduction of invasive plants and livestock to the archipelago, resulting in the extinction of at least two plant species on Pico Island. On Faial Island, the decline of Prunus lusitanica has been hypothesized by some scholars to have been related to the tree species being endozoochoric, with the extirpation or extinction of various bird species drastically limiting its seed dispersal. Lacustrine ecosystems were ravaged by human colonization, as evidenced by hydrogen isotopes from C30 fatty acids recording hypoxic bottom waters caused by eutrophication in Lake Funda on Flores Island beginning between 1500 and 1600 AD.
The arrival of humans on the archipelago of Madeira caused the extinction of approximately two-thirds of its endemic bird species, with two non-endemic birds also being locally extirpated from the archipelago. Of thirty-four land snail species collected in a subfossil sample from eastern Madeira Island, nine became extinct following the arrival of humans. On the Desertas Islands, of forty-five land snail species known to exist before human colonization, eighteen are extinct and five are no longer present on the islands. Eurya stigmosa, whose extinction is typically attributed to climate change following the end of the Pleistocene rather than humans, may have survived until the colonization of the archipelago by the Portuguese and gone extinct as a result of human activity. Introduced mice have been implicated as a leading driver of extinction on Madeira following its discovery by humans.
In the Canary Islands, native thermophilous woodlands were decimated and two tree taxa were driven extinct following the arrival of its first humans, primarily as a result of increased fire clearance and soil erosion and the introduction of invasive pigs, goats, and rats. Invasive species introductions accelerated during the Age of Discovery when Europeans first settled the Macaronesian archipelago. The archipelago's laurel forests, though still negatively impacted, fared better due to being less suitable for human economic use.
Cabo Verde, like the Canary Islands, witnessed precipitous deforestation upon the arrival of European settlers and various invasive species brought by them in the archipelago, with the archipelago's thermophilous woodlands suffering the greatest destruction. Introduced species, overgrazing, increased fire incidence, and soil degradation have been attributed as the chief causes of Cabo Verde's ecological devastation.
Archaeological and paleontological digs on 70 different Pacific islands suggested that numerous species became extinct as people moved across the Pacific, starting 30,000 years ago in the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands. It is currently estimated that among the bird species of the Pacific, some 2000 species have gone extinct since the arrival of humans, representing a 20% drop in the biodiversity of birds worldwide.
The first human settlers of the Hawaiian islands are thought to have arrived between 300 and 800 CE, with European arrival in the 16th century. Hawaii is notable for its endemism of plants, birds, insects, mollusks and fish; 30% of its organisms are endemic. Many of its species are endangered or have gone extinct, primarily due to accidentally introduced species and livestock grazing. Over 40% of its bird species have gone extinct, and it is the location of 75% of extinctions in the United States. Extinction has increased in Hawaii over the last 200 years and is relatively well documented, with extinctions among native snails used as estimates for global extinction rates.
Within centuries of the arrival of humans around the 1st millennium AD, nearly all of Madagascar's distinct, endemic, and geographically isolated megafauna became extinct. The largest animals, of more than 150 kilograms (330 lb), were extinct very shortly after the first human arrival, with large and medium-sized species dying out after prolonged hunting pressure from an expanding human population moving into more remote regions of the island around 1000 years ago. as well as 17 species of "giant" lemurs. Some of these lemurs typically weighed over 150 kilograms (330 lb), and their fossils have provided evidence of human butchery on many species. Other megafauna present on the island included the Malagasy hippopotamuses as well as the large flightless elephant birds, both groups are thought to have gone extinct in the interval 750–1050 CE. Smaller fauna experienced initial increases due to decreased competition, and then subsequent declines over the last 500 years. All fauna weighing over 10 kilograms (22 lb) died out. The primary reasons for the decline of Madagascar's biota, which at the time was already stressed by natural aridification, were human hunting, herding, farming, and forest clearing, all of which persist and threaten Madagascar's remaining taxa today. The natural ecosystems of Madagascar as a whole were further impacted by the much greater incidence of fire as a result of anthropogenic fire production; evidence from Lake Amparihibe on the island of Nosy Be indicates a shift in local vegetation from intact rainforest to a fire-disturbed patchwork of grassland and woodland between 1300 and 1000 BP.
New Zealand is characterized by its geographic isolation and island biogeography, and had been isolated from mainland Australia for 80 million years. It was the last large land mass to be colonized by humans. The arrival of Polynesian settlers circa 12th century resulted in the extinction of all of the islands' megafaunal birds within several hundred years. The moa, large flightless ratites, became extinct within 200 years of the arrival of human settlers, as did the enormous Haast's eagle, their primary predator, and at least two species of large, flightless geese. The Polynesians also introduced the Polynesian rat. This may have put some pressure on other birds but at the time of early European contact (18th century) and colonization (19th century) the bird life was prolific. With them, the Europeans brought various invasive species including ship rats, possums, cats and mustelids which devastated native bird life, some of which had adapted flightlessness and ground nesting habits, and had no defensive behavior as a result of having no native mammalian predators. The kākāpō, the world's biggest parrot, which is flightless, now only exists in managed breeding sanctuaries. New Zealand's national emblem, the kiwi, is on the endangered bird list.
Stabilizing human populations; reining in capitalism, decreasing economic demands, and shifting them to economic activities with low impacts on biodiversity; transitioning to plant-based diets; and increasing the number and size of terrestrial and marine protected areas have been suggested to avoid or limit biodiversity loss and a possible sixth mass extinction. Rodolfo Dirzo and Paul R. Ehrlich suggest that "the one fundamental, necessary, 'simple' cure, ... is reducing the scale of the human enterprise." According to a 2021 paper published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, humanity almost certainly faces a "ghastly future" of mass extinction, biodiversity collapse, climate change and their impacts unless major efforts to change human industry and activity are rapidly undertaken.
Reducing human population growth has been suggested as a means of mitigating climate change and the biodiversity crisis, although many scholars believe it has been largely ignored in mainstream policy discourse. An alternative proposal is greater agricultural efficiency & sustainability. Lots of non-arable land can be made into arable land good for growing food crops. Mushrooms have also been known to repair damaged soil.
A 2018 article in Science advocated for the global community to designate 30% of the planet by 2030, and 50% by 2050, as protected areas in order to mitigate the contemporary extinction crisis. It highlighted that the human population is projected to grow to 10 billion by the middle of the century, and consumption of food and water resources is projected to double by this time. A 2022 report published in Science warned that 44% of earth's terrestrial surface, or 64 million square kilometres (24.7 million square miles), must be conserved and made "ecologically sound" in order to prevent further biodiversity loss.
In November 2018, the UN's biodiversity chief Cristiana Pașca Palmer urged people around the world to put pressure on governments to implement significant protections for wildlife by 2020. She called biodiversity loss a "silent killer" as dangerous as global warming, but said it had received little attention by comparison. "It's different from climate change, where people feel the impact in everyday life. With biodiversity, it is not so clear but by the time you feel what is happening, it may be too late." In January 2020, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drafted a Paris-style plan to stop biodiversity and ecosystem collapse by setting the deadline of 2030 to protect 30% of the earth's land and oceans and to reduce pollution by 50%, with the goal of allowing for the restoration of ecosystems by 2050. The world failed to meet the Aichi Biodiversity targets for 2020 set by the convention during a summit in Japan in 2010. Of the 20 biodiversity targets proposed, only six were "partially achieved" by the deadline. It was called a global failure by Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme:
"From COVID-19 to massive wildfires, floods, melting glaciers and unprecedented heat, our failure to meet the Aichi (biodiversity) targets — protect our our home — has very real consequences. We can no longer afford to cast nature to the side."
Some scientists have proposed keeping extinctions below 20 per year for the next century as a global target to reduce species loss, which is the biodiversity equivalent of the 2 °C climate target, although it is still much higher than the normal background rate of two per year prior to anthropogenic impacts on the natural world.
An October 2020 report on the "era of pandemics" from IPBES found that many of the same human activities that contribute to biodiversity loss and climate change, including deforestation and the wildlife trade, have also increased the risk of future pandemics. The report offers several policy options to reduce such risk, such as taxing meat production and consumption, cracking down on the illegal wildlife trade, removing high disease-risk species from the legal wildlife trade, and eliminating subsidies to businesses which are harmful to the environment. According to marine zoologist John Spicer, "the COVID-19 crisis is not just another crisis alongside the biodiversity crisis and the climate change crisis. Make no mistake, this is one big crisis – the greatest that humans have ever faced."
In December 2022, nearly every country on earth, with the United States and the Holy See being the only exceptions, signed onto the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreement formulated at the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) which includes protecting 30% of land and oceans by 2030 and 22 other targets intended to mitigate the extinction crisis. The agreement is weaker than the Aichi Targets of 2010. It was criticized by some countries for being rushed and not going far enough to protect endangered species. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the \"Big Five\" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Holocene extinction follows the extinction of many large (megafaunal) animals during the preceding Late Pleistocene as part of the Quaternary extinction event. It has been suggested that megafauna outside of the African mainland, which did not evolve alongside modern humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of human predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth. The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the Holocene extinction coincides with human colonization of many new areas around the world. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation and habitat loss affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with the onset of human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the twentieth century, human numbers quadrupled, and the size of the global economy increased twenty-five-fold. This Great Acceleration or Anthropocene epoch has also accelerated species extinction. Ecologically, humanity is now an unprecedented \"global superpredator\", which consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, takes over other species' essential habitats and displaces them, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with human population growth, increasing per capita consumption (especially by the super-affluent), and meat production and consumption, among others, being the primary drivers of mass extinction. Deforestation, overfishing, ocean acidification, the destruction of wetlands, and the decline in amphibian populations, among others, are a few broader examples of global biodiversity loss.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Mass extinctions are characterized by the loss of at least 75% of species within a geologically short period of time (i.e., less than 2 million years). The Holocene extinction is also known as the \"sixth extinction\", as it is possibly the sixth mass extinction event, after the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, and the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. If the Capitanian extinction event is included among the first-order mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction would correspondingly be known as the \"seventh extinction\". The Holocene is the current geological epoch.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "There is no general agreement on where the Holocene, or anthropogenic, extinction begins, and the Quaternary extinction event, which includes climate change resulting in the end of the last ice age, ends, or if they should be considered separate events at all. The Holocene extinction is mainly caused by human activities. Some have suggested that anthropogenic extinctions may have begun as early as when the first modern humans spread out of Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago; this is supported by rapid megafaunal extinction following recent human colonization in Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar. In many cases, it is suggested that even minimal hunting pressure was enough to wipe out large fauna, particularly on geographically isolated islands. Only during the most recent parts of the extinction have plants also suffered large losses.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth. One scientist estimates the current extinction rate may be 10,000 times the background extinction rate, although most scientists predict a much lower extinction rate than this outlying estimate. Theoretical ecologist Stuart Pimm stated that the extinction rate for plants is 100 times higher than normal.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Some contend that contemporary extinction has yet to reach the level of the previous five mass extinctions, and that this comparison downplays how severe the first five mass extinctions were. John Briggs argues that there is inadequate data to determine the real rate of extinctions, and shows that estimates of current species extinctions varies enormously, ranging from 1.5 species to 40,000 species going extinct due to human activities each year. Both papers from Barnosky et al. (2011) and Hull et al. (2015) point out that the real rate of extinction during previous mass extinctions is unknown, both as only some organisms leave fossil remains, and as the temporal resolution of the fossil layer is larger than the time frame of the extinction events. However, all these authors agree that there is a modern biodiversity crisis with population declines affecting numerous species, and that a future anthropogenic mass extinction event is a big risk. The 2011 study by Barnosky et al. confirms that \"current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record\" and adds that anthropogenic ecological stressors, including climate change, habitat fragmentation, pollution, overfishing, overhunting, invasive species, and expanding human biomass, will intensify and accelerate extinction rates in the future without significant mitigation efforts.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In The Future of Life (2002), Edward Osborne Wilson of Harvard calculated that, if the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere continues, one-half of Earth's higher lifeforms will be extinct by 2100. A 1998 poll conducted by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists acknowledge an ongoing anthropogenic extinction event.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In a pair of studies published in 2015, extrapolation from observed extinction of Hawaiian snails led to the conclusion that 7% of all species on Earth may have been lost already. A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change found that only around 3% of the planet's terrestrial surface is ecologically and faunally intact, meaning areas with healthy populations of native animal species and little to no human footprint.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), posits that out of around eight million species of plants and animals, roughly one million species face extinction within decades as the result of human actions. Organized human existence is jeopardized by increasingly rapid destruction of the systems that support life on Earth, according to the report, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies of the health of the planet ever conducted. Moreover, the 2021 Economics of Biodiversity review, published by the UK government, asserts that \"biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history.\" According to a 2022 study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a survey of more than 3,000 experts says that the extent of the mass extinction might be greater than previously thought, and estimates that roughly 30% of species \"have been globally threatened or driven extinct since the year 1500.\" In a 2022 report, IPBES listed unsustainable fishing, hunting, and logging as being some of the primary drivers of the global extinction crisis. A 2022 study published in Science Advances suggests that if global warming reaches 2.7 °C (4.9 °F) or 4.4 °C (7.9 °F) by 2100, then 13% and 27% of terrestrial vertebrate species will go extinct by then, largely due to climate change (62%), with anthropogenic land conversion and co-extinctions accounting for the rest. A 2023 study published in PLOS One shows that around two million species are threatened with extinction, double the estimate put forward in the 2019 IPBES report.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to a 2023 study published in PNAS, at least 73 genera of animals have gone extinct since 1500. If humans had never existed, the study estimates it would have taken 18,000 years for the same genera to have disappeared naturally, leading the authors to conclude that \"the current generic extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts\" and that human civilization is causing the \"rapid mutilation of the tree of life.\"",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "—Anne Larigauderie, IPBES executive secretary",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "There is widespread consensus among scientists that human activity is accelerating the extinction of many animal species through the destruction of habitats, the consumption of animals as resources, and the elimination of species that humans view as threats or competitors. Rising extinction trends impacting numerous animal groups including mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have prompted some scientists to declare a biodiversity crisis.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Characterization of recent extinction as a mass extinction has been debated among scientists. Stuart Pimm, for example, asserts that the sixth mass extinction \"is something that hasn't happened yet – we are on the edge of it.\" Several studies posit that the earth has entered a sixth mass extinction event, including a 2015 paper by Barnosky et al. and a November 2017 statement titled \"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice\", led by eight authors and signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries which asserted that, among other things, \"we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be extirpated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.\" The World Wide Fund for Nature's 2020 Living Planet Report says that wildlife populations have declined by 68% since 1970 as a result of overconsumption, population growth, and intensive farming, which is further evidence that humans have unleashed a sixth mass extinction event; however, this finding has been disputed by one 2020 study, which posits that this major decline was primarily driven by a few extreme outlier populations, and that when these outliers are removed, the trend shifts to that of a decline between the 1980s and 2000s, but a roughly positive trend after 2000. A 2021 report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which cites both of the aforementioned studies, says \"population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades, with certain population clusters in extreme decline, thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species,\" and asserts \"that we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now scientifically undeniable.\" A January 2022 review article published in Biological Reviews builds upon previous studies documenting biodiversity decline to assert that a sixth mass extinction event caused by anthropogenic activity is currently underway. A December 2022 study published in Science Advances states that \"the planet has entered the sixth mass extinction\" and warns that current anthropogenic trends, particularly regarding climate and land-use changes, could result in the loss of more than a tenth of plant and animal species by the end of the century. A 2023 study published in Biological Reviews found that, of 70,000 monitored species, some 48% are experiencing population declines from anthropogenic pressures, whereas only 3% have increasing populations.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "According to the UNDP's 2020 Human Development Report, The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene:",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The planet's biodiversity is plunging, with a quarter of species facing extinction, many within decades. Numerous experts believe we are living through, or on the cusp of, a mass species extinction event, the sixth in the history of the planet and the first to be caused by a single organism—us.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The 2022 Living Planet Report found that vertebrate wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of almost 70% since 1970, with agriculture and fishing being the primary drivers of this decline.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Some scientists, including Rodolfo Dirzo and Paul R. Ehrlich, contend that the sixth mass extinction is largely unknown to most people globally and is also misunderstood by many in the scientific community. They say it is not the disappearance of species, which gets the most attention, that is at the heart of the crisis, but \"the existential threat of myriad population extinctions.\"",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The abundance of species extinctions considered anthropogenic, or due to human activity, has sometimes (especially when referring to hypothesized future events) been collectively called the \"Anthropocene extinction\". Anthropocene is a term introduced in 2000. Some now postulate that a new geological epoch has begun, with the most abrupt and widespread extinction of species since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The term \"anthropocene\" is being used more frequently by scientists, and some commentators may refer to the current and projected future extinctions as part of a longer Holocene extinction. The Holocene–Anthropocene boundary is contested, with some commentators asserting significant human influence on climate for much of what is normally regarded as the Holocene Epoch. Other commentators place the Holocene–Anthropocene boundary at the industrial revolution and also say that \"[f]ormal adoption of this term in the near future will largely depend on its utility, particularly to earth scientists working on late Holocene successions.\"",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "It has been suggested that human activity has made the period starting from the mid-20th century different enough from the rest of the Holocene to consider it a new geological epoch, known as the Anthropocene, a term which was considered for inclusion in the timeline of Earth's history by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2016. In order to constitute the Holocene as an extinction event, scientists must determine exactly when anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions began to measurably alter natural atmospheric levels on a global scale, and when these alterations caused changes to global climate. Using chemical proxies from Antarctic ice cores, researchers have estimated the fluctuations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) gases in the Earth's atmosphere during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Estimates of the fluctuations of these two gases in the atmosphere, using chemical proxies from Antarctic ice cores, generally indicate that the peak of the Anthropocene occurred within the previous two centuries: typically beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when the highest greenhouse gas levels were recorded.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A 2015 article in Science suggested that humans are unique in ecology as an unprecedented \"global superpredator\", regularly preying on large numbers of fully grown terrestrial and marine apex predators, and with a great deal of influence over food webs and climatic systems worldwide. Although significant debate exists as to how much human predation and indirect effects contributed to prehistoric extinctions, certain population crashes have been directly correlated with human arrival. Human activity has been the main cause of mammalian extinctions since the Late Pleistocene. A 2018 study published in PNAS found that since the dawn of human civilization, the biomass of wild mammals has decreased by 83%. The biomass decrease is 80% for marine mammals, 50% for plants, and 15% for fish. Currently, livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). As for birds, 70% are domesticated, such as poultry, whereas only 30% are wild.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Extinction of animals, plants, and other organisms caused by human actions may go as far back as the late Pleistocene, over 12,000 years ago. There is a correlation between megafaunal extinction and the arrival of humans. Megafauna that are still extant also suffered severe declines that were highly correlated with human expansion and activity. Over the past 125,000 years, the average body size of wildlife has fallen by 14% as actions by prehistoric humans eradicated megafauna on all continents with the exception of Africa.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Human civilization was founded on and grew from agriculture. The more land used for farming, the greater the population a civilization could sustain, and subsequent popularization of farming led to widespread habitat conversion.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Habitat destruction by humans, thus replacing the original local ecosystems, is a major driver of extinction. The sustained conversion of biodiversity rich forests and wetlands into poorer fields and pastures (of lesser carrying capacity for wild species), over the last 10,000 years, has considerably reduced the Earth's carrying capacity for wild birds and mammals, among other organisms, in both population size and species count.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Other, related human causes of the extinction event include deforestation, hunting, pollution, the introduction in various regions of non-native species, and the widespread transmission of infectious diseases spread through livestock and crops.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Recent investigations into the practice of landscape burning during the Neolithic Revolution have a major implication for the current debate about the timing of the Anthropocene and the role that humans may have played in the production of greenhouse gases prior to the Industrial Revolution. Studies of early hunter-gatherers raise questions about the current use of population size or density as a proxy for the amount of land clearance and anthropogenic burning that took place in pre-industrial times. Scientists have questioned the correlation between population size and early territorial alterations. Ruddiman and Ellis' research paper in 2009 makes the case that early farmers involved in systems of agriculture used more land per capita than growers later in the Holocene, who intensified their labor to produce more food per unit of area (thus, per laborer); arguing that agricultural involvement in rice production implemented thousands of years ago by relatively small populations created significant environmental impacts through large-scale means of deforestation.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "While a number of human-derived factors are recognized as contributing to rising atmospheric concentrations of CH4 (methane) and CO2 (carbon dioxide), deforestation and territorial clearance practices associated with agricultural development may have contributed most to these concentrations globally in earlier millennia. Scientists that are employing a variance of archaeological and paleoecological data argue that the processes contributing to substantial human modification of the environment spanned many thousands of years on a global scale and thus, not originating as late as the Industrial Revolution. Palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued that in the early Holocene 11,000 years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels fluctuated in a pattern which was different from the Pleistocene epoch before it. He argued that the patterns of the significant decline of CO2 levels during the last ice age of the Pleistocene inversely correlate to the Holocene where there have been dramatic increases of CO2 around 8000 years ago and CH4 levels 3000 years after that. The correlation between the decrease of CO2 in the Pleistocene and the increase of it during the Holocene implies that the causation of this spark of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was the growth of human agriculture during the Holocene.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "One of the main theories explaining early Holocene extinctions is historic climate change. The climate change theory has suggested that a change in climate near the end of the late Pleistocene stressed the megafauna to the point of extinction. Some scientists favor abrupt climate change as the catalyst for the extinction of the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene, most who believe increased hunting from early modern humans also played a part, with others even suggesting that the two interacted. In the Americas, a controversial explanation for the shift in climate is presented under the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which states that the impact of comets cooled global temperatures. Despite its popularity among nonscientists, this hypothesis never been accepted by relevant experts, who dismiss it as a fringe theory.",
"title": "Historic extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Contemporary human overpopulation and continued population growth, along with per-capita consumption growth, prominently in the past two centuries, are regarded as the underlying causes of extinction. Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, stated that \"we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure. As far as biodiversity is concerned, we are at war with nature.\"",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Some scholars assert that the emergence of capitalism as the dominant economic system has accelerated ecological exploitation and destruction, and has also exacerbated mass species extinction. CUNY professor David Harvey, for example, posits that the neoliberal era \"happens to be the era of the fastest mass extinction of species in the Earth's recent history\". Ecologist William E. Rees concludes that the \"neoliberal paradigm contributes significantly to planetary unraveling\" by treating the economy and the ecosphere as totally separate systems, and by neglecting the latter. Major lobbying organizations representing corporations in the agriculture, fisheries, forestry and paper, mining, and oil and gas industries, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, have been pushing back against legislation that could address the extinction crisis. A 2022 report by the climate think tank InfluenceMap stated that \"although industry associations, especially in the US, appear reluctant to discuss the biodiversity crisis, they are clearly engaged on a wide range of policies with significant impacts on biodiversity loss.\"",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The loss of animal species from ecological communities, defaunation, is primarily driven by human activity. This has resulted in empty forests, ecological communities depleted of large vertebrates. This is not to be confused with extinction, as it includes both the disappearance of species and declines in abundance. Defaunation effects were first implied at the Symposium of Plant-Animal Interactions at the University of Campinas, Brazil in 1988 in the context of Neotropical forests. Since then, the term has gained broader usage in conservation biology as a global phenomenon.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Big cat populations have severely declined over the last half-century and could face extinction in the following decades. According to 2011 IUCN estimates: lions are down to 25,000, from 450,000; leopards are down to 50,000, from 750,000; cheetahs are down to 12,000, from 45,000; tigers are down to 3,000 in the wild, from 50,000. A December 2016 study by the Zoological Society of London, Panthera Corporation and Wildlife Conservation Society showed that cheetahs are far closer to extinction than previously thought, with only 7,100 remaining in the wild, existing within only 9% of their historic range. Human pressures are to blame for the cheetah population crash, including prey loss due to overhunting by people, retaliatory killing from farmers, habitat loss and the illegal wildlife trade. Populations of brown bears have experienced similar population decline.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The term pollinator decline refers to the reduction in abundance of insect and other animal pollinators in many ecosystems worldwide beginning at the end of the twentieth century, and continuing into the present day. Pollinators, which are necessary for 75% of food crops, are declining globally in both abundance and diversity. A 2017 study led by Radboud University's Hans de Kroon indicated that the biomass of insect life in Germany had declined by three-quarters in the previous 25 years. Participating researcher Dave Goulson of Sussex University stated that their study suggested that humans are making large parts of the planet uninhabitable for wildlife. Goulson characterized the situation as an approaching \"ecological Armageddon\", adding that \"if we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.\" A 2019 study found that over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. The most significant drivers in the decline of insect populations are associated with intensive farming practices, along with pesticide use and climate change. The world's insect population decreases by around 1 to 2% per year.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Various species are predicted to become extinct in the near future, among them some species of rhinoceros, primates, and pangolins. Others, including several species of giraffe, are considered \"vulnerable\" and are experiencing significant population declines from anthropogenic impacts including hunting, deforestation and conflict. Hunting alone threatens bird and mammalian populations around the world. The direct killing of megafauna for meat and body parts is the primary driver of their destruction, with 70% of the 362 megafauna species in decline as of 2019. Mammals in particular have suffered such severe losses as the result of human activity (mainly during the Quaternary extinction event, but partly during the Holocene) that it could take several million years for them to recover. Contemporary assessments have discovered that roughly 41% of amphibians, 25% of mammals, 21% of reptiles and 14% of birds are threatened with extinction, which could disrupt ecosystems on a global scale and eliminate billions of years of phylogenetic diversity. 189 countries, which are signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio Accord), have committed to preparing a Biodiversity Action Plan, a first step at identifying specific endangered species and habitats, country by country.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife. We ignore the decline of other species at our peril – for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "A 2023 study published in Current Biology concluded that current biodiversity loss rates could reach a tipping point and inevitably trigger a total ecosystem collapse.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Recent extinctions are more directly attributable to human influences, whereas prehistoric extinctions can be attributed to other factors, such as global climate change. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) characterizes 'recent' extinction as those that have occurred past the cut-off point of 1500, and at least 875 plant and animal species have gone extinct since that time and 2009. Some species, such as the Père David's deer and the Hawaiian crow, are extinct in the wild, and survive solely in captive populations. Other populations are only locally extinct (extirpated), still existent elsewhere, but reduced in distribution, as with the extinction of gray whales in the Atlantic, and of the leatherback sea turtle in Malaysia.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Since the Late Pleistocene, humans (together with other factors) have been rapidly driving the largest vertebrate animals towards extinction, and in the process interrupting a 66-million-year-old feature of ecosystems, the relationship between diet and body mass, which researchers suggest could have unpredictable consequences. A 2019 study published in Nature Communications found that rapid biodiversity loss is impacting larger mammals and birds to a much greater extent than smaller ones, with the body mass of such animals expected to shrink by 25% over the next century. Another 2019 study published in Biology Letters found that extinction rates are perhaps much higher than previously estimated, in particular for bird species.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services lists the primary causes of contemporary extinctions in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use (primarily agriculture and overfishing respectively); (2) direct exploitation of organisms such as hunting; (3) anthropogenic climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species spread by human trade. This report, along with the 2020 Living Planet Report by the WWF, both project that climate change will be the leading cause in the next several decades.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "A June 2020 study published in PNAS posits that the contemporary extinction crisis \"may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible\" and that its acceleration \"is certain because of the still fast growth in human numbers and consumption rates.\" The study found that more than 500 vertebrate species are poised to be lost in the next two decades.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Biomass of mammals on Earth as of 2018",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Humans both create and destroy crop cultivar and domesticated animal varieties. Advances in transportation and industrial farming has led to monoculture and the extinction of many cultivars. The use of certain plants and animals for food has also resulted in their extinction, including silphium and the passenger pigeon. It was estimated in 2012 that 13% of Earth's ice-free land surface is used as row-crop agricultural sites, 26% used as pastures, and 4% urban-industrial areas.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In March 2019, Nature Climate Change published a study by ecologists from Yale University, who found that over the next half century, human land use will reduce the habitats of 1,700 species by up to 50%, pushing them closer to extinction. That same month PLOS Biology published a similar study drawing on work at the University of Queensland, which found that \"more than 1,200 species globally face threats to their survival in more than 90% of their habitat and will almost certainly face extinction without conservation intervention\".",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Since 1970, the populations of migratory freshwater fish have declined by 76%, according to research published by the Zoological Society of London in July 2020. Overall, around one in three freshwater fish species are threatened with extinction due to human-driven habitat degradation and overfishing.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Some scientists and academics assert that industrial agriculture and the growing demand for meat is contributing to significant global biodiversity loss as this is a significant driver of deforestation and habitat destruction; species-rich habitats, such as the Amazon region and Indonesia being converted to agriculture. A 2017 study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation required to rear tens of billions of farm animals. Moreover, a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Livestock's Long Shadow, also found that the livestock sector is a \"leading player\" in biodiversity loss. More recently, in 2019, the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services attributed much of this ecological destruction to agriculture and fishing, with the meat and dairy industries having a very significant impact. Since the 1970s food production has soared in order to feed a growing human population and bolster economic growth, but at a huge price to the environment and other species. The report says some 25% of the earth's ice-free land is used for cattle grazing. A 2020 study published in Nature Communications warned that human impacts from housing, industrial agriculture and in particular meat consumption are wiping out a combined 50 billion years of earth's evolutionary history (defined as phylogenetic diversity) and driving to extinction some of the \"most unique animals on the planet,\" among them the Aye-aye lemur, the Chinese crocodile lizard and the pangolin. Said lead author Rikki Gumbs:",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "We know from all the data we have for threatened species, that the biggest threats are agriculture expansion and the global demand for meat. Pasture land, and the clearing of rainforests for production of soy, for me, are the largest drivers – and the direct consumption of animals.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Urbanization has also been cited as a significant driver of biodiversity loss, particularly of plant life. A 1999 study of local plant extirpations in Great Britain found that urbanization contributed at least as much to local plant extinction as did agriculture.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Climate change is expected to be a major driver of extinctions from the 21st century. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are resulting in influx of this gas into the ocean, increasing its acidity. Marine organisms which possess calcium carbonate shells or exoskeletons experience physiological pressure as the carbonate reacts with acid. For example, this is already resulting in coral bleaching on various coral reefs worldwide, which provide valuable habitat and maintain a high biodiversity. Marine gastropods, bivalves, and other invertebrates are also affected, as are the organisms that feed on them. Some studies have suggested that it is not climate change that is driving the current extinction crisis, but the demands of contemporary human civilization on nature. However, a rise in average global temperatures greater than 5.2 °C is projected to cause a mass extinction similar to the \"Big Five\" mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, even without other anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Overhunting can reduce the local population of game animals by more than half, as well as reducing population density, and may lead to extinction for some species. Populations located nearer to villages are significantly more at risk of depletion. Several conservationist organizations, among them IFAW and HSUS, assert that trophy hunters, particularly from the United States, are playing a significant role in the decline of giraffes, which they refer to as a \"silent extinction\".",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The surge in the mass killings by poachers involved in the illegal ivory trade along with habitat loss is threatening African elephant populations. In 1979, their populations stood at 1.7 million; at present there are fewer than 400,000 remaining. Prior to European colonization, scientists believe Africa was home to roughly 20 million elephants. According to the Great Elephant Census, 30% of African elephants (or 144,000 individuals) disappeared over a seven-year period, 2007 to 2014. African elephants could become extinct by 2035 if poaching rates continue.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Fishing has had a devastating effect on marine organism populations for several centuries even before the explosion of destructive and highly effective fishing practices like trawling. Humans are unique among predators in that they regularly prey on other adult apex predators, particularly in marine environments; bluefin tuna, blue whales, North Atlantic right whales, and over fifty species of sharks and rays are vulnerable to predation pressure from human fishing, in particular commercial fishing. A 2016 study published in Science concludes that humans tend to hunt larger species, and this could disrupt ocean ecosystems for millions of years. A 2020 study published in Science Advances found that around 18% of marine megafauna, including iconic species such as the Great white shark, are at risk of extinction from human pressures over the next century. In a worst-case scenario, 40% could go extinct over the same time period. According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 71% of oceanic shark and ray populations have been destroyed by overfishing (the primary driver of ocean defaunation) from 1970 to 2018, and are nearing the \"point of no return\" as 24 of the 31 species are now threatened with extinction, with several being classified as critically endangered. Almost two thirds of sharks and rays around coral reefs are threatened with extinction from overfishing, with 14 of 134 species being critically endangered.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "If this pattern goes unchecked, the future oceans would lack many of the largest species in today's oceans. Many large species play critical roles in ecosystems and so their extinctions could lead to ecological cascades that would influence the structure and function of future ecosystems beyond the simple fact of losing those species.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The decline of amphibian populations has also been identified as an indicator of environmental degradation. As well as habitat loss, introduced predators and pollution, Chytridiomycosis, a fungal infection accidentally spread by human travel, globalization, and the wildlife trade, has caused severe population drops of over 500 amphibian species, and perhaps 90 extinctions, including (among many others) the extinction of the golden toad in Costa Rica, the Gastric-brooding frog in Australia, the Rabb's fringe-limbed treefrog and the extinction of the Panamanian golden frog in the wild. Chytrid fungus has spread across Australia, New Zealand, Central America and Africa, including countries with high amphibian diversity such as cloud forests in Honduras and Madagascar. Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans is a similar infection currently threatening salamanders. Amphibians are now the most endangered vertebrate group, having existed for more than 300 million years through three other mass extinctions.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Millions of bats in the US have been dying off since 2012 due to a fungal infection known as white-nose syndrome that spread from European bats, who appear to be immune. Population drops have been as great as 90% within five years, and extinction of at least one bat species is predicted. There is currently no form of treatment, and such declines have been described as \"unprecedented\" in bat evolutionary history by Alan Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Between 2007 and 2013, over ten million beehives were abandoned due to colony collapse disorder, which causes worker bees to abandon the queen. Though no single cause has gained widespread acceptance by the scientific community, proposals include infections with Varroa and Acarapis mites; malnutrition; various pathogens; genetic factors; immunodeficiencies; loss of habitat; changing beekeeping practices; or a combination of factors.",
"title": "Contemporary extinction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Megafauna were once found on every continent of the world, but are now almost exclusively found on the continent of Africa. In some regions, megafauna experienced population crashes and trophic cascades shortly after the earliest human settlers. Worldwide, 178 species of the world's largest mammals died out between 52,000 and 9,000 BC; it has been suggested that a higher proportion of African megafauna survived because they evolved alongside humans. The timing of South American megafaunal extinction appears to precede human arrival, although the possibility that human activity at the time impacted the global climate enough to cause such an extinction has been suggested.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Africa experienced the smallest decline in megafauna compared to the other continents. This is presumably due to the idea that Afroeurasian megafauna evolved alongside humans, and thus developed a healthy fear of them, unlike the comparatively tame animals of other continents.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Unlike other continents, the megafauna of Eurasia went extinct over a relatively long period of time, possibly due to climate fluctuations fragmenting and decreasing populations, leaving them vulnerable to over-exploitation, as with the steppe bison (Bison priscus). The warming of the arctic region caused the rapid decline of grasslands, which had a negative effect on the grazing megafauna of Eurasia. Most of what once was mammoth steppe was converted to mire, rendering the environment incapable of supporting them, notably the woolly mammoth.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In the western Mediterranean region, anthropogenic forest degradation began around 4,000 BP, during the Chalcolithic, and became especially pronounced during the Roman era. The reasons for the decline of forest ecosystems stem from agriculture, grazing, and mining. During the twilight years of the Western Roman Empire, forests in northwestern Europe rebounded from losses incurred throughout the Roman period, though deforestation on a large scale resumed once again around 800 BP, during the High Middle Ages.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In southern China, human land use is believed to have permanently altered the trend of vegetation dynamics in the region, which was previously governed by temperature. This is evidenced by high fluxes of charcoal from that time interval.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "There has been a debate as to the extent to which the disappearance of megafauna at the end of the last glacial period can be attributed to human activities by hunting, or even by slaughter of prey populations. Discoveries at Monte Verde in South America and at Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania have caused a controversy regarding the Clovis culture. There likely would have been human settlements prior to the Clovis culture, and the history of humans in the Americas may extend back many thousands of years before the Clovis culture. The amount of correlation between human arrival and megafauna extinction is still being debated: for example, in Wrangel Island in Siberia the extinction of dwarf woolly mammoths (approximately 2000 BCE) did not coincide with the arrival of humans, nor did megafaunal mass extinction on the South American continent, although it has been suggested climate changes induced by anthropogenic effects elsewhere in the world may have contributed.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Comparisons are sometimes made between recent extinctions (approximately since the industrial revolution) and the Pleistocene extinction near the end of the last glacial period. The latter is exemplified by the extinction of large herbivores such as the woolly mammoth and the carnivores that preyed on them. Humans of this era actively hunted the mammoth and the mastodon, but it is not known if this hunting was the cause of the subsequent massive ecological changes, widespread extinctions and climate changes.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The ecosystems encountered by the first Americans had not been exposed to human interaction, and may have been far less resilient to human made changes than the ecosystems encountered by industrial era humans. Therefore, the actions of the Clovis people, despite seeming insignificant by today's standards could indeed have had a profound effect on the ecosystems and wild life which was entirely unused to human influence.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In the Yukon, the mammoth steppe ecosystem collapsed between 13,500 and 10,000 BP, though wild horses and woolly mammoths somehow persisted in the region for millennia after this collapse. In what is now Texas, a drop in local plant and animal biodiversity occurred during the Younger Dryas cooling, though while plant diversity recovered after the Younger Dryas, animal diversity did not. In the Channel Islands, multiple terrestrial species went extinct around the same time as human arrival, but direct evidence for an anthropogenic cause of their extinction remains lacking. In the montane forests of the Colombian Andes, spores of coprophilous fungi indicate megafaunal extinction occurred in two waves, the first occurring around 22,900 BP and the second around 10,990 BP. A 2023 study of megafaunal extinctions in the Junín Plateau of Peru found that the timing of the disappearance of megafauna was concurrent with a large uptick in fire activity attributed to human actions, implicating humans as the cause of their local extinction on the plateau.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Australia was once home to a large assemblage of megafauna, with many parallels to those found on the African continent today. Australia's fauna is characterized by primarily marsupial mammals, and many reptiles and birds, all existing as giant forms until recently. Humans arrived on the continent very early, about 50,000 years ago. The extent human arrival contributed is controversial; climatic drying of Australia 40,000–60,000 years ago was an unlikely cause, as it was less severe in speed or magnitude than previous regional climate change which failed to kill off megafauna. Extinctions in Australia continued from original settlement until today in both plants and animals, whilst many more animals and plants have declined or are endangered.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Due to the older timeframe and the soil chemistry on the continent, very little subfossil preservation evidence exists relative to elsewhere. However, continent-wide extinction of all genera weighing over 100 kilograms, and six of seven genera weighing between 45 and 100 kilograms occurred around 46,400 years ago (4,000 years after human arrival) and the fact that megafauna survived until a later date on the island of Tasmania following the establishment of a land bridge suggest direct hunting or anthropogenic ecosystem disruption such as fire-stick farming as likely causes. The first evidence of direct human predation leading to extinction in Australia was published in 2016.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "A 2021 study found that the rate of extinction of Australia's megafauna is rather unusual, with some generalistic species having gone extinct earlier while highly specialized ones having become extinct later or even still surviving today. A mosaic cause of extinction with different anthropogenic and environmental pressures has been proposed.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Human arrival in the Caribbean around 6,000 years ago is correlated with the extinction of many species. These include many different genera of ground and arboreal sloths across all islands. These sloths were generally smaller than those found on the South American continent. Megalocnus were the largest genus at up to 90 kilograms (200 lb), Acratocnus were medium-sized relatives of modern two-toed sloths endemic to Cuba, Imagocnus also of Cuba, Neocnus and many others.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The arrival of the first human settlers in the Azores saw the introduction of invasive plants and livestock to the archipelago, resulting in the extinction of at least two plant species on Pico Island. On Faial Island, the decline of Prunus lusitanica has been hypothesized by some scholars to have been related to the tree species being endozoochoric, with the extirpation or extinction of various bird species drastically limiting its seed dispersal. Lacustrine ecosystems were ravaged by human colonization, as evidenced by hydrogen isotopes from C30 fatty acids recording hypoxic bottom waters caused by eutrophication in Lake Funda on Flores Island beginning between 1500 and 1600 AD.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The arrival of humans on the archipelago of Madeira caused the extinction of approximately two-thirds of its endemic bird species, with two non-endemic birds also being locally extirpated from the archipelago. Of thirty-four land snail species collected in a subfossil sample from eastern Madeira Island, nine became extinct following the arrival of humans. On the Desertas Islands, of forty-five land snail species known to exist before human colonization, eighteen are extinct and five are no longer present on the islands. Eurya stigmosa, whose extinction is typically attributed to climate change following the end of the Pleistocene rather than humans, may have survived until the colonization of the archipelago by the Portuguese and gone extinct as a result of human activity. Introduced mice have been implicated as a leading driver of extinction on Madeira following its discovery by humans.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In the Canary Islands, native thermophilous woodlands were decimated and two tree taxa were driven extinct following the arrival of its first humans, primarily as a result of increased fire clearance and soil erosion and the introduction of invasive pigs, goats, and rats. Invasive species introductions accelerated during the Age of Discovery when Europeans first settled the Macaronesian archipelago. The archipelago's laurel forests, though still negatively impacted, fared better due to being less suitable for human economic use.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Cabo Verde, like the Canary Islands, witnessed precipitous deforestation upon the arrival of European settlers and various invasive species brought by them in the archipelago, with the archipelago's thermophilous woodlands suffering the greatest destruction. Introduced species, overgrazing, increased fire incidence, and soil degradation have been attributed as the chief causes of Cabo Verde's ecological devastation.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Archaeological and paleontological digs on 70 different Pacific islands suggested that numerous species became extinct as people moved across the Pacific, starting 30,000 years ago in the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands. It is currently estimated that among the bird species of the Pacific, some 2000 species have gone extinct since the arrival of humans, representing a 20% drop in the biodiversity of birds worldwide.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The first human settlers of the Hawaiian islands are thought to have arrived between 300 and 800 CE, with European arrival in the 16th century. Hawaii is notable for its endemism of plants, birds, insects, mollusks and fish; 30% of its organisms are endemic. Many of its species are endangered or have gone extinct, primarily due to accidentally introduced species and livestock grazing. Over 40% of its bird species have gone extinct, and it is the location of 75% of extinctions in the United States. Extinction has increased in Hawaii over the last 200 years and is relatively well documented, with extinctions among native snails used as estimates for global extinction rates.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Within centuries of the arrival of humans around the 1st millennium AD, nearly all of Madagascar's distinct, endemic, and geographically isolated megafauna became extinct. The largest animals, of more than 150 kilograms (330 lb), were extinct very shortly after the first human arrival, with large and medium-sized species dying out after prolonged hunting pressure from an expanding human population moving into more remote regions of the island around 1000 years ago. as well as 17 species of \"giant\" lemurs. Some of these lemurs typically weighed over 150 kilograms (330 lb), and their fossils have provided evidence of human butchery on many species. Other megafauna present on the island included the Malagasy hippopotamuses as well as the large flightless elephant birds, both groups are thought to have gone extinct in the interval 750–1050 CE. Smaller fauna experienced initial increases due to decreased competition, and then subsequent declines over the last 500 years. All fauna weighing over 10 kilograms (22 lb) died out. The primary reasons for the decline of Madagascar's biota, which at the time was already stressed by natural aridification, were human hunting, herding, farming, and forest clearing, all of which persist and threaten Madagascar's remaining taxa today. The natural ecosystems of Madagascar as a whole were further impacted by the much greater incidence of fire as a result of anthropogenic fire production; evidence from Lake Amparihibe on the island of Nosy Be indicates a shift in local vegetation from intact rainforest to a fire-disturbed patchwork of grassland and woodland between 1300 and 1000 BP.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "New Zealand is characterized by its geographic isolation and island biogeography, and had been isolated from mainland Australia for 80 million years. It was the last large land mass to be colonized by humans. The arrival of Polynesian settlers circa 12th century resulted in the extinction of all of the islands' megafaunal birds within several hundred years. The moa, large flightless ratites, became extinct within 200 years of the arrival of human settlers, as did the enormous Haast's eagle, their primary predator, and at least two species of large, flightless geese. The Polynesians also introduced the Polynesian rat. This may have put some pressure on other birds but at the time of early European contact (18th century) and colonization (19th century) the bird life was prolific. With them, the Europeans brought various invasive species including ship rats, possums, cats and mustelids which devastated native bird life, some of which had adapted flightlessness and ground nesting habits, and had no defensive behavior as a result of having no native mammalian predators. The kākāpō, the world's biggest parrot, which is flightless, now only exists in managed breeding sanctuaries. New Zealand's national emblem, the kiwi, is on the endangered bird list.",
"title": "By region"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Stabilizing human populations; reining in capitalism, decreasing economic demands, and shifting them to economic activities with low impacts on biodiversity; transitioning to plant-based diets; and increasing the number and size of terrestrial and marine protected areas have been suggested to avoid or limit biodiversity loss and a possible sixth mass extinction. Rodolfo Dirzo and Paul R. Ehrlich suggest that \"the one fundamental, necessary, 'simple' cure, ... is reducing the scale of the human enterprise.\" According to a 2021 paper published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, humanity almost certainly faces a \"ghastly future\" of mass extinction, biodiversity collapse, climate change and their impacts unless major efforts to change human industry and activity are rapidly undertaken.",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Reducing human population growth has been suggested as a means of mitigating climate change and the biodiversity crisis, although many scholars believe it has been largely ignored in mainstream policy discourse. An alternative proposal is greater agricultural efficiency & sustainability. Lots of non-arable land can be made into arable land good for growing food crops. Mushrooms have also been known to repair damaged soil.",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "A 2018 article in Science advocated for the global community to designate 30% of the planet by 2030, and 50% by 2050, as protected areas in order to mitigate the contemporary extinction crisis. It highlighted that the human population is projected to grow to 10 billion by the middle of the century, and consumption of food and water resources is projected to double by this time. A 2022 report published in Science warned that 44% of earth's terrestrial surface, or 64 million square kilometres (24.7 million square miles), must be conserved and made \"ecologically sound\" in order to prevent further biodiversity loss.",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In November 2018, the UN's biodiversity chief Cristiana Pașca Palmer urged people around the world to put pressure on governments to implement significant protections for wildlife by 2020. She called biodiversity loss a \"silent killer\" as dangerous as global warming, but said it had received little attention by comparison. \"It's different from climate change, where people feel the impact in everyday life. With biodiversity, it is not so clear but by the time you feel what is happening, it may be too late.\" In January 2020, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drafted a Paris-style plan to stop biodiversity and ecosystem collapse by setting the deadline of 2030 to protect 30% of the earth's land and oceans and to reduce pollution by 50%, with the goal of allowing for the restoration of ecosystems by 2050. The world failed to meet the Aichi Biodiversity targets for 2020 set by the convention during a summit in Japan in 2010. Of the 20 biodiversity targets proposed, only six were \"partially achieved\" by the deadline. It was called a global failure by Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme:",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "\"From COVID-19 to massive wildfires, floods, melting glaciers and unprecedented heat, our failure to meet the Aichi (biodiversity) targets — protect our our home — has very real consequences. We can no longer afford to cast nature to the side.\"",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Some scientists have proposed keeping extinctions below 20 per year for the next century as a global target to reduce species loss, which is the biodiversity equivalent of the 2 °C climate target, although it is still much higher than the normal background rate of two per year prior to anthropogenic impacts on the natural world.",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "An October 2020 report on the \"era of pandemics\" from IPBES found that many of the same human activities that contribute to biodiversity loss and climate change, including deforestation and the wildlife trade, have also increased the risk of future pandemics. The report offers several policy options to reduce such risk, such as taxing meat production and consumption, cracking down on the illegal wildlife trade, removing high disease-risk species from the legal wildlife trade, and eliminating subsidies to businesses which are harmful to the environment. According to marine zoologist John Spicer, \"the COVID-19 crisis is not just another crisis alongside the biodiversity crisis and the climate change crisis. Make no mistake, this is one big crisis – the greatest that humans have ever faced.\"",
"title": "Mitigation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In December 2022, nearly every country on earth, with the United States and the Holy See being the only exceptions, signed onto the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreement formulated at the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) which includes protecting 30% of land and oceans by 2030 and 22 other targets intended to mitigate the extinction crisis. The agreement is weaker than the Aichi Targets of 2010. It was criticized by some countries for being rushed and not going far enough to protect endangered species.",
"title": "Mitigation"
}
]
| The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the "Big Five" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event. The Holocene extinction follows the extinction of many large (megafaunal) animals during the preceding Late Pleistocene as part of the Quaternary extinction event. It has been suggested that megafauna outside of the African mainland, which did not evolve alongside modern humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of human predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth. The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the Holocene extinction coincides with human colonization of many new areas around the world. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation and habitat loss affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with the onset of human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene. In the twentieth century, human numbers quadrupled, and the size of the global economy increased twenty-five-fold. This Great Acceleration or Anthropocene epoch has also accelerated species extinction. Ecologically, humanity is now an unprecedented "global superpredator", which consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, takes over other species' essential habitats and displaces them, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands. Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with human population growth, increasing per capita consumption, and meat production and consumption, among others, being the primary drivers of mass extinction. Deforestation, overfishing, ocean acidification, the destruction of wetlands, and the decline in amphibian populations, among others, are a few broader examples of global biodiversity loss. | 2001-11-28T05:26:10Z | 2023-12-23T16:30:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction |
14,210 | Harrison Narcotics Tax Act | The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (Ch. 1, 38 Stat. 785) was a United States federal law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. The act was proposed by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and was approved on December 17, 1914.
"An Act To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes." The courts interpreted this to mean that physicians could prescribe narcotics to patients in the course of normal treatment, but not for the treatment of addiction.
The Harrison anti-narcotic legislation consisted of three U.S. House bills imposing restrictions on the availability and consumption of the psychoactive drug opium. U.S. House bills H.R. 1966 and H.R. 1967 passed conjointly with House bill H.R. 6282 or the Opium and Coca Leaves Trade Restrictions Act.
Although technically illegal for purposes of distribution and use, the distribution, sale and use of cocaine was still legal for registered companies and individuals.
Following the Spanish–American War and the Philippine–American War, the Philippines saw a proliferation of opium use. A cholera outbreak in 1902 further strengthened this tendency due to the astringent properties of opium.
Charles Henry Brent was an American Episcopal bishop who served as Missionary Bishop of the Philippines beginning in 1901. He convened a Commission of Inquiry, known as the Brent Commission, for the purpose of examining alternatives to a licensing system for opium addicts. Although Governor William Taft supported this policy, Brent opposed it "on moral grounds". The Commission recommended that narcotics should be subject to international control. The recommendations of the Brent Commission were endorsed by the United States Department of State and in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt called for an international conference, the International Opium Commission, which was held in Shanghai in February 1909. A second conference was held at The Hague in May 1911, and out of it came the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention of 1912.
In the 1800s, opiates and cocaine were mostly unregulated drugs. In the 1890s, the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of Americans homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine or heroin for $1.50. On the other hand, as early as 1880, some states and localities had already passed laws against smoking opium, at least in public, for example as reported in the Los Angeles Herald in an article mentioning the city law against opium smoking.
At the beginning of the 20th century, cocaine began to be linked to crime. In 1900, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an editorial stating, "Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice – that of 'cocaine sniffing' or the 'coke habit.'" Some newspapers later claimed cocaine use caused blacks to rape white women and was improving their pistol marksmanship. Chinese immigrants were blamed for importing the opium-smoking habit to the U.S. The 1903 blue-ribbon citizens' panel, the Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit, concluded, "If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope we can get along without him."
Theodore Roosevelt appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner of the United States in 1908. In 1909, Wright attended the International Opium Commission in Shanghai as the American delegate. He was accompanied by Charles Henry Brent, the Episcopal Bishop. On March 12, 1911, Wright was quoted in an article in The New York Times: "Of all the nations of the world, the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation in Europe fences it with." He further claimed that "it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of the South and other sections of the country". He also stated that "one of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities".
Opium usage had begun to decline by 1914 after rising dramatically in the post Civil War Era, peaking at around one-half million pounds per year in 1896. Demand gradually declined thereafter in response to mounting public concern, local and state regulations, and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which required labeling of patent medicines that contained opiates, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis and other intoxicants. As of 1911, an estimated one U.S. citizen in 400 (0.25%) was addicted to some form of opium. The opium addicts were mostly women who were prescribed and dispensed legal opiates by physicians and pharmacist for "female problems" (probably pain at menstruation) or white men and Chinese at the opium dens. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of these addicts were women. By 1914, forty-six states had regulations on cocaine and twenty-nine states had laws against opium, morphine, and heroin.
The committee report prior to the debate on the house floor and the debate itself, discussed the rise of opiate use in the United States. Harrison stated that "The purpose of this Bill can hardly be said to raise revenue, because it prohibits the importation of something upon which we have hitherto collected revenue." Later Harrison stated, "We are not attempting to collect revenue, but regulate commerce." House representative Thomas Sisson stated, "The purpose of this bill—and we are all in sympathy with it—is to prevent the use of opium in the United States, destructive as it is to human happiness and human life."
The drafters played on fears of "drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes" and made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and "Chinamen" seducing white women with drugs. Dr. Hamilton Wright, testified at a hearing for the Harrison Act. Wright alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and caused them to rebel against white authority. Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testified that "Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain".
Before the Act was passed, on February 8, 1914, The New York Times published an article entitled "Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks" by Edward Huntington Williams, which reported that Southern sheriffs had increased the caliber of their weapons from .32 to .38 to bring down Negroes under the effect of cocaine.
Despite the extreme racialization of the issue that took place in the buildup to the Act's passage, the contemporary research on the subject indicated that black Americans were using cocaine and opium at much lower rates than white Americans.
Enforcement began in 1915.
The act appears to be mainly concerned about the marketing of opiates. However, a clause applying to doctors allowed distribution "in the course of his professional practice only." This clause was interpreted after 1917 to mean that a doctor could not prescribe opiates to an addict. A number of doctors were arrested and some were imprisoned. The medical profession quickly learned not to supply opiates to addicts. In United States v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 (1919), the Supreme Court ruled that the Harrison Act was constitutional, and in Webb v. United States, 249 U.S. 96, 99 (1919) that physicians could not prescribe narcotics solely for maintenance.
The impact of diminished supply was obvious by mid-1915. A 1918 commission called for sterner law enforcement, while newspapers published sensational articles about addiction-related crime waves. Congress responded by tightening up the Harrison Act—the importation of heroin for any purpose was banned in 1924.
The use of the term 'narcotic', which was originally derived from ancient Greek ναρκῶ (narkō), "to make numb", in the title of the act referenced not just opiates but also cocaine, which is a central nervous system stimulant. This set a precedent of frequent legislative and judicial misclassification of various (illegal) substances as 'narcotics'. Today, law enforcement agencies, popular media, the United Nations, other nations and even some medical practitioners can be observed applying the term very broadly and often pejoratively in reference to a wide range of illicit substances, regardless of the more precise definition existing in medical contexts. For this reason, however, 'narcotic' has come to mean any illegally used drug, but it is useful as a shorthand for referring to a controlled drug in a context where its legal status is more important than its physiological effects.
One effect of this act, which has largely been superseded by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, is the warning "*Warning: May be habit forming" on labels, package inserts, and other places where ingredients are listed in the case of many opioids, barbiturates, medicinal formulations of cocaine, and chloral hydrate.
The act also marks the beginning of the criminalization of addiction and the American black market for drugs. Within five years the Rainey Committee, a Special Committee on Investigation appointed by Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo and led by Congressman T. Rainey, reported in June, 1919 that drugs were being smuggled into the country by sea, and across the Mexican and Canadian borders by nationally established organisations and that the United States consumed 470,000 pounds of opium annually, compared to 17,000 pounds in both France and Germany. The Monthly Summary of Foreign Commerce of the United States recorded that in the 7 months to January 1920, 528,635 pounds of opium was imported, compared to 74,650 pounds in the same period in 1919.
The Act's applicability in prosecuting doctors who prescribe narcotics to addicts was successfully challenged in Linder v. United States in 1925, as Justice McReynolds ruled that the federal government has no power to regulate medical practice. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (Ch. 1, 38 Stat. 785) was a United States federal law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. The act was proposed by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and was approved on December 17, 1914.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "\"An Act To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.\" The courts interpreted this to mean that physicians could prescribe narcotics to patients in the course of normal treatment, but not for the treatment of addiction.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Harrison anti-narcotic legislation consisted of three U.S. House bills imposing restrictions on the availability and consumption of the psychoactive drug opium. U.S. House bills H.R. 1966 and H.R. 1967 passed conjointly with House bill H.R. 6282 or the Opium and Coca Leaves Trade Restrictions Act.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Although technically illegal for purposes of distribution and use, the distribution, sale and use of cocaine was still legal for registered companies and individuals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Following the Spanish–American War and the Philippine–American War, the Philippines saw a proliferation of opium use. A cholera outbreak in 1902 further strengthened this tendency due to the astringent properties of opium.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Charles Henry Brent was an American Episcopal bishop who served as Missionary Bishop of the Philippines beginning in 1901. He convened a Commission of Inquiry, known as the Brent Commission, for the purpose of examining alternatives to a licensing system for opium addicts. Although Governor William Taft supported this policy, Brent opposed it \"on moral grounds\". The Commission recommended that narcotics should be subject to international control. The recommendations of the Brent Commission were endorsed by the United States Department of State and in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt called for an international conference, the International Opium Commission, which was held in Shanghai in February 1909. A second conference was held at The Hague in May 1911, and out of it came the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention of 1912.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the 1800s, opiates and cocaine were mostly unregulated drugs. In the 1890s, the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of Americans homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine or heroin for $1.50. On the other hand, as early as 1880, some states and localities had already passed laws against smoking opium, at least in public, for example as reported in the Los Angeles Herald in an article mentioning the city law against opium smoking.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At the beginning of the 20th century, cocaine began to be linked to crime. In 1900, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an editorial stating, \"Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice – that of 'cocaine sniffing' or the 'coke habit.'\" Some newspapers later claimed cocaine use caused blacks to rape white women and was improving their pistol marksmanship. Chinese immigrants were blamed for importing the opium-smoking habit to the U.S. The 1903 blue-ribbon citizens' panel, the Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit, concluded, \"If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope we can get along without him.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Theodore Roosevelt appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner of the United States in 1908. In 1909, Wright attended the International Opium Commission in Shanghai as the American delegate. He was accompanied by Charles Henry Brent, the Episcopal Bishop. On March 12, 1911, Wright was quoted in an article in The New York Times: \"Of all the nations of the world, the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation in Europe fences it with.\" He further claimed that \"it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of the South and other sections of the country\". He also stated that \"one of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Opium usage had begun to decline by 1914 after rising dramatically in the post Civil War Era, peaking at around one-half million pounds per year in 1896. Demand gradually declined thereafter in response to mounting public concern, local and state regulations, and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which required labeling of patent medicines that contained opiates, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis and other intoxicants. As of 1911, an estimated one U.S. citizen in 400 (0.25%) was addicted to some form of opium. The opium addicts were mostly women who were prescribed and dispensed legal opiates by physicians and pharmacist for \"female problems\" (probably pain at menstruation) or white men and Chinese at the opium dens. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of these addicts were women. By 1914, forty-six states had regulations on cocaine and twenty-nine states had laws against opium, morphine, and heroin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The committee report prior to the debate on the house floor and the debate itself, discussed the rise of opiate use in the United States. Harrison stated that \"The purpose of this Bill can hardly be said to raise revenue, because it prohibits the importation of something upon which we have hitherto collected revenue.\" Later Harrison stated, \"We are not attempting to collect revenue, but regulate commerce.\" House representative Thomas Sisson stated, \"The purpose of this bill—and we are all in sympathy with it—is to prevent the use of opium in the United States, destructive as it is to human happiness and human life.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The drafters played on fears of \"drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes\" and made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and \"Chinamen\" seducing white women with drugs. Dr. Hamilton Wright, testified at a hearing for the Harrison Act. Wright alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and caused them to rebel against white authority. Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testified that \"Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Before the Act was passed, on February 8, 1914, The New York Times published an article entitled \"Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks\" by Edward Huntington Williams, which reported that Southern sheriffs had increased the caliber of their weapons from .32 to .38 to bring down Negroes under the effect of cocaine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Despite the extreme racialization of the issue that took place in the buildup to the Act's passage, the contemporary research on the subject indicated that black Americans were using cocaine and opium at much lower rates than white Americans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Enforcement began in 1915.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The act appears to be mainly concerned about the marketing of opiates. However, a clause applying to doctors allowed distribution \"in the course of his professional practice only.\" This clause was interpreted after 1917 to mean that a doctor could not prescribe opiates to an addict. A number of doctors were arrested and some were imprisoned. The medical profession quickly learned not to supply opiates to addicts. In United States v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 (1919), the Supreme Court ruled that the Harrison Act was constitutional, and in Webb v. United States, 249 U.S. 96, 99 (1919) that physicians could not prescribe narcotics solely for maintenance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The impact of diminished supply was obvious by mid-1915. A 1918 commission called for sterner law enforcement, while newspapers published sensational articles about addiction-related crime waves. Congress responded by tightening up the Harrison Act—the importation of heroin for any purpose was banned in 1924.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The use of the term 'narcotic', which was originally derived from ancient Greek ναρκῶ (narkō), \"to make numb\", in the title of the act referenced not just opiates but also cocaine, which is a central nervous system stimulant. This set a precedent of frequent legislative and judicial misclassification of various (illegal) substances as 'narcotics'. Today, law enforcement agencies, popular media, the United Nations, other nations and even some medical practitioners can be observed applying the term very broadly and often pejoratively in reference to a wide range of illicit substances, regardless of the more precise definition existing in medical contexts. For this reason, however, 'narcotic' has come to mean any illegally used drug, but it is useful as a shorthand for referring to a controlled drug in a context where its legal status is more important than its physiological effects.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "One effect of this act, which has largely been superseded by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, is the warning \"*Warning: May be habit forming\" on labels, package inserts, and other places where ingredients are listed in the case of many opioids, barbiturates, medicinal formulations of cocaine, and chloral hydrate.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The act also marks the beginning of the criminalization of addiction and the American black market for drugs. Within five years the Rainey Committee, a Special Committee on Investigation appointed by Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo and led by Congressman T. Rainey, reported in June, 1919 that drugs were being smuggled into the country by sea, and across the Mexican and Canadian borders by nationally established organisations and that the United States consumed 470,000 pounds of opium annually, compared to 17,000 pounds in both France and Germany. The Monthly Summary of Foreign Commerce of the United States recorded that in the 7 months to January 1920, 528,635 pounds of opium was imported, compared to 74,650 pounds in the same period in 1919.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Act's applicability in prosecuting doctors who prescribe narcotics to addicts was successfully challenged in Linder v. United States in 1925, as Justice McReynolds ruled that the federal government has no power to regulate medical practice.",
"title": "Challenge"
}
]
| The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was a United States federal law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. The act was proposed by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and was approved on December 17, 1914. "An Act To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes." The courts interpreted this to mean that physicians could prescribe narcotics to patients in the course of normal treatment, but not for the treatment of addiction. The Harrison anti-narcotic legislation consisted of three U.S. House bills imposing restrictions on the availability and consumption of the psychoactive drug opium. U.S. House bills H.R. 1966 and H.R. 1967 passed conjointly with House bill H.R. 6282 or the Opium and Coca Leaves Trade Restrictions Act. Although technically illegal for purposes of distribution and use, the distribution, sale and use of cocaine was still legal for registered companies and individuals. | 2002-02-05T20:03:42Z | 2023-12-26T16:32:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act |
14,215 | Horse tack | Tack is equipment or accessories equipped on horses and other equines in the course of their use as domesticated animals. This equipment includes such items as saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, and harnesses. Equipping a horse is often referred to as tacking up, and involves putting the tack equipment on the horse. A room to store such equipment, usually near or in a stable, is a tack room.
Saddles are seats for the rider, fastened to the horse's back by means of a girth in English-style riding, or a cinch in the use of Western tack. Girths are generally a wide strap that goes around the horse at a point about four inches behind the forelegs. Some western saddles will also have a second strap known as a flank or back cinch that fastens at the rear of the saddle and goes around the widest part of the horse's belly.
It is important that the saddle be comfortable for both the rider and the horse as an improperly fitting saddle may create pressure points on the horse's back muscle (Latissimus dorsi) and cause the horse pain and can lead to the horse, rider, or both getting injured.
There are many types of saddle, each specially designed for its given task. Saddles are usually divided into two major categories: "English saddles" and "Western saddles" according to the riding discipline they are used in. Other types of saddles, such as racing saddles, Australian saddles, sidesaddles and endurance saddles do not necessarily fit neatly in either category.
Stirrups are supports for the rider's feet that hang down on either side of the saddle. They provide greater stability for the rider but can have safety concerns due to the potential for a rider's feet to get stuck in them. If a rider is thrown from a horse but has a foot caught in the stirrup, they could be dragged if the horse runs away. To minimize this risk, a number of safety precautions are taken. First, most riders wear riding boots with a heel and a smooth sole. Next, some saddles, particularly English saddles, have safety bars that allow a stirrup leather to fall off the saddle if pulled backwards by a falling rider. Other precautions are done with stirrup design itself. Western saddles have wide stirrup treads that make it more difficult for the foot to become trapped. A number of saddle styles incorporate a tapedero, which is covering over the front of the stirrup that keeps the foot from sliding all the way through the stirrup. The English stirrup (or "iron") has several design variations which are either shaped to allow the rider's foot to slip out easily or are closed with a very heavy rubber band. The invention of stirrups was of great historic significance in mounted combat, giving the rider secure foot support while on horseback.
Bridles, hackamores, halters, or headcollars, and similar equipment consist of various arrangements of straps around the horse's head, and are used for control and communication with the animal.
A halter (United States) or headcollar (United Kingdom) (occasionally headstall) consists of a noseband and headstall that buckles around the horse's head and allows the horse to be led or tied. The lead rope is separate, and it may be short (from six to ten feet, two to three meters) for everyday leading and tying, or much longer (up to 25 feet (7.6 m), eight meters) for tasks such as for leading packhorses or for picketing a horse out to graze.
Some horses, particularly stallions, may have a chain attached to the lead rope and placed over the nose or under the jaw to increase the control provided by a halter while being led. Most of the time, horses are not ridden with a halter, as it offers insufficient precision and control. Halters have no bit.
In Australian and British English, a halter is a rope with a spliced running loop around the nose and another over the poll, used mainly for unbroken horses or for cattle. The lead rope cannot be removed from the halter. A show halter is made from rolled leather and the lead attaches to form the chinpiece of the noseband. These halters are not suitable for paddock usage or in loose stalls. An underhalter is a lightweight halter or headcollar which is made with only one small buckle, and can be worn under a bridle for tethering a horse without untacking.
Bridles usually have a bit attached to reins and are used for riding and driving horses.
English Bridles have a cavesson style noseband and are seen in English riding. Their reins are buckled to one another, and they have little adornment or flashy hardware.
Western Bridles used in Western riding usually have no noseband, are made of thin bridle leather. They may have long, separated "Split" reins or shorter closed reins, which sometimes include an attached Romal. Western bridles are often adorned with silver or other decorative features.
Double bridles are a type of English bridle that use two bits in the mouth at once, a snaffle and a curb. The two bits allow the rider to have very precise control of the horse. As a rule, only very advanced horses and riders use double bridles. Double bridles are usually seen in the top levels of dressage, but also are seen in certain types of show hack and Saddle seat competition.
A hackamore is a headgear that utilizes a heavy noseband of some sort, rather than a bit, most often used to train young horses or to go easy on an older horse's mouth. Hackamores are more often seen in western riding. Some related styles of headgear that control a horse with a noseband rather than a bit are known as bitless bridles.
The word "hackamore" is derived from the Spanish word jáquima. Hackamores are seen in western riding disciplines, as well as in endurance riding and English riding disciplines such as show jumping and the stadium phase of eventing. While the classic bosal-style hackamore is usually used to start young horses, other designs, such as various bitless bridles and the mechanical hackamore are often seen on mature horses with dental issues that make bit use painful, horses with certain training problems, and on horses with mouth or tongue injuries. Some riders also like to use them in the winter to avoid putting a frozen metal bit into a horse's mouth.
Like bitted bridles, noseband-based designs can be gentle or harsh, depending on the hands of the rider. It is a myth that a bit is cruel and a hackamore is gentler. The horse's face is very soft and sensitive with many nerve endings. Misuse of a hackamore can cause swelling on the nose, scraping on the nose and jawbone, and extreme misuse may cause damage to the bones and cartilage of the horse's head.
A longeing cavesson (UK: lungeing) is a special type of halter or noseband used for longeing a horse. Longeing is the activity of having a horse walk, trot and/or canter in a large circle around the handler at the end of a rope that is 25 to 30 feet (9.1 m) long. It is used for training and exercise.
A neck rope or cordeo is a rope tied around a horse's neck used to guide the horse during bridleless riding or groundwork.
Reins consist of leather straps or rope attached to the outer ends of a bit and extend to the rider's or driver's hands. Reins are the means by which a horse rider or driver communicates directional commands to the horse's head. Pulling on the reins can be used to steer or stop the horse. The sides of a horse's mouth are sensitive, so pulling on the reins pulls the bit, which then pulls the horse's head from side to side, which is how the horse is controlled.
On some types of harnesses there might be supporting rings to carry the reins over the horse's back. When pairs of horses are used in drawing a wagon or coach it is usual for the outer side of each pair to be connected to reins and the inside of the bits connected by a short bridging strap or rope. The driver carries "four-in-hand" or "six-in-hand" being the number of reins connecting to the pairs of horses.
A rein may be attached to a halter to lead or guide the horse in a circle for training purposes or to lead a packhorse, but a simple lead rope is more often used for these purposes. A longe line is sometimes called a "longe rein", but it is actually a flat line about 30 feet (9.1 m) long, usually made of nylon or cotton web, about one inch wide, thus longer and wider than even a driving rein.
A bit is a device placed in a horse's mouth, kept on a horse's head by means of a headstall. There are many types, each useful for specific types of riding and training.
The mouthpiece of the bit does not rest on the teeth of the horse, but rather rests on the gums or "bars" of the horse's mouth in an interdental space behind the front incisors and in front of the back molars. It is important that the style of bit is appropriate to the horse's needs and is fitted properly for it to function properly and be as comfortable as possible for the horse.
The basic "classic" styles of bits are:
While there are literally hundreds of types of bit mouthpieces, bit rings and bit shanks, essentially there are really only two broad categories: direct pressure bits, broadly termed snaffle bits; and leverage bits, usually termed curbs.
Bits that act with direct pressure on the tongue and lips of the bit are in the general category of snaffle bits. Snaffle bits commonly have a single jointed mouthpiece and act with a nutcracker effect on the bars, tongue and occasionally roof of the mouth. However, regardless of mouthpiece, any bit that operates only on direct pressure is a "snaffle" bit.
Leverage bits have shanks coming off the mouthpiece to create leverage that applies pressure to the poll, chin groove and mouth of the horse are in the category of curb bits. Any bit with shanks that works off of leverage is a "curb" bit, regardless of whether the mouthpiece is solid or jointed.
Some combination or hybrid bits combine direct pressure and leverage, such as the Kimblewick or Kimberwicke, which adds slight leverage to a two-rein design that resembles a snaffle; and the four rein designs such as the single mouthpiece Pelham bit and the double bridle, which places a curb and a snaffle bit simultaneously in the horse's mouth.
In the wrong hands even the mildest bit can hurt the horse. Conversely, a very severe bit, in the right hands, can transmit subtle commands that cause no pain to the horse. Bit commands should be given with only the quietest movements of the hands, and much steering and stopping should be done with the legs and seat.
A horse harness is a set of devices and straps that attaches a horse to a cart, carriage, sledge or any other load. There are two main styles of harnesses - breaststrap and collar and hames style. These differ in how the weight of the load is attached. Most Harnesses are made from leather, which is the traditional material for harnesses, though some designs are now made of nylon webbing or synthetic biothane.
A breaststrap harness has a wide leather strap going horizontally across the horses' breast, attached to the traces and then to the load. This is used only for lighter loads. A collar and hames harness has a collar around the horses' neck with wood or metal hames in the collar. The traces attach from the hames to the load. This type of harness is needed for heavy draft work.
Both types will also have a bridle and reins. A harness that is used to support shafts, such as on a cart pulled by a single horse, will also have a saddle attached to the harness to help the horse support the shafts and breeching to brake the forward motion of the vehicle, especially when stopping or moving downhill. Horses guiding vehicles by means of a pole, such as two-horse teams pulling a wagon, a hay-mower, or a dray, will have pole-straps attached to the lower part of the horse collar.
Breastplates, breastcollars or breastgirths attach to the front of the saddle, cross the horse's chest, and usually have a strap that runs between the horse's front legs and attaches to the girth. They keep the saddle from sliding back or sideways. They are usually seen in demanding, fast-paced sports. They are crucial pieces of safety equipment for English riding activities requiring jumping, such as eventing, show jumping, polo, and fox hunting. They are also seen in Western riding events, particularly in rodeo, reining and cutting, where it is particularly important to prevent a saddle from shifting. They may also be worn in other horse show classes for decorative purposes.
A martingale is a piece of equipment that keeps a horse from raising its head too high. Various styles can be used as a control measure, to prevent the horse from avoiding rider commands by raising its head out of position; or as a safety measure to keep the horse from tossing its head high or hard enough to smack its rider in the face.
They are allowed in many types of competition, especially those where speed or jumping may be required, but are not allowed in most "flat" classes at horse shows, though an exception is made in a few classes limited exclusively to young or "green" horses who may not yet be fully trained.
Martingales are usually attached to the horse one of two ways. They are either attached to the center chest ring of a breastplate or, if no breastplate is worn, they are attached by two straps, one that goes around the horse's neck, and the other that attaches to the girth, with the martingale itself beginning at the point in the center of the chest where the neck and girth straps intersect.
Martingale types include:
There are other training devices that fall loosely in the martingale category, in that they use straps attached to the reins or bit which limit the movement of the horse's head or add leverage to the rider's hands in order to control the horse's head. Common devices of this nature include the overcheck, the chambon, de Gogue, grazing reins, draw reins and the "bitting harness" or "bitting rig". However, most of this equipment is used for training purposes and is not legal in any competition. In some disciplines, use of leverage devices, even in training, is controversial. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Tack is equipment or accessories equipped on horses and other equines in the course of their use as domesticated animals. This equipment includes such items as saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, and harnesses. Equipping a horse is often referred to as tacking up, and involves putting the tack equipment on the horse. A room to store such equipment, usually near or in a stable, is a tack room.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Saddles are seats for the rider, fastened to the horse's back by means of a girth in English-style riding, or a cinch in the use of Western tack. Girths are generally a wide strap that goes around the horse at a point about four inches behind the forelegs. Some western saddles will also have a second strap known as a flank or back cinch that fastens at the rear of the saddle and goes around the widest part of the horse's belly.",
"title": "Saddles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "It is important that the saddle be comfortable for both the rider and the horse as an improperly fitting saddle may create pressure points on the horse's back muscle (Latissimus dorsi) and cause the horse pain and can lead to the horse, rider, or both getting injured.",
"title": "Saddles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "There are many types of saddle, each specially designed for its given task. Saddles are usually divided into two major categories: \"English saddles\" and \"Western saddles\" according to the riding discipline they are used in. Other types of saddles, such as racing saddles, Australian saddles, sidesaddles and endurance saddles do not necessarily fit neatly in either category.",
"title": "Saddles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Stirrups are supports for the rider's feet that hang down on either side of the saddle. They provide greater stability for the rider but can have safety concerns due to the potential for a rider's feet to get stuck in them. If a rider is thrown from a horse but has a foot caught in the stirrup, they could be dragged if the horse runs away. To minimize this risk, a number of safety precautions are taken. First, most riders wear riding boots with a heel and a smooth sole. Next, some saddles, particularly English saddles, have safety bars that allow a stirrup leather to fall off the saddle if pulled backwards by a falling rider. Other precautions are done with stirrup design itself. Western saddles have wide stirrup treads that make it more difficult for the foot to become trapped. A number of saddle styles incorporate a tapedero, which is covering over the front of the stirrup that keeps the foot from sliding all the way through the stirrup. The English stirrup (or \"iron\") has several design variations which are either shaped to allow the rider's foot to slip out easily or are closed with a very heavy rubber band. The invention of stirrups was of great historic significance in mounted combat, giving the rider secure foot support while on horseback.",
"title": "Saddles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Bridles, hackamores, halters, or headcollars, and similar equipment consist of various arrangements of straps around the horse's head, and are used for control and communication with the animal.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A halter (United States) or headcollar (United Kingdom) (occasionally headstall) consists of a noseband and headstall that buckles around the horse's head and allows the horse to be led or tied. The lead rope is separate, and it may be short (from six to ten feet, two to three meters) for everyday leading and tying, or much longer (up to 25 feet (7.6 m), eight meters) for tasks such as for leading packhorses or for picketing a horse out to graze.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Some horses, particularly stallions, may have a chain attached to the lead rope and placed over the nose or under the jaw to increase the control provided by a halter while being led. Most of the time, horses are not ridden with a halter, as it offers insufficient precision and control. Halters have no bit.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In Australian and British English, a halter is a rope with a spliced running loop around the nose and another over the poll, used mainly for unbroken horses or for cattle. The lead rope cannot be removed from the halter. A show halter is made from rolled leather and the lead attaches to form the chinpiece of the noseband. These halters are not suitable for paddock usage or in loose stalls. An underhalter is a lightweight halter or headcollar which is made with only one small buckle, and can be worn under a bridle for tethering a horse without untacking.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Bridles usually have a bit attached to reins and are used for riding and driving horses.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "English Bridles have a cavesson style noseband and are seen in English riding. Their reins are buckled to one another, and they have little adornment or flashy hardware.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Western Bridles used in Western riding usually have no noseband, are made of thin bridle leather. They may have long, separated \"Split\" reins or shorter closed reins, which sometimes include an attached Romal. Western bridles are often adorned with silver or other decorative features.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Double bridles are a type of English bridle that use two bits in the mouth at once, a snaffle and a curb. The two bits allow the rider to have very precise control of the horse. As a rule, only very advanced horses and riders use double bridles. Double bridles are usually seen in the top levels of dressage, but also are seen in certain types of show hack and Saddle seat competition.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A hackamore is a headgear that utilizes a heavy noseband of some sort, rather than a bit, most often used to train young horses or to go easy on an older horse's mouth. Hackamores are more often seen in western riding. Some related styles of headgear that control a horse with a noseband rather than a bit are known as bitless bridles.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The word \"hackamore\" is derived from the Spanish word jáquima. Hackamores are seen in western riding disciplines, as well as in endurance riding and English riding disciplines such as show jumping and the stadium phase of eventing. While the classic bosal-style hackamore is usually used to start young horses, other designs, such as various bitless bridles and the mechanical hackamore are often seen on mature horses with dental issues that make bit use painful, horses with certain training problems, and on horses with mouth or tongue injuries. Some riders also like to use them in the winter to avoid putting a frozen metal bit into a horse's mouth.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Like bitted bridles, noseband-based designs can be gentle or harsh, depending on the hands of the rider. It is a myth that a bit is cruel and a hackamore is gentler. The horse's face is very soft and sensitive with many nerve endings. Misuse of a hackamore can cause swelling on the nose, scraping on the nose and jawbone, and extreme misuse may cause damage to the bones and cartilage of the horse's head.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A longeing cavesson (UK: lungeing) is a special type of halter or noseband used for longeing a horse. Longeing is the activity of having a horse walk, trot and/or canter in a large circle around the handler at the end of a rope that is 25 to 30 feet (9.1 m) long. It is used for training and exercise.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "A neck rope or cordeo is a rope tied around a horse's neck used to guide the horse during bridleless riding or groundwork.",
"title": "Headgear"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Reins consist of leather straps or rope attached to the outer ends of a bit and extend to the rider's or driver's hands. Reins are the means by which a horse rider or driver communicates directional commands to the horse's head. Pulling on the reins can be used to steer or stop the horse. The sides of a horse's mouth are sensitive, so pulling on the reins pulls the bit, which then pulls the horse's head from side to side, which is how the horse is controlled.",
"title": "Reins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On some types of harnesses there might be supporting rings to carry the reins over the horse's back. When pairs of horses are used in drawing a wagon or coach it is usual for the outer side of each pair to be connected to reins and the inside of the bits connected by a short bridging strap or rope. The driver carries \"four-in-hand\" or \"six-in-hand\" being the number of reins connecting to the pairs of horses.",
"title": "Reins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A rein may be attached to a halter to lead or guide the horse in a circle for training purposes or to lead a packhorse, but a simple lead rope is more often used for these purposes. A longe line is sometimes called a \"longe rein\", but it is actually a flat line about 30 feet (9.1 m) long, usually made of nylon or cotton web, about one inch wide, thus longer and wider than even a driving rein.",
"title": "Reins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A bit is a device placed in a horse's mouth, kept on a horse's head by means of a headstall. There are many types, each useful for specific types of riding and training.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The mouthpiece of the bit does not rest on the teeth of the horse, but rather rests on the gums or \"bars\" of the horse's mouth in an interdental space behind the front incisors and in front of the back molars. It is important that the style of bit is appropriate to the horse's needs and is fitted properly for it to function properly and be as comfortable as possible for the horse.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The basic \"classic\" styles of bits are:",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "While there are literally hundreds of types of bit mouthpieces, bit rings and bit shanks, essentially there are really only two broad categories: direct pressure bits, broadly termed snaffle bits; and leverage bits, usually termed curbs.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Bits that act with direct pressure on the tongue and lips of the bit are in the general category of snaffle bits. Snaffle bits commonly have a single jointed mouthpiece and act with a nutcracker effect on the bars, tongue and occasionally roof of the mouth. However, regardless of mouthpiece, any bit that operates only on direct pressure is a \"snaffle\" bit.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Leverage bits have shanks coming off the mouthpiece to create leverage that applies pressure to the poll, chin groove and mouth of the horse are in the category of curb bits. Any bit with shanks that works off of leverage is a \"curb\" bit, regardless of whether the mouthpiece is solid or jointed.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Some combination or hybrid bits combine direct pressure and leverage, such as the Kimblewick or Kimberwicke, which adds slight leverage to a two-rein design that resembles a snaffle; and the four rein designs such as the single mouthpiece Pelham bit and the double bridle, which places a curb and a snaffle bit simultaneously in the horse's mouth.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the wrong hands even the mildest bit can hurt the horse. Conversely, a very severe bit, in the right hands, can transmit subtle commands that cause no pain to the horse. Bit commands should be given with only the quietest movements of the hands, and much steering and stopping should be done with the legs and seat.",
"title": "Bits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A horse harness is a set of devices and straps that attaches a horse to a cart, carriage, sledge or any other load. There are two main styles of harnesses - breaststrap and collar and hames style. These differ in how the weight of the load is attached. Most Harnesses are made from leather, which is the traditional material for harnesses, though some designs are now made of nylon webbing or synthetic biothane.",
"title": "Harness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A breaststrap harness has a wide leather strap going horizontally across the horses' breast, attached to the traces and then to the load. This is used only for lighter loads. A collar and hames harness has a collar around the horses' neck with wood or metal hames in the collar. The traces attach from the hames to the load. This type of harness is needed for heavy draft work.",
"title": "Harness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Both types will also have a bridle and reins. A harness that is used to support shafts, such as on a cart pulled by a single horse, will also have a saddle attached to the harness to help the horse support the shafts and breeching to brake the forward motion of the vehicle, especially when stopping or moving downhill. Horses guiding vehicles by means of a pole, such as two-horse teams pulling a wagon, a hay-mower, or a dray, will have pole-straps attached to the lower part of the horse collar.",
"title": "Harness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Breastplates, breastcollars or breastgirths attach to the front of the saddle, cross the horse's chest, and usually have a strap that runs between the horse's front legs and attaches to the girth. They keep the saddle from sliding back or sideways. They are usually seen in demanding, fast-paced sports. They are crucial pieces of safety equipment for English riding activities requiring jumping, such as eventing, show jumping, polo, and fox hunting. They are also seen in Western riding events, particularly in rodeo, reining and cutting, where it is particularly important to prevent a saddle from shifting. They may also be worn in other horse show classes for decorative purposes.",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A martingale is a piece of equipment that keeps a horse from raising its head too high. Various styles can be used as a control measure, to prevent the horse from avoiding rider commands by raising its head out of position; or as a safety measure to keep the horse from tossing its head high or hard enough to smack its rider in the face.",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "They are allowed in many types of competition, especially those where speed or jumping may be required, but are not allowed in most \"flat\" classes at horse shows, though an exception is made in a few classes limited exclusively to young or \"green\" horses who may not yet be fully trained.",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Martingales are usually attached to the horse one of two ways. They are either attached to the center chest ring of a breastplate or, if no breastplate is worn, they are attached by two straps, one that goes around the horse's neck, and the other that attaches to the girth, with the martingale itself beginning at the point in the center of the chest where the neck and girth straps intersect.",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Martingale types include:",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "There are other training devices that fall loosely in the martingale category, in that they use straps attached to the reins or bit which limit the movement of the horse's head or add leverage to the rider's hands in order to control the horse's head. Common devices of this nature include the overcheck, the chambon, de Gogue, grazing reins, draw reins and the \"bitting harness\" or \"bitting rig\". However, most of this equipment is used for training purposes and is not legal in any competition. In some disciplines, use of leverage devices, even in training, is controversial.",
"title": "Breastplates and martingales"
}
]
| Tack is equipment or accessories equipped on horses and other equines in the course of their use as domesticated animals. This equipment includes such items as saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, and harnesses. Equipping a horse is often referred to as tacking up, and involves putting the tack equipment on the horse. A room to store such equipment, usually near or in a stable, is a tack room. | 2001-11-29T01:32:53Z | 2023-11-09T19:06:33Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_tack |
14,216 | Hausa language | Hausa (/ˈhaʊsə/; Harshen/Halshen Hausa (listen); Ajami: هَرْشٜن هَوْسَ) is a Chadic language spoken by the Hausa people in the northern parts of Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and Togo, and the southern parts of Niger, Chad and Sudan, with significant minorities in Ivory Coast.
Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Ethnologue estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 50.7 million people and as a second language by another 26.2 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 77 million.
In Nigeria, the Hausa-speaking film industry is known as Kannywood.
Hausa belongs to the West Chadic languages subgroup of the Chadic languages group, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic language family.
Native speakers of Hausa, the Hausa people, are mostly found in southern Niger and northern Nigeria. The language is used as a lingua franca by non-native speakers in most of northern Nigeria, southern Niger, northern Cameroon, northern Ghana, northern Benin, northern Togo, southern Chad and parts of Sudan.
In Nigeria, Hausa is dominant throughout the north, but not dominant in the states of Kwara, Kogi and Benue. Cities in which Hausa is spoken include Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Daura, Gobir, Zaria, Sokoto, Birnin Kebbi, Gusau, Dutse, Hadejia, Bauchi, Misau, Zamfara, Gombe, Nafada, Maiduguri, Yobe, Yola, Jalingo, Jos, Lafia, Nasarawa, Minna, Kontagora, Lokoja, Keffi and Abuja.
In Niger, Hausa is spoken in the south, including the cities of Maradi, Diffa, Tahoua, Zinder, Tillaberi, Dosso, and Agadez.
In Cameroon, Hausa is spoken in the north, including the cities of Ngaoundere, Garoua, and Maroua.
In Ghana, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Tamale, Bolgatanga, and Wa.
In Benin, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Parakou, Kandi, Natitingou, and Djougou.
In Togo, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Sokode, Kara, and Dapaong.
In Chad, Hausa is spoken in the south. Cities where it is spoken include N'Djamena.
In Sudan, Hausa is spoken in the states of Jazirah, Blue Nile, and Kordofan.
Hausa presents a wide uniformity wherever it is spoken. However, linguists have identified dialect areas with a cluster of features characteristic of each one.
Eastern Hausa dialects include Dauranci in Daura, Kananci in Kano, Bausanci in Bauchi, Gudduranci in Katagum Misau and part of Borno, and Hadejanci in Hadejiya.
Western Hausa dialects include Sakkwatanci in Sokoto, Katsinanci in Katsina, Arewanci in Gobir, Adar, Kebbi, and Zanhwaranci in Zamfara, and Kurhwayanci in Kurfey in Niger. Katsina is transitional between Eastern and Western dialects. Sokoto is used in a variety of classical Hausa literature, and is often known as Classical Hausa.
Northern Hausa dialects include Arewa (meaning 'North') and Arewaci.
Zazzaganci in Zazzau is the major Southern dialect.
The Daura (Dauranchi) and Kano (Kananci) dialect are the standard. The BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale and Voice of America offer Hausa services on their international news web sites using Dauranci and Kananci. In recent language development Zazzaganci took over the innovation of writing and speaking the current Hausa language use.
The western to eastern Hausa dialects of Kurhwayanci, Damagaram and Adarawa, represent the traditional northernmost limit of native Hausa communities. These are spoken in the northernmost sahel and mid-Saharan regions in west and central Niger in the Tillaberi, Tahoua, Dosso, Maradi, Agadez and Zinder regions. While mutually comprehensible with other dialects (especially Sakkwatanci, and to a lesser extent Gaananci), the northernmost dialects have slight grammatical and lexical differences owing to frequent contact with the Zarma, Fula, and Tuareg groups and cultural changes owing to the geographical differences between the grassland and desert zones. These dialects also have the quality of bordering on non-tonal pitch accent dialects.
This link between non-tonality and geographic location is not limited to Hausa alone, but is exhibited in other northern dialects of neighbouring languages; example includes differences within the Songhay language (between the non-tonal northernmost dialects of Koyra Chiini in Timbuktu and Koyraboro Senni in Gao; and the tonal southern Zarma dialect, spoken from western Niger to northern Ghana), and within the Soninke language (between the non-tonal northernmost dialects of Imraguen and Nemadi spoken in east-central Mauritania; and the tonal southern dialects of Senegal, Mali and the Sahel).
The Ghanaian Hausa dialect (Gaananci), spoken in Ghana and Togo, is a distinct western native Hausa dialect-bloc with adequate linguistic and media resources available. Separate smaller Hausa dialects are spoken by an unknown number of Hausa further west in parts of Burkina Faso, and in the Haoussa Foulane, Badji Haoussa, Guezou Haoussa, and Ansongo districts of northeastern Mali (where it is designated as a minority language by the Malian government), but there are very little linguistic resources and research done on these particular dialects at this time.
Gaananci forms a separate group from other Western Hausa dialects, as it now falls outside the contiguous Hausa-dominant area, and is usually identified by the use of c for ky, and j for gy. This is attributed to the fact that Ghana's Hausa population descend from Hausa-Fulani traders settled in the zongo districts of major trade-towns up and down the previous Asante, Gonja and Dagomba kingdoms stretching from the sahel to coastal regions, in particular the cities of Accra (Sabon Zango, Nima), Takoradi and Cape Coast
Gaananci exhibits noted inflected influences from Zarma, Gur, Jula-Bambara, Akan, and Soninke, as Ghana is the westernmost area in which the Hausa language is a major lingua-franca among sahelian/Muslim West Africans, including both Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian zango migrants primarily from the northern regions, or Mali and Burkina Faso. Ghana also marks the westernmost boundary in which the Hausa people inhabit in any considerable number. Immediately west and north of Ghana (in Cote d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso), Hausa is abruptly replaced with Dioula–Bambara as the main sahelian/Muslim lingua-franca of what become predominantly Manding areas, and native Hausa-speakers plummet to a very small urban minority.
Because of this, and the presence of surrounding Akan, Gbe, Gur and Mande languages, Gaananci was historically isolated from the other Hausa dialects. Despite this difference, grammatical similarities between Sakkwatanci and Ghanaian Hausa determine that the dialect, and the origin of the Ghanaian Hausa people themselves, are derived from the northwestern Hausa area surrounding Sokoto.
Hausa is also widely spoken by non-native Gur, and Mandé Ghanaian Muslims, but differs from Gaananci, and rather has features consistent with non-native Hausa dialects.
Hausa is also spoken in various parts of Cameroon and Chad, which combined the mixed dialects of Northern Nigeria and Niger. In addition, Arabic has had a great influence in the way Hausa is spoken by the native Hausa speakers in these areas.
In West Africa, Hausa's use as a lingua franca has given rise to a non-native pronunciation that differs vastly from native pronunciation by way of key omissions of implosive and ejective consonants present in native Hausa dialects, such as ɗ, ɓ and kʼ/ƙ, which are pronounced by non-native speakers as d, b and k respectively. This creates confusion among non-native and native Hausa speakers, as non-native pronunciation does not distinguish words like daidai ("correct") and ɗaiɗai ("one-by-one"). Another difference between native and non-native Hausa is the omission of vowel length in words and change in the standard tone of native Hausa dialects (ranging from native Fulani and Tuareg Hausa-speakers omitting tone altogether, to Hausa speakers with Gur or Yoruba mother tongues using additional tonal structures similar to those used in their native languages). Use of masculine and feminine gender nouns and sentence structure are usually omitted or interchanged, and many native Hausa nouns and verbs are substituted with non-native terms from local languages.
Non-native speakers of Hausa numbered more than 25 million and, in some areas, live close to native Hausa. It has replaced many other languages especially in the north-central and north-eastern part of Nigeria and continues to gain popularity in other parts of Africa as a result of Hausa movies and music which spread out throughout the region.
There are several pidgin forms of Hausa. Barikanchi was formerly used in the colonial army of Nigeria. Gibanawa is currently in widespread use in Jega in northwestern Nigeria, south of the native Hausa area.
The Hausa language has a long history of borrowing words from other languages, usually from the languages being spoken around and near Hausaland.
Hausa has between 23 and 25 consonant phonemes depending on the speaker.
The three-way contrast between palatals /c ɟ cʼ/, plain velars /k ɡ kʼ/, and labialized velars /kʷ ɡʷ kʷʼ/ is found only before long and short /a/, e.g. /cʼaːɽa/ ('grass'), /kʼaːɽaː/ ('to increase'), /kʷʼaːɽaː/ ('shea-nuts'). Before front vowels, only palatals and labialized velars occur, e.g. /ciːʃiː/ ('jealousy') vs. /kʷiːɓiː/ ('side of body'). Before rounded vowels, only labialized velars occur, e.g. /kʷoːɽaː/ ('ringworm').
Hausa has glottalic consonants (implosives and ejectives) at four or five places of articulation (depending on the dialect). They require movement of the glottis during pronunciation and have a staccato sound.
They are written with modified versions of Latin letters. They can also be denoted with an apostrophe, either before or after depending on the letter, as shown below.
Hausa vowels occur in five different vowel qualities, all of which can be short or long, totaling 10 monophthongs. In addition, there are four diphthongs, giving a total number of 14 vocalic phonemes.
In comparison with the long vowels, the short /i, u/ can be similar in quality to the long vowels, mid-centralized to [ɪ, ʊ] or centralized to [ɨ, ʉ].
Medial /i, u/ can be neutralized to [ɨ ~ ʉ], with the rounding depending on the environment.
Medial /e, o/ are neutralized with /a/.
The short /a/ can be either similar in quality to the long /aː/, or it can be as high as [ə], with possible intermediate pronunciations ([ɐ ~ ɜ]).
The 4 diphthongs in Hausa are /ai, au, iu, ui/.
Hausa is a tonal language. Each of its five vowels may have low tone, high tone or falling tone. In standard written Hausa, tone is not marked. In recent linguistic and pedagogical materials, tone is marked by means of diacritics.
An acute accent (´) may be used for high tone, but the usual practice is to leave high tone unmarked.
Except for the Zaria and Bauchi dialects spoken south of Kano, Hausa distinguishes between masculine and feminine genders.
Hausa, like the rest of the Chadic languages, is known for its complex, irregular pluralization of nouns. Noun plurals in Hausa are derived using a variety of morphological processes, such as suffixation, infixation, reduplication, or a combination of any of these processes. There are 20 plural classes proposed by Newman (2000).
Hausa marks tense differences by different sets of subject pronouns, sometimes with the pronoun combined with some additional particle. For this reason, a subject pronoun must accompany every verb in Hausa, regardless of whether the subject is known from previous context or is expressed by a noun subject.
Hausa's modern official orthography is a Latin-based alphabet called boko, which was introduced in the 1930s by the British colonial administration.
The letter ƴ (y with a right hook) is used only in Niger; in Nigeria it is written ʼy.
Tone and vowel length are not marked in writing. So, for example, /dàɡà/ "from" and /dáːɡáː/ "battle" are both written daga. The distinction between /r/ and /ɽ/ (which does not exist for all speakers) is not marked in orthography, but may be indicated with R̃ r̃ for the trill in linguistic transcription.
Hausa has also been written in ajami, an Arabic alphabet, since the early 17th century. The first known work to be written in Hausa is Riwayar Nabi Musa by Abdullahi Suka in the 17th century. There is no standard system of using ajami, and different writers may use letters with different values. Short vowels are written regularly with the help of vowel marks, which are seldom used in Arabic texts other than the Quran. Many medieval Hausa manuscripts in ajami, similar to the Timbuktu Manuscripts, have been discovered recently; some of them even describe constellations and calendars.
In the following table, short and long e are shown along with the Arabic letter for t (ت).
Hausa is one of three indigenous languages of Nigeria that have been rendered in braille.
At least three other writing systems for Hausa have been proposed or "discovered". None of these are in active use beyond perhaps some individuals. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hausa (/ˈhaʊsə/; Harshen/Halshen Hausa (listen); Ajami: هَرْشٜن هَوْسَ) is a Chadic language spoken by the Hausa people in the northern parts of Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and Togo, and the southern parts of Niger, Chad and Sudan, with significant minorities in Ivory Coast.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Ethnologue estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 50.7 million people and as a second language by another 26.2 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 77 million.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In Nigeria, the Hausa-speaking film industry is known as Kannywood.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hausa belongs to the West Chadic languages subgroup of the Chadic languages group, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic language family.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Native speakers of Hausa, the Hausa people, are mostly found in southern Niger and northern Nigeria. The language is used as a lingua franca by non-native speakers in most of northern Nigeria, southern Niger, northern Cameroon, northern Ghana, northern Benin, northern Togo, southern Chad and parts of Sudan.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In Nigeria, Hausa is dominant throughout the north, but not dominant in the states of Kwara, Kogi and Benue. Cities in which Hausa is spoken include Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Daura, Gobir, Zaria, Sokoto, Birnin Kebbi, Gusau, Dutse, Hadejia, Bauchi, Misau, Zamfara, Gombe, Nafada, Maiduguri, Yobe, Yola, Jalingo, Jos, Lafia, Nasarawa, Minna, Kontagora, Lokoja, Keffi and Abuja.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In Niger, Hausa is spoken in the south, including the cities of Maradi, Diffa, Tahoua, Zinder, Tillaberi, Dosso, and Agadez.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In Cameroon, Hausa is spoken in the north, including the cities of Ngaoundere, Garoua, and Maroua.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In Ghana, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Tamale, Bolgatanga, and Wa.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Benin, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Parakou, Kandi, Natitingou, and Djougou.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In Togo, Hausa is spoken in the north. Cities where it is spoken include Sokode, Kara, and Dapaong.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In Chad, Hausa is spoken in the south. Cities where it is spoken include N'Djamena.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In Sudan, Hausa is spoken in the states of Jazirah, Blue Nile, and Kordofan.",
"title": "Geographic distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hausa presents a wide uniformity wherever it is spoken. However, linguists have identified dialect areas with a cluster of features characteristic of each one.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Eastern Hausa dialects include Dauranci in Daura, Kananci in Kano, Bausanci in Bauchi, Gudduranci in Katagum Misau and part of Borno, and Hadejanci in Hadejiya.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Western Hausa dialects include Sakkwatanci in Sokoto, Katsinanci in Katsina, Arewanci in Gobir, Adar, Kebbi, and Zanhwaranci in Zamfara, and Kurhwayanci in Kurfey in Niger. Katsina is transitional between Eastern and Western dialects. Sokoto is used in a variety of classical Hausa literature, and is often known as Classical Hausa.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Northern Hausa dialects include Arewa (meaning 'North') and Arewaci.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Zazzaganci in Zazzau is the major Southern dialect.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Daura (Dauranchi) and Kano (Kananci) dialect are the standard. The BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale and Voice of America offer Hausa services on their international news web sites using Dauranci and Kananci. In recent language development Zazzaganci took over the innovation of writing and speaking the current Hausa language use.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The western to eastern Hausa dialects of Kurhwayanci, Damagaram and Adarawa, represent the traditional northernmost limit of native Hausa communities. These are spoken in the northernmost sahel and mid-Saharan regions in west and central Niger in the Tillaberi, Tahoua, Dosso, Maradi, Agadez and Zinder regions. While mutually comprehensible with other dialects (especially Sakkwatanci, and to a lesser extent Gaananci), the northernmost dialects have slight grammatical and lexical differences owing to frequent contact with the Zarma, Fula, and Tuareg groups and cultural changes owing to the geographical differences between the grassland and desert zones. These dialects also have the quality of bordering on non-tonal pitch accent dialects.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "This link between non-tonality and geographic location is not limited to Hausa alone, but is exhibited in other northern dialects of neighbouring languages; example includes differences within the Songhay language (between the non-tonal northernmost dialects of Koyra Chiini in Timbuktu and Koyraboro Senni in Gao; and the tonal southern Zarma dialect, spoken from western Niger to northern Ghana), and within the Soninke language (between the non-tonal northernmost dialects of Imraguen and Nemadi spoken in east-central Mauritania; and the tonal southern dialects of Senegal, Mali and the Sahel).",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Ghanaian Hausa dialect (Gaananci), spoken in Ghana and Togo, is a distinct western native Hausa dialect-bloc with adequate linguistic and media resources available. Separate smaller Hausa dialects are spoken by an unknown number of Hausa further west in parts of Burkina Faso, and in the Haoussa Foulane, Badji Haoussa, Guezou Haoussa, and Ansongo districts of northeastern Mali (where it is designated as a minority language by the Malian government), but there are very little linguistic resources and research done on these particular dialects at this time.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Gaananci forms a separate group from other Western Hausa dialects, as it now falls outside the contiguous Hausa-dominant area, and is usually identified by the use of c for ky, and j for gy. This is attributed to the fact that Ghana's Hausa population descend from Hausa-Fulani traders settled in the zongo districts of major trade-towns up and down the previous Asante, Gonja and Dagomba kingdoms stretching from the sahel to coastal regions, in particular the cities of Accra (Sabon Zango, Nima), Takoradi and Cape Coast",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Gaananci exhibits noted inflected influences from Zarma, Gur, Jula-Bambara, Akan, and Soninke, as Ghana is the westernmost area in which the Hausa language is a major lingua-franca among sahelian/Muslim West Africans, including both Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian zango migrants primarily from the northern regions, or Mali and Burkina Faso. Ghana also marks the westernmost boundary in which the Hausa people inhabit in any considerable number. Immediately west and north of Ghana (in Cote d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso), Hausa is abruptly replaced with Dioula–Bambara as the main sahelian/Muslim lingua-franca of what become predominantly Manding areas, and native Hausa-speakers plummet to a very small urban minority.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Because of this, and the presence of surrounding Akan, Gbe, Gur and Mande languages, Gaananci was historically isolated from the other Hausa dialects. Despite this difference, grammatical similarities between Sakkwatanci and Ghanaian Hausa determine that the dialect, and the origin of the Ghanaian Hausa people themselves, are derived from the northwestern Hausa area surrounding Sokoto.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Hausa is also widely spoken by non-native Gur, and Mandé Ghanaian Muslims, but differs from Gaananci, and rather has features consistent with non-native Hausa dialects.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Hausa is also spoken in various parts of Cameroon and Chad, which combined the mixed dialects of Northern Nigeria and Niger. In addition, Arabic has had a great influence in the way Hausa is spoken by the native Hausa speakers in these areas.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In West Africa, Hausa's use as a lingua franca has given rise to a non-native pronunciation that differs vastly from native pronunciation by way of key omissions of implosive and ejective consonants present in native Hausa dialects, such as ɗ, ɓ and kʼ/ƙ, which are pronounced by non-native speakers as d, b and k respectively. This creates confusion among non-native and native Hausa speakers, as non-native pronunciation does not distinguish words like daidai (\"correct\") and ɗaiɗai (\"one-by-one\"). Another difference between native and non-native Hausa is the omission of vowel length in words and change in the standard tone of native Hausa dialects (ranging from native Fulani and Tuareg Hausa-speakers omitting tone altogether, to Hausa speakers with Gur or Yoruba mother tongues using additional tonal structures similar to those used in their native languages). Use of masculine and feminine gender nouns and sentence structure are usually omitted or interchanged, and many native Hausa nouns and verbs are substituted with non-native terms from local languages.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Non-native speakers of Hausa numbered more than 25 million and, in some areas, live close to native Hausa. It has replaced many other languages especially in the north-central and north-eastern part of Nigeria and continues to gain popularity in other parts of Africa as a result of Hausa movies and music which spread out throughout the region.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "There are several pidgin forms of Hausa. Barikanchi was formerly used in the colonial army of Nigeria. Gibanawa is currently in widespread use in Jega in northwestern Nigeria, south of the native Hausa area.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Hausa language has a long history of borrowing words from other languages, usually from the languages being spoken around and near Hausaland.",
"title": "Dialects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Hausa has between 23 and 25 consonant phonemes depending on the speaker.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The three-way contrast between palatals /c ɟ cʼ/, plain velars /k ɡ kʼ/, and labialized velars /kʷ ɡʷ kʷʼ/ is found only before long and short /a/, e.g. /cʼaːɽa/ ('grass'), /kʼaːɽaː/ ('to increase'), /kʷʼaːɽaː/ ('shea-nuts'). Before front vowels, only palatals and labialized velars occur, e.g. /ciːʃiː/ ('jealousy') vs. /kʷiːɓiː/ ('side of body'). Before rounded vowels, only labialized velars occur, e.g. /kʷoːɽaː/ ('ringworm').",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Hausa has glottalic consonants (implosives and ejectives) at four or five places of articulation (depending on the dialect). They require movement of the glottis during pronunciation and have a staccato sound.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "They are written with modified versions of Latin letters. They can also be denoted with an apostrophe, either before or after depending on the letter, as shown below.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Hausa vowels occur in five different vowel qualities, all of which can be short or long, totaling 10 monophthongs. In addition, there are four diphthongs, giving a total number of 14 vocalic phonemes.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In comparison with the long vowels, the short /i, u/ can be similar in quality to the long vowels, mid-centralized to [ɪ, ʊ] or centralized to [ɨ, ʉ].",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Medial /i, u/ can be neutralized to [ɨ ~ ʉ], with the rounding depending on the environment.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Medial /e, o/ are neutralized with /a/.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The short /a/ can be either similar in quality to the long /aː/, or it can be as high as [ə], with possible intermediate pronunciations ([ɐ ~ ɜ]).",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The 4 diphthongs in Hausa are /ai, au, iu, ui/.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Hausa is a tonal language. Each of its five vowels may have low tone, high tone or falling tone. In standard written Hausa, tone is not marked. In recent linguistic and pedagogical materials, tone is marked by means of diacritics.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "An acute accent (´) may be used for high tone, but the usual practice is to leave high tone unmarked.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Except for the Zaria and Bauchi dialects spoken south of Kano, Hausa distinguishes between masculine and feminine genders.",
"title": "Morphology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Hausa, like the rest of the Chadic languages, is known for its complex, irregular pluralization of nouns. Noun plurals in Hausa are derived using a variety of morphological processes, such as suffixation, infixation, reduplication, or a combination of any of these processes. There are 20 plural classes proposed by Newman (2000).",
"title": "Morphology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Hausa marks tense differences by different sets of subject pronouns, sometimes with the pronoun combined with some additional particle. For this reason, a subject pronoun must accompany every verb in Hausa, regardless of whether the subject is known from previous context or is expressed by a noun subject.",
"title": "Morphology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Hausa's modern official orthography is a Latin-based alphabet called boko, which was introduced in the 1930s by the British colonial administration.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The letter ƴ (y with a right hook) is used only in Niger; in Nigeria it is written ʼy.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Tone and vowel length are not marked in writing. So, for example, /dàɡà/ \"from\" and /dáːɡáː/ \"battle\" are both written daga. The distinction between /r/ and /ɽ/ (which does not exist for all speakers) is not marked in orthography, but may be indicated with R̃ r̃ for the trill in linguistic transcription.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Hausa has also been written in ajami, an Arabic alphabet, since the early 17th century. The first known work to be written in Hausa is Riwayar Nabi Musa by Abdullahi Suka in the 17th century. There is no standard system of using ajami, and different writers may use letters with different values. Short vowels are written regularly with the help of vowel marks, which are seldom used in Arabic texts other than the Quran. Many medieval Hausa manuscripts in ajami, similar to the Timbuktu Manuscripts, have been discovered recently; some of them even describe constellations and calendars.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In the following table, short and long e are shown along with the Arabic letter for t (ت).",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Hausa is one of three indigenous languages of Nigeria that have been rendered in braille.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "At least three other writing systems for Hausa have been proposed or \"discovered\". None of these are in active use beyond perhaps some individuals.",
"title": "Writing systems"
}
]
| Hausa; Ajami: هَرْشٜن هَوْسَ) is a Chadic language spoken by the Hausa people in the northern parts of Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and Togo, and the southern parts of Niger, Chad and Sudan, with significant minorities in Ivory Coast. Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Ethnologue estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 50.7 million people and as a second language by another 26.2 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 77 million. In Nigeria, the Hausa-speaking film industry is known as Kannywood. | 2001-11-29T18:16:35Z | 2023-12-03T23:52:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausa_language |
14,220 | History of mathematics | The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.
The earliest mathematical texts available are from Mesopotamia and Egypt – Plimpton 322 (Babylonian c. 2000 – 1900 BC), the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Egyptian c. 1800 BC) and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (Egyptian c. 1890 BC). All of these texts mention the so-called Pythagorean triples, so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry.
The study of mathematics as a "demonstrative discipline" began in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, who coined the term "mathematics" from the ancient Greek μάθημα (mathema), meaning "subject of instruction". Greek mathematics greatly refined the methods (especially through the introduction of deductive reasoning and mathematical rigor in proofs) and expanded the subject matter of mathematics. Although they made virtually no contributions to theoretical mathematics, the ancient Romans used applied mathematics in surveying, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, bookkeeping, creation of lunar and solar calendars, and even arts and crafts. Chinese mathematics made early contributions, including a place value system and the first use of negative numbers. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics through the work of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Islamic mathematics, in turn, developed and expanded the mathematics known to these civilizations. Contemporaneous with but independent of these traditions were the mathematics developed by the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America, where the concept of zero was given a standard symbol in Maya numerals.
Many Greek and Arabic texts on mathematics were translated into Latin from the 12th century onward, leading to further development of mathematics in Medieval Europe. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, periods of mathematical discovery were often followed by centuries of stagnation. Beginning in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century, new mathematical developments, interacting with new scientific discoveries, were made at an increasing pace that continues through the present day. This includes the groundbreaking work of both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the development of infinitesimal calculus during the course of the 17th century.
The origins of mathematical thought lie in the concepts of number, patterns in nature, magnitude, and form. Modern studies of animal cognition have shown that these concepts are not unique to humans. Such concepts would have been part of everyday life in hunter-gatherer societies. The idea of the "number" concept evolving gradually over time is supported by the existence of languages which preserve the distinction between "one", "two", and "many", but not of numbers larger than two.
The Ishango bone, found near the headwaters of the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be more than 20,000 years old and consists of a series of marks carved in three columns running the length of the bone. Common interpretations are that the Ishango bone shows either a tally of the earliest known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers or a six-month lunar calendar. Peter Rudman argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only have come about after the concept of division, which he dates to after 10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about 500 BC. He also writes that "no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10." The Ishango bone, according to scholar Alexander Marshack, may have influenced the later development of mathematics in Egypt as, like some entries on the Ishango bone, Egyptian arithmetic also made use of multiplication by 2; this however, is disputed.
Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC pictorially represented geometric designs. It has been claimed that megalithic monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, incorporate geometric ideas such as circles, ellipses, and Pythagorean triples in their design. All of the above are disputed however, and the currently oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Babylonian and dynastic Egyptian sources.
Babylonian mathematics refers to any mathematics of the peoples of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the days of the early Sumerians through the Hellenistic period almost to the dawn of Christianity. The majority of Babylonian mathematical work comes from two widely separated periods: The first few hundred years of the second millennium BC (Old Babylonian period), and the last few centuries of the first millennium BC (Seleucid period). It is named Babylonian mathematics due to the central role of Babylon as a place of study. Later under the Arab Empire, Mesopotamia, especially Baghdad, once again became an important center of study for Islamic mathematics.
In contrast to the sparsity of sources in Egyptian mathematics, knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived from more than 400 clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Written in Cuneiform script, tablets were inscribed whilst the clay was moist, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. Some of these appear to be graded homework.
The earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. They developed a complex system of metrology from 3000 BC that was chiefly concerned with administrative/financial counting, such as grain allotments, workers, weights of silver, or even liquids, among other things. From around 2500 BC onward, the Sumerians wrote multiplication tables on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division problems. The earliest traces of the Babylonian numerals also date back to this period.
Babylonian mathematics were written using a sexagesimal (base-60) numeral system. From this derives the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 × 6) degrees in a circle, as well as the use of seconds and minutes of arc to denote fractions of a degree. It is thought the sexagesimal system was initially used by Sumerian scribes because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, and for scribes (doling out the aforementioned grain allotments, recording weights of silver, etc) being able to easily calculate by hand was essential, and so a sexagesimal system is pragmatically easier to calculate by hand with; however, there is the possibility that using a sexagesimal system was an ethno-linguistic phenomenon (that might not ever be known), and not a mathematical/practical decision. Also, unlike the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the Babylonians had a place-value system, where digits written in the left column represented larger values, much as in the [[decimal]] system. The power of the Babylonian notational system lay in that it could be used to represent fractions as easily as whole numbers; thus multiplying two numbers that contained fractions was no different from multiplying integers, similar to modern notation. The notational system of the Babylonians was the best of any civilization until the Renaissance,and its power allowed it to achieve remarkable computational accuracy; for example, the Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation of √2 accurate to five decimal places. The Babylonians lacked, however, an equivalent of the decimal point, and so the place value of a symbol often had to be inferred from the context. By the Seleucid period, the Babylonians had developed a zero symbol as a placeholder for empty positions; however it was only used for intermediate positions. This zero sign does not appear in terminal positions, thus the Babylonians came close but did not develop a true place value system.
Other topics covered by Babylonian mathematics include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations, and the calculation of regular numbers, and their reciprocal pairs. The tablets also include multiplication tables and methods for solving linear, quadratic equations and cubic equations, a remarkable achievement for the time. Tablets from the Old Babylonian period also contain the earliest known statement of the Pythagorean theorem. However, as with Egyptian mathematics, Babylonian mathematics shows no awareness of the difference between exact and approximate solutions, or the solvability of a problem, and most importantly, no explicit statement of the need for proofs or logical principles.
Egyptian mathematics refers to mathematics written in the Egyptian language. From the Hellenistic period, Greek replaced Egyptian as the written language of Egyptian scholars. Mathematical study in Egypt later continued under the Arab Empire as part of Islamic mathematics, when Arabic became the written language of Egyptian scholars. Archaeological evidence has suggested that the Ancient Egyptian counting system had origins in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also, fractal geometry designs which are widespread among Sub-Saharan African cultures are also found in Egyptian architecture and cosmological signs.
The most extensive Egyptian mathematical text is the Rhind papyrus (sometimes also called the Ahmes Papyrus after its author), dated to c. 1650 BC but likely a copy of an older document from the Middle Kingdom of about 2000–1800 BC. It is an instruction manual for students in arithmetic and geometry. In addition to giving area formulas and methods for multiplication, division and working with unit fractions, it also contains evidence of other mathematical knowledge, including composite and prime numbers; arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means; and simplistic understandings of both the Sieve of Eratosthenes and perfect number theory (namely, that of the number 6). It also shows how to solve first order linear equations as well as arithmetic and geometric series.
Another significant Egyptian mathematical text is the Moscow papyrus, also from the Middle Kingdom period, dated to c. 1890 BC. It consists of what are today called word problems or story problems, which were apparently intended as entertainment. One problem is considered to be of particular importance because it gives a method for finding the volume of a frustum (truncated pyramid).
Finally, the Berlin Papyrus 6619 (c. 1800 BC) shows that ancient Egyptians could solve a second-order algebraic equation.
Greek mathematics refers to the mathematics written in the Greek language from the time of Thales of Miletus (~600 BC) to the closure of the Academy of Athens in 529 AD. Greek mathematicians lived in cities spread over the entire Eastern Mediterranean, from Italy to North Africa, but were united by culture and language. Greek mathematics of the period following Alexander the Great is sometimes called Hellenistic mathematics.
Greek mathematics was much more sophisticated than the mathematics that had been developed by earlier cultures. All surviving records of pre-Greek mathematics show the use of inductive reasoning, that is, repeated observations used to establish rules of thumb. Greek mathematicians, by contrast, used deductive reasoning. The Greeks used logic to derive conclusions from definitions and axioms, and used mathematical rigor to prove them.
Greek mathematics is thought to have begun with Thales of Miletus (c. 624–c.546 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c. 582–c. 507 BC). Although the extent of the influence is disputed, they were probably inspired by Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics. According to legend, Pythagoras traveled to Egypt to learn mathematics, geometry, and astronomy from Egyptian priests.
Thales used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem. As a result, he has been hailed as the first true mathematician and the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed. Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, whose doctrine it was that mathematics ruled the universe and whose motto was "All is number". It was the Pythagoreans who coined the term "mathematics", and with whom the study of mathematics for its own sake begins. The Pythagoreans are credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem, though the statement of the theorem has a long history, and with the proof of the existence of irrational numbers. Although he was preceded by the Babylonians, Indians and the Chinese, the Neopythagorean mathematician Nicomachus (60–120 AD) provided one of the earliest Greco-Roman multiplication tables, whereas the oldest extant Greek multiplication table is found on a wax tablet dated to the 1st century AD (now found in the British Museum). The association of the Neopythagoreans with the Western invention of the multiplication table is evident in its later Medieval name: the mensa Pythagorica.
Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) is important in the history of mathematics for inspiring and guiding others. His Platonic Academy, in Athens, became the mathematical center of the world in the 4th century BC, and it was from this school that the leading mathematicians of the day, such as Eudoxus of Cnidus, came. Plato also discussed the foundations of mathematics, clarified some of the definitions (e.g. that of a line as "breadthless length"), and reorganized the assumptions. The analytic method is ascribed to Plato, while a formula for obtaining Pythagorean triples bears his name.
Eudoxus (408–c. 355 BC) developed the method of exhaustion, a precursor of modern integration and a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes. The former allowed the calculations of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures, while the latter enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances in geometry. Though he made no specific technical mathematical discoveries, Aristotle (384–c. 322 BC) contributed significantly to the development of mathematics by laying the foundations of logic.
In the 3rd century BC, the premier center of mathematical education and research was the Musaeum of Alexandria. It was there that Euclid (c. 300 BC) taught, and wrote the Elements, widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time. The Elements introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were already known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework. The Elements was known to all educated people in the West up through the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today. In addition to the familiar theorems of Euclidean geometry, the Elements was meant as an introductory textbook to all mathematical subjects of the time, such as number theory, algebra and solid geometry, including proofs that the square root of two is irrational and that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid also wrote extensively on other subjects, such as conic sections, optics, spherical geometry, and mechanics, but only half of his writings survive.
Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse, widely considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity, used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, in a manner not too dissimilar from modern calculus. He also showed one could use the method of exhaustion to calculate the value of π with as much precision as desired, and obtained the most accurate value of π then known, 3+10/71 < π < 3+10/70. He also studied the spiral bearing his name, obtained formulas for the volumes of surfaces of revolution (paraboloid, ellipsoid, hyperboloid), and an ingenious method of exponentiation for expressing very large numbers. While he is also known for his contributions to physics and several advanced mechanical devices, Archimedes himself placed far greater value on the products of his thought and general mathematical principles. He regarded as his greatest achievement his finding of the surface area and volume of a sphere, which he obtained by proving these are 2/3 the surface area and volume of a cylinder circumscribing the sphere.
Apollonius of Perga (c. 262–190 BC) made significant advances to the study of conic sections, showing that one can obtain all three varieties of conic section by varying the angle of the plane that cuts a double-napped cone. He also coined the terminology in use today for conic sections, namely parabola ("place beside" or "comparison"), "ellipse" ("deficiency"), and "hyperbola" ("a throw beyond"). His work Conics is one of the best known and preserved mathematical works from antiquity, and in it he derives many theorems concerning conic sections that would prove invaluable to later mathematicians and astronomers studying planetary motion, such as Isaac Newton. While neither Apollonius nor any other Greek mathematicians made the leap to coordinate geometry, Apollonius' treatment of curves is in some ways similar to the modern treatment, and some of his work seems to anticipate the development of analytical geometry by Descartes some 1800 years later.
Around the same time, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276–194 BC) devised the Sieve of Eratosthenes for finding prime numbers. The 3rd century BC is generally regarded as the "Golden Age" of Greek mathematics, with advances in pure mathematics henceforth in relative decline. Nevertheless, in the centuries that followed significant advances were made in applied mathematics, most notably trigonometry, largely to address the needs of astronomers. Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190–120 BC) is considered the founder of trigonometry for compiling the first known trigonometric table, and to him is also due the systematic use of the 360 degree circle. Heron of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) is credited with Heron's formula for finding the area of a scalene triangle and with being the first to recognize the possibility of negative numbers possessing square roots. Menelaus of Alexandria (c. 100 AD) pioneered spherical trigonometry through Menelaus' theorem. The most complete and influential trigonometric work of antiquity is the Almagest of Ptolemy (c. AD 90–168), a landmark astronomical treatise whose trigonometric tables would be used by astronomers for the next thousand years. Ptolemy is also credited with Ptolemy's theorem for deriving trigonometric quantities, and the most accurate value of π outside of China until the medieval period, 3.1416.
Following a period of stagnation after Ptolemy, the period between 250 and 350 AD is sometimes referred to as the "Silver Age" of Greek mathematics. During this period, Diophantus made significant advances in algebra, particularly indeterminate analysis, which is also known as "Diophantine analysis". The study of Diophantine equations and Diophantine approximations is a significant area of research to this day. His main work was the Arithmetica, a collection of 150 algebraic problems dealing with exact solutions to determinate and indeterminate equations. The Arithmetica had a significant influence on later mathematicians, such as Pierre de Fermat, who arrived at his famous Last Theorem after trying to generalize a problem he had read in the Arithmetica (that of dividing a square into two squares). Diophantus also made significant advances in notation, the Arithmetica being the first instance of algebraic symbolism and syncopation.
Among the last great Greek mathematicians is Pappus of Alexandria (4th century AD). He is known for his hexagon theorem and centroid theorem, as well as the Pappus configuration and Pappus graph. His Collection is a major source of knowledge on Greek mathematics as most of it has survived. Pappus is considered the last major innovator in Greek mathematics, with subsequent work consisting mostly of commentaries on earlier work.
The first woman mathematician recorded by history was Hypatia of Alexandria (AD 350–415). She succeeded her father (Theon of Alexandria) as Librarian at the Great Library and wrote many works on applied mathematics. Because of a political dispute, the Christian community in Alexandria had her stripped publicly and executed. Her death is sometimes taken as the end of the era of the Alexandrian Greek mathematics, although work did continue in Athens for another century with figures such as Proclus, Simplicius and Eutocius. Although Proclus and Simplicius were more philosophers than mathematicians, their commentaries on earlier works are valuable sources on Greek mathematics. The closure of the neo-Platonic Academy of Athens by the emperor Justinian in 529 AD is traditionally held as marking the end of the era of Greek mathematics, although the Greek tradition continued unbroken in the Byzantine empire with mathematicians such as Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, the architects of the Hagia Sophia. Nevertheless, Byzantine mathematics consisted mostly of commentaries, with little in the way of innovation, and the centers of mathematical innovation were to be found elsewhere by this time.
Although ethnic Greek mathematicians continued under the rule of the late Roman Republic and subsequent Roman Empire, there were no noteworthy native Latin mathematicians in comparison. Ancient Romans such as Cicero (106–43 BC), an influential Roman statesman who studied mathematics in Greece, believed that Roman surveyors and calculators were far more interested in applied mathematics than the theoretical mathematics and geometry that were prized by the Greeks. It is unclear if the Romans first derived their numerical system directly from the Greek precedent or from Etruscan numerals used by the Etruscan civilization centered in what is now Tuscany, central Italy.
Using calculation, Romans were adept at both instigating and detecting financial fraud, as well as managing taxes for the treasury. Siculus Flaccus, one of the Roman gromatici (i.e. land surveyor), wrote the Categories of Fields, which aided Roman surveyors in measuring the surface areas of allotted lands and territories. Aside from managing trade and taxes, the Romans also regularly applied mathematics to solve problems in engineering, including the erection of architecture such as bridges, road-building, and preparation for military campaigns. Arts and crafts such as Roman mosaics, inspired by previous Greek designs, created illusionist geometric patterns and rich, detailed scenes that required precise measurements for each tessera tile, the opus tessellatum pieces on average measuring eight millimeters square and the finer opus vermiculatum pieces having an average surface of four millimeters square.
The creation of the Roman calendar also necessitated basic mathematics. The first calendar allegedly dates back to 8th century BC during the Roman Kingdom and included 356 days plus a leap year every other year. In contrast, the lunar calendar of the Republican era contained 355 days, roughly ten-and-one-fourth days shorter than the solar year, a discrepancy that was solved by adding an extra month into the calendar after the 23rd of February. This calendar was supplanted by the Julian calendar, a solar calendar organized by Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) and devised by Sosigenes of Alexandria to include a leap day every four years in a 365-day cycle. This calendar, which contained an error of 11 minutes and 14 seconds, was later corrected by the Gregorian calendar organized by Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585), virtually the same solar calendar used in modern times as the international standard calendar.
At roughly the same time, the Han Chinese and the Romans both invented the wheeled odometer device for measuring distances traveled, the Roman model first described by the Roman civil engineer and architect Vitruvius (c. 80 BC – c. 15 BC). The device was used at least until the reign of emperor Commodus (r. 177 – 192 AD), but its design seems to have been lost until experiments were made during the 15th century in Western Europe. Perhaps relying on similar gear-work and technology found in the Antikythera mechanism, the odometer of Vitruvius featured chariot wheels measuring 4 feet (1.2 m) in diameter turning four-hundred times in one Roman mile (roughly 4590 ft/1400 m). With each revolution, a pin-and-axle device engaged a 400-tooth cogwheel that turned a second gear responsible for dropping pebbles into a box, each pebble representing one mile traversed.
An analysis of early Chinese mathematics has demonstrated its unique development compared to other parts of the world, leading scholars to assume an entirely independent development. The oldest extant mathematical text from China is the Zhoubi Suanjing (周髀算經), variously dated to between 1200 BC and 100 BC, though a date of about 300 BC during the Warring States Period appears reasonable. However, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips, containing the earliest known decimal multiplication table (although ancient Babylonians had ones with a base of 60), is dated around 305 BC and is perhaps the oldest surviving mathematical text of China.
Of particular note is the use in Chinese mathematics of a decimal positional notation system, the so-called "rod numerals" in which distinct ciphers were used for numbers between 1 and 10, and additional ciphers for powers of ten. Thus, the number 123 would be written using the symbol for "1", followed by the symbol for "100", then the symbol for "2" followed by the symbol for "10", followed by the symbol for "3". This was the most advanced number system in the world at the time, apparently in use several centuries before the common era and well before the development of the Indian numeral system. Rod numerals allowed the representation of numbers as large as desired and allowed calculations to be carried out on the suan pan, or Chinese abacus. The date of the invention of the suan pan is not certain, but the earliest written mention dates from AD 190, in Xu Yue's Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures.
The oldest existent work on geometry in China comes from the philosophical Mohist canon c. 330 BC, compiled by the followers of Mozi (470–390 BC). The Mo Jing described various aspects of many fields associated with physical science, and provided a small number of geometrical theorems as well. It also defined the concepts of circumference, diameter, radius, and volume.
In 212 BC, the Emperor Qin Shi Huang commanded all books in the Qin Empire other than officially sanctioned ones be burned. This decree was not universally obeyed, but as a consequence of this order little is known about ancient Chinese mathematics before this date. After the book burning of 212 BC, the Han dynasty (202 BC–220 AD) produced works of mathematics which presumably expanded on works that are now lost. The most important of these is The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, the full title of which appeared by AD 179, but existed in part under other titles beforehand. It consists of 246 word problems involving agriculture, business, employment of geometry to figure height spans and dimension ratios for Chinese pagoda towers, engineering, surveying, and includes material on right triangles. It created mathematical proof for the Pythagorean theorem, and a mathematical formula for Gaussian elimination. The treatise also provides values of π, which Chinese mathematicians originally approximated as 3 until Liu Xin (d. 23 AD) provided a figure of 3.1457 and subsequently Zhang Heng (78–139) approximated pi as 3.1724, as well as 3.162 by taking the square root of 10. Liu Hui commented on the Nine Chapters in the 3rd century AD and gave a value of π accurate to 5 decimal places (i.e. 3.14159). Though more of a matter of computational stamina than theoretical insight, in the 5th century AD Zu Chongzhi computed the value of π to seven decimal places (between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927), which remained the most accurate value of π for almost the next 1000 years. He also established a method which would later be called Cavalieri's principle to find the volume of a sphere.
The high-water mark of Chinese mathematics occurred in the 13th century during the latter half of the Song dynasty (960–1279), with the development of Chinese algebra. The most important text from that period is the Precious Mirror of the Four Elements by Zhu Shijie (1249–1314), dealing with the solution of simultaneous higher order algebraic equations using a method similar to Horner's method. The Precious Mirror also contains a diagram of Pascal's triangle with coefficients of binomial expansions through the eighth power, though both appear in Chinese works as early as 1100. The Chinese also made use of the complex combinatorial diagram known as the magic square and magic circles, described in ancient times and perfected by Yang Hui (AD 1238–1298).
Even after European mathematics began to flourish during the Renaissance, European and Chinese mathematics were separate traditions, with significant Chinese mathematical output in decline from the 13th century onwards. Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci carried mathematical ideas back and forth between the two cultures from the 16th to 18th centuries, though at this point far more mathematical ideas were entering China than leaving.
Japanese mathematics, Korean mathematics, and Vietnamese mathematics are traditionally viewed as stemming from Chinese mathematics and belonging to the Confucian-based East Asian cultural sphere. Korean and Japanese mathematics were heavily influenced by the algebraic works produced during China's Song dynasty, whereas Vietnamese mathematics was heavily indebted to popular works of China's Ming dynasty (1368–1644). For instance, although Vietnamese mathematical treatises were written in either Chinese or the native Vietnamese Chữ Nôm script, all of them followed the Chinese format of presenting a collection of problems with algorithms for solving them, followed by numerical answers. Mathematics in Vietnam and Korea were mostly associated with the professional court bureaucracy of mathematicians and astronomers, whereas in Japan it was more prevalent in the realm of private schools.
The earliest civilization on the Indian subcontinent is the Indus Valley civilization (mature second phase: 2600 to 1900 BC) that flourished in the Indus river basin. Their cities were laid out with geometric regularity, but no known mathematical documents survive from this civilization.
The oldest extant mathematical records from India are the Sulba Sutras (dated variously between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century AD), appendices to religious texts which give simple rules for constructing altars of various shapes, such as squares, rectangles, parallelograms, and others. As with Egypt, the preoccupation with temple functions points to an origin of mathematics in religious ritual. The Sulba Sutras give methods for constructing a circle with approximately the same area as a given square, which imply several different approximations of the value of π. In addition, they compute the square root of 2 to several decimal places, list Pythagorean triples, and give a statement of the Pythagorean theorem. All of these results are present in Babylonian mathematics, indicating Mesopotamian influence. It is not known to what extent the Sulba Sutras influenced later Indian mathematicians. As in China, there is a lack of continuity in Indian mathematics; significant advances are separated by long periods of inactivity.
Pāṇini (c. 5th century BC) formulated the rules for Sanskrit grammar. His notation was similar to modern mathematical notation, and used metarules, transformations, and recursion. Pingala (roughly 3rd–1st centuries BC) in his treatise of prosody uses a device corresponding to a binary numeral system. His discussion of the combinatorics of meters corresponds to an elementary version of the binomial theorem. Pingala's work also contains the basic ideas of Fibonacci numbers (called mātrāmeru).
The next significant mathematical documents from India after the Sulba Sutras are the Siddhantas, astronomical treatises from the 4th and 5th centuries AD (Gupta period) showing strong Hellenistic influence. They are significant in that they contain the first instance of trigonometric relations based on the half-chord, as is the case in modern trigonometry, rather than the full chord, as was the case in Ptolemaic trigonometry. Through a series of translation errors, the words "sine" and "cosine" derive from the Sanskrit "jiya" and "kojiya".
Around 500 AD, Aryabhata wrote the Aryabhatiya, a slim volume, written in verse, intended to supplement the rules of calculation used in astronomy and mathematical mensuration, though with no feeling for logic or deductive methodology. It is in the Aryabhatiya that the decimal place-value system first appears. Several centuries later, the Muslim mathematician Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Aryabhatiya as a "mix of common pebbles and costly crystals".
In the 7th century, Brahmagupta identified the Brahmagupta theorem, Brahmagupta's identity and Brahmagupta's formula, and for the first time, in Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta, he lucidly explained the use of zero as both a placeholder and decimal digit, and explained the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. It was from a translation of this Indian text on mathematics (c. 770) that Islamic mathematicians were introduced to this numeral system, which they adapted as Arabic numerals. Islamic scholars carried knowledge of this number system to Europe by the 12th century, and it has now displaced all older number systems throughout the world. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, all of which evolved from the Brahmi numerals. Each of the roughly dozen major scripts of India has its own numeral glyphs. In the 10th century, Halayudha's commentary on Pingala's work contains a study of the Fibonacci sequence and Pascal's triangle, and describes the formation of a matrix.
In the 12th century, Bhāskara II, who lived in southern India, wrote extensively on all then known branches of mathematics. His work contains mathematical objects equivalent or approximately equivalent to infinitesimals, derivatives, the mean value theorem and the derivative of the sine function. To what extent he anticipated the invention of calculus is a controversial subject among historians of mathematics. In the 14th century, Narayana Pandita completed his Ganita Kaumudi.
Also in the 14th century, Madhava of Sangamagrama, the founder of the Kerala School of Mathematics, found the Madhava–Leibniz series and obtained from it a transformed series, whose first 21 terms he used to compute the value of π as 3.14159265359. Madhava also found the Madhava-Gregory series to determine the arctangent, the Madhava-Newton power series to determine sine and cosine and the Taylor approximation for sine and cosine functions. In the 16th century, Jyesthadeva consolidated many of the Kerala School's developments and theorems in the Yukti-bhāṣā. It has been argued that the advances of the Kerala school, which laid the foundations of the classical analysis, were transmitted to Europe in the 16th century via Jesuit missionaries and traders who were active around the ancient port of Muziris at the time and, as a result, directly influenced later European developments in analysis and calculus. However, other scholars argue that the Kerala School did not formulate a systematic theory of differentiation and integration, and that there is not any direct evidence of their results being transmitted outside Kerala.
The Islamic Empire established across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Iberia, and in parts of India in the 8th century made significant contributions towards mathematics. Although most Islamic texts on mathematics were written in Arabic, most of them were not written by Arabs, since much like the status of Greek in the Hellenistic world, Arabic was used as the written language of non-Arab scholars throughout the Islamic world at the time.
In the 9th century, the mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote an important book on the Hindu–Arabic numerals and one on methods for solving equations. His book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, written about 825, along with the work of Al-Kindi, were instrumental in spreading Indian mathematics and Indian numerals to the West. The word algorithm is derived from the Latinization of his name, Algoritmi, and the word algebra from the title of one of his works, Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī hīsāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). He gave an exhaustive explanation for the algebraic solution of quadratic equations with positive roots, and he was the first to teach algebra in an elementary form and for its own sake. He also discussed the fundamental method of "reduction" and "balancing", referring to the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation. This is the operation which al-Khwārizmī originally described as al-jabr. His algebra was also no longer concerned "with a series of problems to be resolved, but an exposition which starts with primitive terms in which the combinations must give all possible prototypes for equations, which henceforward explicitly constitute the true object of study." He also studied an equation for its own sake and "in a generic manner, insofar as it does not simply emerge in the course of solving a problem, but is specifically called on to define an infinite class of problems."
In Egypt, Abu Kamil extended algebra to the set of irrational numbers, accepting square roots and fourth roots as solutions and coefficients to quadratic equations. He also developed techniques used to solve three non-linear simultaneous equations with three unknown variables. One unique feature of his works was trying to find all the possible solutions to some of his problems, including one where he found 2676 solutions. His works formed an important foundation for the development of algebra and influenced later mathematicians, such as al-Karaji and Fibonacci.
Further developments in algebra were made by Al-Karaji in his treatise al-Fakhri, where he extends the methodology to incorporate integer powers and integer roots of unknown quantities. Something close to a proof by mathematical induction appears in a book written by Al-Karaji around 1000 AD, who used it to prove the binomial theorem, Pascal's triangle, and the sum of integral cubes. The historian of mathematics, F. Woepcke, praised Al-Karaji for being "the first who introduced the theory of algebraic calculus." Also in the 10th century, Abul Wafa translated the works of Diophantus into Arabic. Ibn al-Haytham was the first mathematician to derive the formula for the sum of the fourth powers, using a method that is readily generalizable for determining the general formula for the sum of any integral powers. He performed an integration in order to find the volume of a paraboloid, and was able to generalize his result for the integrals of polynomials up to the fourth degree. He thus came close to finding a general formula for the integrals of polynomials, but he was not concerned with any polynomials higher than the fourth degree.
In the late 11th century, Omar Khayyam wrote Discussions of the Difficulties in Euclid, a book about what he perceived as flaws in Euclid's Elements, especially the parallel postulate. He was also the first to find the general geometric solution to cubic equations. He was also very influential in calendar reform.
In the 13th century, Nasir al-Din Tusi (Nasireddin) made advances in spherical trigonometry. He also wrote influential work on Euclid's parallel postulate. In the 15th century, Ghiyath al-Kashi computed the value of π to the 16th decimal place. Kashi also had an algorithm for calculating nth roots, which was a special case of the methods given many centuries later by Ruffini and Horner.
Other achievements of Muslim mathematicians during this period include the addition of the decimal point notation to the Arabic numerals, the discovery of all the modern trigonometric functions besides the sine, al-Kindi's introduction of cryptanalysis and frequency analysis, the development of analytic geometry by Ibn al-Haytham, the beginning of algebraic geometry by Omar Khayyam and the development of an algebraic notation by al-Qalasādī.
During the time of the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire from the 15th century, the development of Islamic mathematics became stagnant.
In the Pre-Columbian Americas, the Maya civilization that flourished in Mexico and Central America during the 1st millennium AD developed a unique tradition of mathematics that, due to its geographic isolation, was entirely independent of existing European, Egyptian, and Asian mathematics. Maya numerals used a base of twenty, the vigesimal system, instead of a base of ten that forms the basis of the decimal system used by most modern cultures. The Maya used mathematics to create the Maya calendar as well as to predict astronomical phenomena in their native Maya astronomy. While the concept of zero had to be inferred in the mathematics of many contemporary cultures, the Maya developed a standard symbol for it.
Medieval European interest in mathematics was driven by concerns quite different from those of modern mathematicians. One driving element was the belief that mathematics provided the key to understanding the created order of nature, frequently justified by Plato's Timaeus and the biblical passage (in the Book of Wisdom) that God had ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.
Boethius provided a place for mathematics in the curriculum in the 6th century when he coined the term quadrivium to describe the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. He wrote De institutione arithmetica, a free translation from the Greek of Nicomachus's Introduction to Arithmetic; De institutione musica, also derived from Greek sources; and a series of excerpts from Euclid's Elements. His works were theoretical, rather than practical, and were the basis of mathematical study until the recovery of Greek and Arabic mathematical works.
In the 12th century, European scholars traveled to Spain and Sicily seeking scientific Arabic texts, including al-Khwārizmī's The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, translated into Latin by Robert of Chester, and the complete text of Euclid's Elements, translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath, Herman of Carinthia, and Gerard of Cremona. These and other new sources sparked a renewal of mathematics.
Leonardo of Pisa, now known as Fibonacci, serendipitously learned about the Hindu–Arabic numerals on a trip to what is now Béjaïa, Algeria with his merchant father. (Europe was still using Roman numerals.) There, he observed a system of arithmetic (specifically algorism) which due to the positional notation of Hindu–Arabic numerals was much more efficient and greatly facilitated commerce. Leonardo wrote Liber Abaci in 1202 (updated in 1254) introducing the technique to Europe and beginning a long period of popularizing it. The book also brought to Europe what is now known as the Fibonacci sequence (known to Indian mathematicians for hundreds of years before that) which Fibonacci used as an unremarkable example.
The 14th century saw the development of new mathematical concepts to investigate a wide range of problems. One important contribution was development of mathematics of local motion.
Thomas Bradwardine proposed that speed (V) increases in arithmetic proportion as the ratio of force (F) to resistance (R) increases in geometric proportion. Bradwardine expressed this by a series of specific examples, but although the logarithm had not yet been conceived, we can express his conclusion anachronistically by writing: V = log (F/R). Bradwardine's analysis is an example of transferring a mathematical technique used by al-Kindi and Arnald of Villanova to quantify the nature of compound medicines to a different physical problem.
One of the 14th-century Oxford Calculators, William Heytesbury, lacking differential calculus and the concept of limits, proposed to measure instantaneous speed "by the path that would be described by [a body] if... it were moved uniformly at the same degree of speed with which it is moved in that given instant".
Heytesbury and others mathematically determined the distance covered by a body undergoing uniformly accelerated motion (today solved by integration), stating that "a moving body uniformly acquiring or losing that increment [of speed] will traverse in some given time a [distance] completely equal to that which it would traverse if it were moving continuously through the same time with the mean degree [of speed]".
Nicole Oresme at the University of Paris and the Italian Giovanni di Casali independently provided graphical demonstrations of this relationship, asserting that the area under the line depicting the constant acceleration, represented the total distance traveled. In a later mathematical commentary on Euclid's Elements, Oresme made a more detailed general analysis in which he demonstrated that a body will acquire in each successive increment of time an increment of any quality that increases as the odd numbers. Since Euclid had demonstrated the sum of the odd numbers are the square numbers, the total quality acquired by the body increases as the square of the time.
During the Renaissance, the development of mathematics and of accounting were intertwined. While there is no direct relationship between algebra and accounting, the teaching of the subjects and the books published often intended for the children of merchants who were sent to reckoning schools (in Flanders and Germany) or abacus schools (known as abbaco in Italy), where they learned the skills useful for trade and commerce. There is probably no need for algebra in performing bookkeeping operations, but for complex bartering operations or the calculation of compound interest, a basic knowledge of arithmetic was mandatory and knowledge of algebra was very useful.
Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492) wrote books on solid geometry and linear perspective, including De Prospectiva Pingendi (On Perspective for Painting), Trattato d’Abaco (Abacus Treatise), and De quinque corporibus regularibus (On the Five Regular Solids).
Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità (Italian: "Review of Arithmetic, Geometry, Ratio and Proportion") was first printed and published in Venice in 1494. It included a 27-page treatise on bookkeeping, "Particularis de Computis et Scripturis" (Italian: "Details of Calculation and Recording"). It was written primarily for, and sold mainly to, merchants who used the book as a reference text, as a source of pleasure from the mathematical puzzles it contained, and to aid the education of their sons. In Summa Arithmetica, Pacioli introduced symbols for plus and minus for the first time in a printed book, symbols that became standard notation in Italian Renaissance mathematics. Summa Arithmetica was also the first known book printed in Italy to contain algebra. Pacioli obtained many of his ideas from Piero Della Francesca whom he plagiarized.
In Italy, during the first half of the 16th century, Scipione del Ferro and Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia discovered solutions for cubic equations. Gerolamo Cardano published them in his 1545 book Ars Magna, together with a solution for the quartic equations, discovered by his student Lodovico Ferrari. In 1572 Rafael Bombelli published his L'Algebra in which he showed how to deal with the imaginary quantities that could appear in Cardano's formula for solving cubic equations.
Simon Stevin's De Thiende ('the art of tenths'), first published in Dutch in 1585, contained the first systematic treatment of decimal notation, which influenced all later work on the real number system.
Driven by the demands of navigation and the growing need for accurate maps of large areas, trigonometry grew to be a major branch of mathematics. Bartholomaeus Pitiscus was the first to use the word, publishing his Trigonometria in 1595. Regiomontanus's table of sines and cosines was published in 1533.
During the Renaissance the desire of artists to represent the natural world realistically, together with the rediscovered philosophy of the Greeks, led artists to study mathematics. They were also the engineers and architects of that time, and so had need of mathematics in any case. The art of painting in perspective, and the developments in geometry that involved, were studied intensely.
The 17th century saw an unprecedented increase of mathematical and scientific ideas across Europe. Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter in orbit about that planet, using a telescope based Hans Lipperhey's. Tycho Brahe had gathered a large quantity of mathematical data describing the positions of the planets in the sky. By his position as Brahe's assistant, Johannes Kepler was first exposed to and seriously interacted with the topic of planetary motion. Kepler's calculations were made simpler by the contemporaneous invention of logarithms by John Napier and Jost Bürgi. Kepler succeeded in formulating mathematical laws of planetary motion. The analytic geometry developed by René Descartes (1596–1650) allowed those orbits to be plotted on a graph, in Cartesian coordinates.
Building on earlier work by many predecessors, Isaac Newton discovered the laws of physics that explain Kepler's Laws, and brought together the concepts now known as calculus. Independently, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed calculus and much of the calculus notation still in use today. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of nearly all digital (electronic, solid-state, discrete logic) computers, including the Von Neumann architecture, which is the standard design paradigm, or "computer architecture", followed from the second half of the 20th century, and into the 21st. Leibniz has been called the "founder of computer science".
Science and mathematics had become an international endeavor, which would soon spread over the entire world.
In addition to the application of mathematics to the studies of the heavens, applied mathematics began to expand into new areas, with the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Pascal and Fermat set the groundwork for the investigations of probability theory and the corresponding rules of combinatorics in their discussions over a game of gambling. Pascal, with his wager, attempted to use the newly developing probability theory to argue for a life devoted to religion, on the grounds that even if the probability of success was small, the rewards were infinite. In some sense, this foreshadowed the development of utility theory in the 18th–19th century.
The most influential mathematician of the 18th century was arguably Leonhard Euler (1707–1783). His contributions range from founding the study of graph theory with the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem to standardizing many modern mathematical terms and notations. For example, he named the square root of minus 1 with the symbol i, and he popularized the use of the Greek letter π {\displaystyle \pi } to stand for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. He made numerous contributions to the study of topology, graph theory, calculus, combinatorics, and complex analysis, as evidenced by the multitude of theorems and notations named for him.
Other important European mathematicians of the 18th century included Joseph Louis Lagrange, who did pioneering work in number theory, algebra, differential calculus, and the calculus of variations, and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who, in the age of Napoleon, did important work on the foundations of celestial mechanics and on statistics.
Throughout the 19th century mathematics became increasingly abstract. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) epitomizes this trend. He did revolutionary work on functions of complex variables, in geometry, and on the convergence of series, leaving aside his many contributions to science. He also gave the first satisfactory proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra and of the quadratic reciprocity law.
This century saw the development of the two forms of non-Euclidean geometry, where the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry no longer holds. The Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and his rival, the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, independently defined and studied hyperbolic geometry, where uniqueness of parallels no longer holds. In this geometry the sum of angles in a triangle add up to less than 180°. Elliptic geometry was developed later in the 19th century by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann; here no parallel can be found and the angles in a triangle add up to more than 180°. Riemann also developed Riemannian geometry, which unifies and vastly generalizes the three types of geometry, and he defined the concept of a manifold, which generalizes the ideas of curves and surfaces, and set the mathematical foundations for the theory of general relativity.
The 19th century saw the beginning of a great deal of abstract algebra. Hermann Grassmann in Germany gave a first version of vector spaces, William Rowan Hamilton in Ireland developed noncommutative algebra. The British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra that soon evolved into what is now called Boolean algebra, in which the only numbers were 0 and 1. Boolean algebra is the starting point of mathematical logic and has important applications in electrical engineering and computer science. Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bernhard Riemann, and Karl Weierstrass reformulated the calculus in a more rigorous fashion.
Also, for the first time, the limits of mathematics were explored. Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian, and Évariste Galois, a Frenchman, proved that there is no general algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of degree greater than four (Abel–Ruffini theorem). Other 19th-century mathematicians used this in their proofs that straight edge and compass alone are not sufficient to trisect an arbitrary angle, to construct the side of a cube twice the volume of a given cube, nor to construct a square equal in area to a given circle. Mathematicians had vainly attempted to solve all of these problems since the time of the ancient Greeks. On the other hand, the limitation of three dimensions in geometry was surpassed in the 19th century through considerations of parameter space and hypercomplex numbers.
Abel and Galois's investigations into the solutions of various polynomial equations laid the groundwork for further developments of group theory, and the associated fields of abstract algebra. In the 20th century physicists and other scientists have seen group theory as the ideal way to study symmetry.
In the later 19th century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory, which enabled the rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity and has become the common language of nearly all mathematics. Cantor's set theory, and the rise of mathematical logic in the hands of Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, and A.N. Whitehead, initiated a long running debate on the foundations of mathematics.
The 19th century saw the founding of a number of national mathematical societies: the London Mathematical Society in 1865, the Société Mathématique de France in 1872, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo in 1884, the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 1883, and the American Mathematical Society in 1888. The first international, special-interest society, the Quaternion Society, was formed in 1899, in the context of a vector controversy.
In 1897, Kurt Hensel introduced p-adic numbers.
The 20th century saw mathematics become a major profession. By the end of the century, thousands of new Ph.D.s in mathematics were being awarded every year, and jobs were available in both teaching and industry. An effort to catalogue the areas and applications of mathematics was undertaken in Klein's encyclopedia.
In a 1900 speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians, David Hilbert set out a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. These problems, spanning many areas of mathematics, formed a central focus for much of 20th-century mathematics. Today, 10 have been solved, 7 are partially solved, and 2 are still open. The remaining 4 are too loosely formulated to be stated as solved or not.
Notable historical conjectures were finally proven. In 1976, Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel proved the four color theorem, controversial at the time for the use of a computer to do so. Andrew Wiles, building on the work of others, proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995. Paul Cohen and Kurt Gödel proved that the continuum hypothesis is independent of (could neither be proved nor disproved from) the standard axioms of set theory. In 1998 Thomas Callister Hales proved the Kepler conjecture.
Mathematical collaborations of unprecedented size and scope took place. An example is the classification of finite simple groups (also called the "enormous theorem"), whose proof between 1955 and 2004 required 500-odd journal articles by about 100 authors, and filling tens of thousands of pages. A group of French mathematicians, including Jean Dieudonné and André Weil, publishing under the pseudonym "Nicolas Bourbaki", attempted to exposit all of known mathematics as a coherent rigorous whole. The resulting several dozen volumes has had a controversial influence on mathematical education.
Differential geometry came into its own when Albert Einstein used it in general relativity. Entirely new areas of mathematics such as mathematical logic, topology, and John von Neumann's game theory changed the kinds of questions that could be answered by mathematical methods. All kinds of structures were abstracted using axioms and given names like metric spaces, topological spaces etc. As mathematicians do, the concept of an abstract structure was itself abstracted and led to category theory. Grothendieck and Serre recast algebraic geometry using sheaf theory. Large advances were made in the qualitative study of dynamical systems that Poincaré had begun in the 1890s. Measure theory was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Applications of measures include the Lebesgue integral, Kolmogorov's axiomatisation of probability theory, and ergodic theory. Knot theory greatly expanded. Quantum mechanics led to the development of functional analysis. Other new areas include Laurent Schwartz's distribution theory, fixed point theory, singularity theory and René Thom's catastrophe theory, model theory, and Mandelbrot's fractals. Lie theory with its Lie groups and Lie algebras became one of the major areas of study.
Non-standard analysis, introduced by Abraham Robinson, rehabilitated the infinitesimal approach to calculus, which had fallen into disrepute in favour of the theory of limits, by extending the field of real numbers to the Hyperreal numbers which include infinitesimal and infinite quantities. An even larger number system, the surreal numbers were discovered by John Horton Conway in connection with combinatorial games.
The development and continual improvement of computers, at first mechanical analog machines and then digital electronic machines, allowed industry to deal with larger and larger amounts of data to facilitate mass production and distribution and communication, and new areas of mathematics were developed to deal with this: Alan Turing's computability theory; complexity theory; Derrick Henry Lehmer's use of ENIAC to further number theory and the Lucas–Lehmer primality test; Rózsa Péter's recursive function theory; Claude Shannon's information theory; signal processing; data analysis; optimization and other areas of operations research. In the preceding centuries much mathematical focus was on calculus and continuous functions, but the rise of computing and communication networks led to an increasing importance of discrete concepts and the expansion of combinatorics including graph theory. The speed and data processing abilities of computers also enabled the handling of mathematical problems that were too time-consuming to deal with by pencil and paper calculations, leading to areas such as numerical analysis and symbolic computation. Some of the most important methods and algorithms of the 20th century are: the simplex algorithm, the fast Fourier transform, error-correcting codes, the Kalman filter from control theory and the RSA algorithm of public-key cryptography.
At the same time, deep insights were made about the limitations to mathematics. In 1929 and 1930, it was proved the truth or falsity of all statements formulated about the natural numbers plus either addition or multiplication (but not both), was decidable, i.e. could be determined by some algorithm. In 1931, Kurt Gödel found that this was not the case for the natural numbers plus both addition and multiplication; this system, known as Peano arithmetic, was in fact incompletable. (Peano arithmetic is adequate for a good deal of number theory, including the notion of prime number.) A consequence of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems is that in any mathematical system that includes Peano arithmetic (including all of analysis and geometry), truth necessarily outruns proof, i.e. there are true statements that cannot be proved within the system. Hence mathematics cannot be reduced to mathematical logic, and David Hilbert's dream of making all of mathematics complete and consistent needed to be reformulated.
One of the more colorful figures in 20th-century mathematics was Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (1887–1920), an Indian autodidact who conjectured or proved over 3000 theorems, including properties of highly composite numbers, the partition function and its asymptotics, and mock theta functions. He also made major investigations in the areas of gamma functions, modular forms, divergent series, hypergeometric series and prime number theory.
Paul Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. Mathematicians have a game equivalent to the Kevin Bacon Game, which leads to the Erdős number of a mathematician. This describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and Erdős, as measured by joint authorship of mathematical papers.
Emmy Noether has been described by many as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. She studied the theories of rings, fields, and algebras.
As in most areas of study, the explosion of knowledge in the scientific age has led to specialization: by the end of the century there were hundreds of specialized areas in mathematics and the Mathematics Subject Classification was dozens of pages long. More and more mathematical journals were published and, by the end of the century, the development of the World Wide Web led to online publishing.
In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the seven Millennium Prize Problems, and in 2003 the Poincaré conjecture was solved by Grigori Perelman (who declined to accept an award, as he was critical of the mathematics establishment).
Most mathematical journals now have online versions as well as print versions, and many online-only journals are launched. There is an increasing drive toward open access publishing, first popularized by arXiv.
There are many observable trends in mathematics, the most notable being that the subject is growing ever larger as computers are ever more important and powerful; the volume of data being produced by science and industry, facilitated by computers, continues expanding exponentially. As a result, there is a corresponding growth in the demand for mathematics to help process and understand this big data. Math science careers are also expected to continue to grow, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating (in 2018) that "employment of mathematical science occupations is projected to grow 27.9 percent from 2016 to 2026." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The earliest mathematical texts available are from Mesopotamia and Egypt – Plimpton 322 (Babylonian c. 2000 – 1900 BC), the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Egyptian c. 1800 BC) and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (Egyptian c. 1890 BC). All of these texts mention the so-called Pythagorean triples, so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The study of mathematics as a \"demonstrative discipline\" began in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, who coined the term \"mathematics\" from the ancient Greek μάθημα (mathema), meaning \"subject of instruction\". Greek mathematics greatly refined the methods (especially through the introduction of deductive reasoning and mathematical rigor in proofs) and expanded the subject matter of mathematics. Although they made virtually no contributions to theoretical mathematics, the ancient Romans used applied mathematics in surveying, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, bookkeeping, creation of lunar and solar calendars, and even arts and crafts. Chinese mathematics made early contributions, including a place value system and the first use of negative numbers. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics through the work of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Islamic mathematics, in turn, developed and expanded the mathematics known to these civilizations. Contemporaneous with but independent of these traditions were the mathematics developed by the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America, where the concept of zero was given a standard symbol in Maya numerals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Many Greek and Arabic texts on mathematics were translated into Latin from the 12th century onward, leading to further development of mathematics in Medieval Europe. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, periods of mathematical discovery were often followed by centuries of stagnation. Beginning in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century, new mathematical developments, interacting with new scientific discoveries, were made at an increasing pace that continues through the present day. This includes the groundbreaking work of both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the development of infinitesimal calculus during the course of the 17th century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The origins of mathematical thought lie in the concepts of number, patterns in nature, magnitude, and form. Modern studies of animal cognition have shown that these concepts are not unique to humans. Such concepts would have been part of everyday life in hunter-gatherer societies. The idea of the \"number\" concept evolving gradually over time is supported by the existence of languages which preserve the distinction between \"one\", \"two\", and \"many\", but not of numbers larger than two.",
"title": "Prehistoric"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Ishango bone, found near the headwaters of the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be more than 20,000 years old and consists of a series of marks carved in three columns running the length of the bone. Common interpretations are that the Ishango bone shows either a tally of the earliest known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers or a six-month lunar calendar. Peter Rudman argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only have come about after the concept of division, which he dates to after 10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about 500 BC. He also writes that \"no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10.\" The Ishango bone, according to scholar Alexander Marshack, may have influenced the later development of mathematics in Egypt as, like some entries on the Ishango bone, Egyptian arithmetic also made use of multiplication by 2; this however, is disputed.",
"title": "Prehistoric"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC pictorially represented geometric designs. It has been claimed that megalithic monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, incorporate geometric ideas such as circles, ellipses, and Pythagorean triples in their design. All of the above are disputed however, and the currently oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Babylonian and dynastic Egyptian sources.",
"title": "Prehistoric"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Babylonian mathematics refers to any mathematics of the peoples of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the days of the early Sumerians through the Hellenistic period almost to the dawn of Christianity. The majority of Babylonian mathematical work comes from two widely separated periods: The first few hundred years of the second millennium BC (Old Babylonian period), and the last few centuries of the first millennium BC (Seleucid period). It is named Babylonian mathematics due to the central role of Babylon as a place of study. Later under the Arab Empire, Mesopotamia, especially Baghdad, once again became an important center of study for Islamic mathematics.",
"title": "Babylonian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In contrast to the sparsity of sources in Egyptian mathematics, knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived from more than 400 clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Written in Cuneiform script, tablets were inscribed whilst the clay was moist, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. Some of these appear to be graded homework.",
"title": "Babylonian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. They developed a complex system of metrology from 3000 BC that was chiefly concerned with administrative/financial counting, such as grain allotments, workers, weights of silver, or even liquids, among other things. From around 2500 BC onward, the Sumerians wrote multiplication tables on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division problems. The earliest traces of the Babylonian numerals also date back to this period.",
"title": "Babylonian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Babylonian mathematics were written using a sexagesimal (base-60) numeral system. From this derives the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 × 6) degrees in a circle, as well as the use of seconds and minutes of arc to denote fractions of a degree. It is thought the sexagesimal system was initially used by Sumerian scribes because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, and for scribes (doling out the aforementioned grain allotments, recording weights of silver, etc) being able to easily calculate by hand was essential, and so a sexagesimal system is pragmatically easier to calculate by hand with; however, there is the possibility that using a sexagesimal system was an ethno-linguistic phenomenon (that might not ever be known), and not a mathematical/practical decision. Also, unlike the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the Babylonians had a place-value system, where digits written in the left column represented larger values, much as in the [[decimal]] system. The power of the Babylonian notational system lay in that it could be used to represent fractions as easily as whole numbers; thus multiplying two numbers that contained fractions was no different from multiplying integers, similar to modern notation. The notational system of the Babylonians was the best of any civilization until the Renaissance,and its power allowed it to achieve remarkable computational accuracy; for example, the Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation of √2 accurate to five decimal places. The Babylonians lacked, however, an equivalent of the decimal point, and so the place value of a symbol often had to be inferred from the context. By the Seleucid period, the Babylonians had developed a zero symbol as a placeholder for empty positions; however it was only used for intermediate positions. This zero sign does not appear in terminal positions, thus the Babylonians came close but did not develop a true place value system.",
"title": "Babylonian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Other topics covered by Babylonian mathematics include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations, and the calculation of regular numbers, and their reciprocal pairs. The tablets also include multiplication tables and methods for solving linear, quadratic equations and cubic equations, a remarkable achievement for the time. Tablets from the Old Babylonian period also contain the earliest known statement of the Pythagorean theorem. However, as with Egyptian mathematics, Babylonian mathematics shows no awareness of the difference between exact and approximate solutions, or the solvability of a problem, and most importantly, no explicit statement of the need for proofs or logical principles.",
"title": "Babylonian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Egyptian mathematics refers to mathematics written in the Egyptian language. From the Hellenistic period, Greek replaced Egyptian as the written language of Egyptian scholars. Mathematical study in Egypt later continued under the Arab Empire as part of Islamic mathematics, when Arabic became the written language of Egyptian scholars. Archaeological evidence has suggested that the Ancient Egyptian counting system had origins in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also, fractal geometry designs which are widespread among Sub-Saharan African cultures are also found in Egyptian architecture and cosmological signs.",
"title": "Egyptian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The most extensive Egyptian mathematical text is the Rhind papyrus (sometimes also called the Ahmes Papyrus after its author), dated to c. 1650 BC but likely a copy of an older document from the Middle Kingdom of about 2000–1800 BC. It is an instruction manual for students in arithmetic and geometry. In addition to giving area formulas and methods for multiplication, division and working with unit fractions, it also contains evidence of other mathematical knowledge, including composite and prime numbers; arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means; and simplistic understandings of both the Sieve of Eratosthenes and perfect number theory (namely, that of the number 6). It also shows how to solve first order linear equations as well as arithmetic and geometric series.",
"title": "Egyptian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Another significant Egyptian mathematical text is the Moscow papyrus, also from the Middle Kingdom period, dated to c. 1890 BC. It consists of what are today called word problems or story problems, which were apparently intended as entertainment. One problem is considered to be of particular importance because it gives a method for finding the volume of a frustum (truncated pyramid).",
"title": "Egyptian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Finally, the Berlin Papyrus 6619 (c. 1800 BC) shows that ancient Egyptians could solve a second-order algebraic equation.",
"title": "Egyptian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Greek mathematics refers to the mathematics written in the Greek language from the time of Thales of Miletus (~600 BC) to the closure of the Academy of Athens in 529 AD. Greek mathematicians lived in cities spread over the entire Eastern Mediterranean, from Italy to North Africa, but were united by culture and language. Greek mathematics of the period following Alexander the Great is sometimes called Hellenistic mathematics.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Greek mathematics was much more sophisticated than the mathematics that had been developed by earlier cultures. All surviving records of pre-Greek mathematics show the use of inductive reasoning, that is, repeated observations used to establish rules of thumb. Greek mathematicians, by contrast, used deductive reasoning. The Greeks used logic to derive conclusions from definitions and axioms, and used mathematical rigor to prove them.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Greek mathematics is thought to have begun with Thales of Miletus (c. 624–c.546 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c. 582–c. 507 BC). Although the extent of the influence is disputed, they were probably inspired by Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics. According to legend, Pythagoras traveled to Egypt to learn mathematics, geometry, and astronomy from Egyptian priests.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Thales used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem. As a result, he has been hailed as the first true mathematician and the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed. Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, whose doctrine it was that mathematics ruled the universe and whose motto was \"All is number\". It was the Pythagoreans who coined the term \"mathematics\", and with whom the study of mathematics for its own sake begins. The Pythagoreans are credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem, though the statement of the theorem has a long history, and with the proof of the existence of irrational numbers. Although he was preceded by the Babylonians, Indians and the Chinese, the Neopythagorean mathematician Nicomachus (60–120 AD) provided one of the earliest Greco-Roman multiplication tables, whereas the oldest extant Greek multiplication table is found on a wax tablet dated to the 1st century AD (now found in the British Museum). The association of the Neopythagoreans with the Western invention of the multiplication table is evident in its later Medieval name: the mensa Pythagorica.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) is important in the history of mathematics for inspiring and guiding others. His Platonic Academy, in Athens, became the mathematical center of the world in the 4th century BC, and it was from this school that the leading mathematicians of the day, such as Eudoxus of Cnidus, came. Plato also discussed the foundations of mathematics, clarified some of the definitions (e.g. that of a line as \"breadthless length\"), and reorganized the assumptions. The analytic method is ascribed to Plato, while a formula for obtaining Pythagorean triples bears his name.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Eudoxus (408–c. 355 BC) developed the method of exhaustion, a precursor of modern integration and a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes. The former allowed the calculations of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures, while the latter enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances in geometry. Though he made no specific technical mathematical discoveries, Aristotle (384–c. 322 BC) contributed significantly to the development of mathematics by laying the foundations of logic.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the 3rd century BC, the premier center of mathematical education and research was the Musaeum of Alexandria. It was there that Euclid (c. 300 BC) taught, and wrote the Elements, widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time. The Elements introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were already known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework. The Elements was known to all educated people in the West up through the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today. In addition to the familiar theorems of Euclidean geometry, the Elements was meant as an introductory textbook to all mathematical subjects of the time, such as number theory, algebra and solid geometry, including proofs that the square root of two is irrational and that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid also wrote extensively on other subjects, such as conic sections, optics, spherical geometry, and mechanics, but only half of his writings survive.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse, widely considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity, used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, in a manner not too dissimilar from modern calculus. He also showed one could use the method of exhaustion to calculate the value of π with as much precision as desired, and obtained the most accurate value of π then known, 3+10/71 < π < 3+10/70. He also studied the spiral bearing his name, obtained formulas for the volumes of surfaces of revolution (paraboloid, ellipsoid, hyperboloid), and an ingenious method of exponentiation for expressing very large numbers. While he is also known for his contributions to physics and several advanced mechanical devices, Archimedes himself placed far greater value on the products of his thought and general mathematical principles. He regarded as his greatest achievement his finding of the surface area and volume of a sphere, which he obtained by proving these are 2/3 the surface area and volume of a cylinder circumscribing the sphere.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Apollonius of Perga (c. 262–190 BC) made significant advances to the study of conic sections, showing that one can obtain all three varieties of conic section by varying the angle of the plane that cuts a double-napped cone. He also coined the terminology in use today for conic sections, namely parabola (\"place beside\" or \"comparison\"), \"ellipse\" (\"deficiency\"), and \"hyperbola\" (\"a throw beyond\"). His work Conics is one of the best known and preserved mathematical works from antiquity, and in it he derives many theorems concerning conic sections that would prove invaluable to later mathematicians and astronomers studying planetary motion, such as Isaac Newton. While neither Apollonius nor any other Greek mathematicians made the leap to coordinate geometry, Apollonius' treatment of curves is in some ways similar to the modern treatment, and some of his work seems to anticipate the development of analytical geometry by Descartes some 1800 years later.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Around the same time, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276–194 BC) devised the Sieve of Eratosthenes for finding prime numbers. The 3rd century BC is generally regarded as the \"Golden Age\" of Greek mathematics, with advances in pure mathematics henceforth in relative decline. Nevertheless, in the centuries that followed significant advances were made in applied mathematics, most notably trigonometry, largely to address the needs of astronomers. Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190–120 BC) is considered the founder of trigonometry for compiling the first known trigonometric table, and to him is also due the systematic use of the 360 degree circle. Heron of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) is credited with Heron's formula for finding the area of a scalene triangle and with being the first to recognize the possibility of negative numbers possessing square roots. Menelaus of Alexandria (c. 100 AD) pioneered spherical trigonometry through Menelaus' theorem. The most complete and influential trigonometric work of antiquity is the Almagest of Ptolemy (c. AD 90–168), a landmark astronomical treatise whose trigonometric tables would be used by astronomers for the next thousand years. Ptolemy is also credited with Ptolemy's theorem for deriving trigonometric quantities, and the most accurate value of π outside of China until the medieval period, 3.1416.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Following a period of stagnation after Ptolemy, the period between 250 and 350 AD is sometimes referred to as the \"Silver Age\" of Greek mathematics. During this period, Diophantus made significant advances in algebra, particularly indeterminate analysis, which is also known as \"Diophantine analysis\". The study of Diophantine equations and Diophantine approximations is a significant area of research to this day. His main work was the Arithmetica, a collection of 150 algebraic problems dealing with exact solutions to determinate and indeterminate equations. The Arithmetica had a significant influence on later mathematicians, such as Pierre de Fermat, who arrived at his famous Last Theorem after trying to generalize a problem he had read in the Arithmetica (that of dividing a square into two squares). Diophantus also made significant advances in notation, the Arithmetica being the first instance of algebraic symbolism and syncopation.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Among the last great Greek mathematicians is Pappus of Alexandria (4th century AD). He is known for his hexagon theorem and centroid theorem, as well as the Pappus configuration and Pappus graph. His Collection is a major source of knowledge on Greek mathematics as most of it has survived. Pappus is considered the last major innovator in Greek mathematics, with subsequent work consisting mostly of commentaries on earlier work.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The first woman mathematician recorded by history was Hypatia of Alexandria (AD 350–415). She succeeded her father (Theon of Alexandria) as Librarian at the Great Library and wrote many works on applied mathematics. Because of a political dispute, the Christian community in Alexandria had her stripped publicly and executed. Her death is sometimes taken as the end of the era of the Alexandrian Greek mathematics, although work did continue in Athens for another century with figures such as Proclus, Simplicius and Eutocius. Although Proclus and Simplicius were more philosophers than mathematicians, their commentaries on earlier works are valuable sources on Greek mathematics. The closure of the neo-Platonic Academy of Athens by the emperor Justinian in 529 AD is traditionally held as marking the end of the era of Greek mathematics, although the Greek tradition continued unbroken in the Byzantine empire with mathematicians such as Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, the architects of the Hagia Sophia. Nevertheless, Byzantine mathematics consisted mostly of commentaries, with little in the way of innovation, and the centers of mathematical innovation were to be found elsewhere by this time.",
"title": "Greek"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Although ethnic Greek mathematicians continued under the rule of the late Roman Republic and subsequent Roman Empire, there were no noteworthy native Latin mathematicians in comparison. Ancient Romans such as Cicero (106–43 BC), an influential Roman statesman who studied mathematics in Greece, believed that Roman surveyors and calculators were far more interested in applied mathematics than the theoretical mathematics and geometry that were prized by the Greeks. It is unclear if the Romans first derived their numerical system directly from the Greek precedent or from Etruscan numerals used by the Etruscan civilization centered in what is now Tuscany, central Italy.",
"title": "Roman"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Using calculation, Romans were adept at both instigating and detecting financial fraud, as well as managing taxes for the treasury. Siculus Flaccus, one of the Roman gromatici (i.e. land surveyor), wrote the Categories of Fields, which aided Roman surveyors in measuring the surface areas of allotted lands and territories. Aside from managing trade and taxes, the Romans also regularly applied mathematics to solve problems in engineering, including the erection of architecture such as bridges, road-building, and preparation for military campaigns. Arts and crafts such as Roman mosaics, inspired by previous Greek designs, created illusionist geometric patterns and rich, detailed scenes that required precise measurements for each tessera tile, the opus tessellatum pieces on average measuring eight millimeters square and the finer opus vermiculatum pieces having an average surface of four millimeters square.",
"title": "Roman"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The creation of the Roman calendar also necessitated basic mathematics. The first calendar allegedly dates back to 8th century BC during the Roman Kingdom and included 356 days plus a leap year every other year. In contrast, the lunar calendar of the Republican era contained 355 days, roughly ten-and-one-fourth days shorter than the solar year, a discrepancy that was solved by adding an extra month into the calendar after the 23rd of February. This calendar was supplanted by the Julian calendar, a solar calendar organized by Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) and devised by Sosigenes of Alexandria to include a leap day every four years in a 365-day cycle. This calendar, which contained an error of 11 minutes and 14 seconds, was later corrected by the Gregorian calendar organized by Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585), virtually the same solar calendar used in modern times as the international standard calendar.",
"title": "Roman"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "At roughly the same time, the Han Chinese and the Romans both invented the wheeled odometer device for measuring distances traveled, the Roman model first described by the Roman civil engineer and architect Vitruvius (c. 80 BC – c. 15 BC). The device was used at least until the reign of emperor Commodus (r. 177 – 192 AD), but its design seems to have been lost until experiments were made during the 15th century in Western Europe. Perhaps relying on similar gear-work and technology found in the Antikythera mechanism, the odometer of Vitruvius featured chariot wheels measuring 4 feet (1.2 m) in diameter turning four-hundred times in one Roman mile (roughly 4590 ft/1400 m). With each revolution, a pin-and-axle device engaged a 400-tooth cogwheel that turned a second gear responsible for dropping pebbles into a box, each pebble representing one mile traversed.",
"title": "Roman"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "An analysis of early Chinese mathematics has demonstrated its unique development compared to other parts of the world, leading scholars to assume an entirely independent development. The oldest extant mathematical text from China is the Zhoubi Suanjing (周髀算經), variously dated to between 1200 BC and 100 BC, though a date of about 300 BC during the Warring States Period appears reasonable. However, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips, containing the earliest known decimal multiplication table (although ancient Babylonians had ones with a base of 60), is dated around 305 BC and is perhaps the oldest surviving mathematical text of China.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Of particular note is the use in Chinese mathematics of a decimal positional notation system, the so-called \"rod numerals\" in which distinct ciphers were used for numbers between 1 and 10, and additional ciphers for powers of ten. Thus, the number 123 would be written using the symbol for \"1\", followed by the symbol for \"100\", then the symbol for \"2\" followed by the symbol for \"10\", followed by the symbol for \"3\". This was the most advanced number system in the world at the time, apparently in use several centuries before the common era and well before the development of the Indian numeral system. Rod numerals allowed the representation of numbers as large as desired and allowed calculations to be carried out on the suan pan, or Chinese abacus. The date of the invention of the suan pan is not certain, but the earliest written mention dates from AD 190, in Xu Yue's Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The oldest existent work on geometry in China comes from the philosophical Mohist canon c. 330 BC, compiled by the followers of Mozi (470–390 BC). The Mo Jing described various aspects of many fields associated with physical science, and provided a small number of geometrical theorems as well. It also defined the concepts of circumference, diameter, radius, and volume.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 212 BC, the Emperor Qin Shi Huang commanded all books in the Qin Empire other than officially sanctioned ones be burned. This decree was not universally obeyed, but as a consequence of this order little is known about ancient Chinese mathematics before this date. After the book burning of 212 BC, the Han dynasty (202 BC–220 AD) produced works of mathematics which presumably expanded on works that are now lost. The most important of these is The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, the full title of which appeared by AD 179, but existed in part under other titles beforehand. It consists of 246 word problems involving agriculture, business, employment of geometry to figure height spans and dimension ratios for Chinese pagoda towers, engineering, surveying, and includes material on right triangles. It created mathematical proof for the Pythagorean theorem, and a mathematical formula for Gaussian elimination. The treatise also provides values of π, which Chinese mathematicians originally approximated as 3 until Liu Xin (d. 23 AD) provided a figure of 3.1457 and subsequently Zhang Heng (78–139) approximated pi as 3.1724, as well as 3.162 by taking the square root of 10. Liu Hui commented on the Nine Chapters in the 3rd century AD and gave a value of π accurate to 5 decimal places (i.e. 3.14159). Though more of a matter of computational stamina than theoretical insight, in the 5th century AD Zu Chongzhi computed the value of π to seven decimal places (between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927), which remained the most accurate value of π for almost the next 1000 years. He also established a method which would later be called Cavalieri's principle to find the volume of a sphere.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The high-water mark of Chinese mathematics occurred in the 13th century during the latter half of the Song dynasty (960–1279), with the development of Chinese algebra. The most important text from that period is the Precious Mirror of the Four Elements by Zhu Shijie (1249–1314), dealing with the solution of simultaneous higher order algebraic equations using a method similar to Horner's method. The Precious Mirror also contains a diagram of Pascal's triangle with coefficients of binomial expansions through the eighth power, though both appear in Chinese works as early as 1100. The Chinese also made use of the complex combinatorial diagram known as the magic square and magic circles, described in ancient times and perfected by Yang Hui (AD 1238–1298).",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Even after European mathematics began to flourish during the Renaissance, European and Chinese mathematics were separate traditions, with significant Chinese mathematical output in decline from the 13th century onwards. Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci carried mathematical ideas back and forth between the two cultures from the 16th to 18th centuries, though at this point far more mathematical ideas were entering China than leaving.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Japanese mathematics, Korean mathematics, and Vietnamese mathematics are traditionally viewed as stemming from Chinese mathematics and belonging to the Confucian-based East Asian cultural sphere. Korean and Japanese mathematics were heavily influenced by the algebraic works produced during China's Song dynasty, whereas Vietnamese mathematics was heavily indebted to popular works of China's Ming dynasty (1368–1644). For instance, although Vietnamese mathematical treatises were written in either Chinese or the native Vietnamese Chữ Nôm script, all of them followed the Chinese format of presenting a collection of problems with algorithms for solving them, followed by numerical answers. Mathematics in Vietnam and Korea were mostly associated with the professional court bureaucracy of mathematicians and astronomers, whereas in Japan it was more prevalent in the realm of private schools.",
"title": "Chinese"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The earliest civilization on the Indian subcontinent is the Indus Valley civilization (mature second phase: 2600 to 1900 BC) that flourished in the Indus river basin. Their cities were laid out with geometric regularity, but no known mathematical documents survive from this civilization.",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The oldest extant mathematical records from India are the Sulba Sutras (dated variously between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century AD), appendices to religious texts which give simple rules for constructing altars of various shapes, such as squares, rectangles, parallelograms, and others. As with Egypt, the preoccupation with temple functions points to an origin of mathematics in religious ritual. The Sulba Sutras give methods for constructing a circle with approximately the same area as a given square, which imply several different approximations of the value of π. In addition, they compute the square root of 2 to several decimal places, list Pythagorean triples, and give a statement of the Pythagorean theorem. All of these results are present in Babylonian mathematics, indicating Mesopotamian influence. It is not known to what extent the Sulba Sutras influenced later Indian mathematicians. As in China, there is a lack of continuity in Indian mathematics; significant advances are separated by long periods of inactivity.",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Pāṇini (c. 5th century BC) formulated the rules for Sanskrit grammar. His notation was similar to modern mathematical notation, and used metarules, transformations, and recursion. Pingala (roughly 3rd–1st centuries BC) in his treatise of prosody uses a device corresponding to a binary numeral system. His discussion of the combinatorics of meters corresponds to an elementary version of the binomial theorem. Pingala's work also contains the basic ideas of Fibonacci numbers (called mātrāmeru).",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The next significant mathematical documents from India after the Sulba Sutras are the Siddhantas, astronomical treatises from the 4th and 5th centuries AD (Gupta period) showing strong Hellenistic influence. They are significant in that they contain the first instance of trigonometric relations based on the half-chord, as is the case in modern trigonometry, rather than the full chord, as was the case in Ptolemaic trigonometry. Through a series of translation errors, the words \"sine\" and \"cosine\" derive from the Sanskrit \"jiya\" and \"kojiya\".",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Around 500 AD, Aryabhata wrote the Aryabhatiya, a slim volume, written in verse, intended to supplement the rules of calculation used in astronomy and mathematical mensuration, though with no feeling for logic or deductive methodology. It is in the Aryabhatiya that the decimal place-value system first appears. Several centuries later, the Muslim mathematician Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Aryabhatiya as a \"mix of common pebbles and costly crystals\".",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the 7th century, Brahmagupta identified the Brahmagupta theorem, Brahmagupta's identity and Brahmagupta's formula, and for the first time, in Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta, he lucidly explained the use of zero as both a placeholder and decimal digit, and explained the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. It was from a translation of this Indian text on mathematics (c. 770) that Islamic mathematicians were introduced to this numeral system, which they adapted as Arabic numerals. Islamic scholars carried knowledge of this number system to Europe by the 12th century, and it has now displaced all older number systems throughout the world. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, all of which evolved from the Brahmi numerals. Each of the roughly dozen major scripts of India has its own numeral glyphs. In the 10th century, Halayudha's commentary on Pingala's work contains a study of the Fibonacci sequence and Pascal's triangle, and describes the formation of a matrix.",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In the 12th century, Bhāskara II, who lived in southern India, wrote extensively on all then known branches of mathematics. His work contains mathematical objects equivalent or approximately equivalent to infinitesimals, derivatives, the mean value theorem and the derivative of the sine function. To what extent he anticipated the invention of calculus is a controversial subject among historians of mathematics. In the 14th century, Narayana Pandita completed his Ganita Kaumudi.",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Also in the 14th century, Madhava of Sangamagrama, the founder of the Kerala School of Mathematics, found the Madhava–Leibniz series and obtained from it a transformed series, whose first 21 terms he used to compute the value of π as 3.14159265359. Madhava also found the Madhava-Gregory series to determine the arctangent, the Madhava-Newton power series to determine sine and cosine and the Taylor approximation for sine and cosine functions. In the 16th century, Jyesthadeva consolidated many of the Kerala School's developments and theorems in the Yukti-bhāṣā. It has been argued that the advances of the Kerala school, which laid the foundations of the classical analysis, were transmitted to Europe in the 16th century via Jesuit missionaries and traders who were active around the ancient port of Muziris at the time and, as a result, directly influenced later European developments in analysis and calculus. However, other scholars argue that the Kerala School did not formulate a systematic theory of differentiation and integration, and that there is not any direct evidence of their results being transmitted outside Kerala.",
"title": "Indian"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Islamic Empire established across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Iberia, and in parts of India in the 8th century made significant contributions towards mathematics. Although most Islamic texts on mathematics were written in Arabic, most of them were not written by Arabs, since much like the status of Greek in the Hellenistic world, Arabic was used as the written language of non-Arab scholars throughout the Islamic world at the time.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the 9th century, the mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote an important book on the Hindu–Arabic numerals and one on methods for solving equations. His book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, written about 825, along with the work of Al-Kindi, were instrumental in spreading Indian mathematics and Indian numerals to the West. The word algorithm is derived from the Latinization of his name, Algoritmi, and the word algebra from the title of one of his works, Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī hīsāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). He gave an exhaustive explanation for the algebraic solution of quadratic equations with positive roots, and he was the first to teach algebra in an elementary form and for its own sake. He also discussed the fundamental method of \"reduction\" and \"balancing\", referring to the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation. This is the operation which al-Khwārizmī originally described as al-jabr. His algebra was also no longer concerned \"with a series of problems to be resolved, but an exposition which starts with primitive terms in which the combinations must give all possible prototypes for equations, which henceforward explicitly constitute the true object of study.\" He also studied an equation for its own sake and \"in a generic manner, insofar as it does not simply emerge in the course of solving a problem, but is specifically called on to define an infinite class of problems.\"",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In Egypt, Abu Kamil extended algebra to the set of irrational numbers, accepting square roots and fourth roots as solutions and coefficients to quadratic equations. He also developed techniques used to solve three non-linear simultaneous equations with three unknown variables. One unique feature of his works was trying to find all the possible solutions to some of his problems, including one where he found 2676 solutions. His works formed an important foundation for the development of algebra and influenced later mathematicians, such as al-Karaji and Fibonacci.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Further developments in algebra were made by Al-Karaji in his treatise al-Fakhri, where he extends the methodology to incorporate integer powers and integer roots of unknown quantities. Something close to a proof by mathematical induction appears in a book written by Al-Karaji around 1000 AD, who used it to prove the binomial theorem, Pascal's triangle, and the sum of integral cubes. The historian of mathematics, F. Woepcke, praised Al-Karaji for being \"the first who introduced the theory of algebraic calculus.\" Also in the 10th century, Abul Wafa translated the works of Diophantus into Arabic. Ibn al-Haytham was the first mathematician to derive the formula for the sum of the fourth powers, using a method that is readily generalizable for determining the general formula for the sum of any integral powers. He performed an integration in order to find the volume of a paraboloid, and was able to generalize his result for the integrals of polynomials up to the fourth degree. He thus came close to finding a general formula for the integrals of polynomials, but he was not concerned with any polynomials higher than the fourth degree.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In the late 11th century, Omar Khayyam wrote Discussions of the Difficulties in Euclid, a book about what he perceived as flaws in Euclid's Elements, especially the parallel postulate. He was also the first to find the general geometric solution to cubic equations. He was also very influential in calendar reform.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In the 13th century, Nasir al-Din Tusi (Nasireddin) made advances in spherical trigonometry. He also wrote influential work on Euclid's parallel postulate. In the 15th century, Ghiyath al-Kashi computed the value of π to the 16th decimal place. Kashi also had an algorithm for calculating nth roots, which was a special case of the methods given many centuries later by Ruffini and Horner.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Other achievements of Muslim mathematicians during this period include the addition of the decimal point notation to the Arabic numerals, the discovery of all the modern trigonometric functions besides the sine, al-Kindi's introduction of cryptanalysis and frequency analysis, the development of analytic geometry by Ibn al-Haytham, the beginning of algebraic geometry by Omar Khayyam and the development of an algebraic notation by al-Qalasādī.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "During the time of the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire from the 15th century, the development of Islamic mathematics became stagnant.",
"title": "Islamic empires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In the Pre-Columbian Americas, the Maya civilization that flourished in Mexico and Central America during the 1st millennium AD developed a unique tradition of mathematics that, due to its geographic isolation, was entirely independent of existing European, Egyptian, and Asian mathematics. Maya numerals used a base of twenty, the vigesimal system, instead of a base of ten that forms the basis of the decimal system used by most modern cultures. The Maya used mathematics to create the Maya calendar as well as to predict astronomical phenomena in their native Maya astronomy. While the concept of zero had to be inferred in the mathematics of many contemporary cultures, the Maya developed a standard symbol for it.",
"title": "Maya"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Medieval European interest in mathematics was driven by concerns quite different from those of modern mathematicians. One driving element was the belief that mathematics provided the key to understanding the created order of nature, frequently justified by Plato's Timaeus and the biblical passage (in the Book of Wisdom) that God had ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Boethius provided a place for mathematics in the curriculum in the 6th century when he coined the term quadrivium to describe the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. He wrote De institutione arithmetica, a free translation from the Greek of Nicomachus's Introduction to Arithmetic; De institutione musica, also derived from Greek sources; and a series of excerpts from Euclid's Elements. His works were theoretical, rather than practical, and were the basis of mathematical study until the recovery of Greek and Arabic mathematical works.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the 12th century, European scholars traveled to Spain and Sicily seeking scientific Arabic texts, including al-Khwārizmī's The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, translated into Latin by Robert of Chester, and the complete text of Euclid's Elements, translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath, Herman of Carinthia, and Gerard of Cremona. These and other new sources sparked a renewal of mathematics.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Leonardo of Pisa, now known as Fibonacci, serendipitously learned about the Hindu–Arabic numerals on a trip to what is now Béjaïa, Algeria with his merchant father. (Europe was still using Roman numerals.) There, he observed a system of arithmetic (specifically algorism) which due to the positional notation of Hindu–Arabic numerals was much more efficient and greatly facilitated commerce. Leonardo wrote Liber Abaci in 1202 (updated in 1254) introducing the technique to Europe and beginning a long period of popularizing it. The book also brought to Europe what is now known as the Fibonacci sequence (known to Indian mathematicians for hundreds of years before that) which Fibonacci used as an unremarkable example.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The 14th century saw the development of new mathematical concepts to investigate a wide range of problems. One important contribution was development of mathematics of local motion.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Thomas Bradwardine proposed that speed (V) increases in arithmetic proportion as the ratio of force (F) to resistance (R) increases in geometric proportion. Bradwardine expressed this by a series of specific examples, but although the logarithm had not yet been conceived, we can express his conclusion anachronistically by writing: V = log (F/R). Bradwardine's analysis is an example of transferring a mathematical technique used by al-Kindi and Arnald of Villanova to quantify the nature of compound medicines to a different physical problem.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "One of the 14th-century Oxford Calculators, William Heytesbury, lacking differential calculus and the concept of limits, proposed to measure instantaneous speed \"by the path that would be described by [a body] if... it were moved uniformly at the same degree of speed with which it is moved in that given instant\".",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Heytesbury and others mathematically determined the distance covered by a body undergoing uniformly accelerated motion (today solved by integration), stating that \"a moving body uniformly acquiring or losing that increment [of speed] will traverse in some given time a [distance] completely equal to that which it would traverse if it were moving continuously through the same time with the mean degree [of speed]\".",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Nicole Oresme at the University of Paris and the Italian Giovanni di Casali independently provided graphical demonstrations of this relationship, asserting that the area under the line depicting the constant acceleration, represented the total distance traveled. In a later mathematical commentary on Euclid's Elements, Oresme made a more detailed general analysis in which he demonstrated that a body will acquire in each successive increment of time an increment of any quality that increases as the odd numbers. Since Euclid had demonstrated the sum of the odd numbers are the square numbers, the total quality acquired by the body increases as the square of the time.",
"title": "Medieval European"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "During the Renaissance, the development of mathematics and of accounting were intertwined. While there is no direct relationship between algebra and accounting, the teaching of the subjects and the books published often intended for the children of merchants who were sent to reckoning schools (in Flanders and Germany) or abacus schools (known as abbaco in Italy), where they learned the skills useful for trade and commerce. There is probably no need for algebra in performing bookkeeping operations, but for complex bartering operations or the calculation of compound interest, a basic knowledge of arithmetic was mandatory and knowledge of algebra was very useful.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492) wrote books on solid geometry and linear perspective, including De Prospectiva Pingendi (On Perspective for Painting), Trattato d’Abaco (Abacus Treatise), and De quinque corporibus regularibus (On the Five Regular Solids).",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità (Italian: \"Review of Arithmetic, Geometry, Ratio and Proportion\") was first printed and published in Venice in 1494. It included a 27-page treatise on bookkeeping, \"Particularis de Computis et Scripturis\" (Italian: \"Details of Calculation and Recording\"). It was written primarily for, and sold mainly to, merchants who used the book as a reference text, as a source of pleasure from the mathematical puzzles it contained, and to aid the education of their sons. In Summa Arithmetica, Pacioli introduced symbols for plus and minus for the first time in a printed book, symbols that became standard notation in Italian Renaissance mathematics. Summa Arithmetica was also the first known book printed in Italy to contain algebra. Pacioli obtained many of his ideas from Piero Della Francesca whom he plagiarized.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In Italy, during the first half of the 16th century, Scipione del Ferro and Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia discovered solutions for cubic equations. Gerolamo Cardano published them in his 1545 book Ars Magna, together with a solution for the quartic equations, discovered by his student Lodovico Ferrari. In 1572 Rafael Bombelli published his L'Algebra in which he showed how to deal with the imaginary quantities that could appear in Cardano's formula for solving cubic equations.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Simon Stevin's De Thiende ('the art of tenths'), first published in Dutch in 1585, contained the first systematic treatment of decimal notation, which influenced all later work on the real number system.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Driven by the demands of navigation and the growing need for accurate maps of large areas, trigonometry grew to be a major branch of mathematics. Bartholomaeus Pitiscus was the first to use the word, publishing his Trigonometria in 1595. Regiomontanus's table of sines and cosines was published in 1533.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "During the Renaissance the desire of artists to represent the natural world realistically, together with the rediscovered philosophy of the Greeks, led artists to study mathematics. They were also the engineers and architects of that time, and so had need of mathematics in any case. The art of painting in perspective, and the developments in geometry that involved, were studied intensely.",
"title": "Renaissance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The 17th century saw an unprecedented increase of mathematical and scientific ideas across Europe. Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter in orbit about that planet, using a telescope based Hans Lipperhey's. Tycho Brahe had gathered a large quantity of mathematical data describing the positions of the planets in the sky. By his position as Brahe's assistant, Johannes Kepler was first exposed to and seriously interacted with the topic of planetary motion. Kepler's calculations were made simpler by the contemporaneous invention of logarithms by John Napier and Jost Bürgi. Kepler succeeded in formulating mathematical laws of planetary motion. The analytic geometry developed by René Descartes (1596–1650) allowed those orbits to be plotted on a graph, in Cartesian coordinates.",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Building on earlier work by many predecessors, Isaac Newton discovered the laws of physics that explain Kepler's Laws, and brought together the concepts now known as calculus. Independently, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed calculus and much of the calculus notation still in use today. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of nearly all digital (electronic, solid-state, discrete logic) computers, including the Von Neumann architecture, which is the standard design paradigm, or \"computer architecture\", followed from the second half of the 20th century, and into the 21st. Leibniz has been called the \"founder of computer science\".",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Science and mathematics had become an international endeavor, which would soon spread over the entire world.",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In addition to the application of mathematics to the studies of the heavens, applied mathematics began to expand into new areas, with the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Pascal and Fermat set the groundwork for the investigations of probability theory and the corresponding rules of combinatorics in their discussions over a game of gambling. Pascal, with his wager, attempted to use the newly developing probability theory to argue for a life devoted to religion, on the grounds that even if the probability of success was small, the rewards were infinite. In some sense, this foreshadowed the development of utility theory in the 18th–19th century.",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The most influential mathematician of the 18th century was arguably Leonhard Euler (1707–1783). His contributions range from founding the study of graph theory with the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem to standardizing many modern mathematical terms and notations. For example, he named the square root of minus 1 with the symbol i, and he popularized the use of the Greek letter π {\\displaystyle \\pi } to stand for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. He made numerous contributions to the study of topology, graph theory, calculus, combinatorics, and complex analysis, as evidenced by the multitude of theorems and notations named for him.",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Other important European mathematicians of the 18th century included Joseph Louis Lagrange, who did pioneering work in number theory, algebra, differential calculus, and the calculus of variations, and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who, in the age of Napoleon, did important work on the foundations of celestial mechanics and on statistics.",
"title": "Mathematics during the Scientific Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Throughout the 19th century mathematics became increasingly abstract. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) epitomizes this trend. He did revolutionary work on functions of complex variables, in geometry, and on the convergence of series, leaving aside his many contributions to science. He also gave the first satisfactory proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra and of the quadratic reciprocity law.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "This century saw the development of the two forms of non-Euclidean geometry, where the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry no longer holds. The Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and his rival, the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, independently defined and studied hyperbolic geometry, where uniqueness of parallels no longer holds. In this geometry the sum of angles in a triangle add up to less than 180°. Elliptic geometry was developed later in the 19th century by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann; here no parallel can be found and the angles in a triangle add up to more than 180°. Riemann also developed Riemannian geometry, which unifies and vastly generalizes the three types of geometry, and he defined the concept of a manifold, which generalizes the ideas of curves and surfaces, and set the mathematical foundations for the theory of general relativity.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The 19th century saw the beginning of a great deal of abstract algebra. Hermann Grassmann in Germany gave a first version of vector spaces, William Rowan Hamilton in Ireland developed noncommutative algebra. The British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra that soon evolved into what is now called Boolean algebra, in which the only numbers were 0 and 1. Boolean algebra is the starting point of mathematical logic and has important applications in electrical engineering and computer science. Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bernhard Riemann, and Karl Weierstrass reformulated the calculus in a more rigorous fashion.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Also, for the first time, the limits of mathematics were explored. Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian, and Évariste Galois, a Frenchman, proved that there is no general algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of degree greater than four (Abel–Ruffini theorem). Other 19th-century mathematicians used this in their proofs that straight edge and compass alone are not sufficient to trisect an arbitrary angle, to construct the side of a cube twice the volume of a given cube, nor to construct a square equal in area to a given circle. Mathematicians had vainly attempted to solve all of these problems since the time of the ancient Greeks. On the other hand, the limitation of three dimensions in geometry was surpassed in the 19th century through considerations of parameter space and hypercomplex numbers.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Abel and Galois's investigations into the solutions of various polynomial equations laid the groundwork for further developments of group theory, and the associated fields of abstract algebra. In the 20th century physicists and other scientists have seen group theory as the ideal way to study symmetry.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In the later 19th century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory, which enabled the rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity and has become the common language of nearly all mathematics. Cantor's set theory, and the rise of mathematical logic in the hands of Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, and A.N. Whitehead, initiated a long running debate on the foundations of mathematics.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The 19th century saw the founding of a number of national mathematical societies: the London Mathematical Society in 1865, the Société Mathématique de France in 1872, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo in 1884, the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 1883, and the American Mathematical Society in 1888. The first international, special-interest society, the Quaternion Society, was formed in 1899, in the context of a vector controversy.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In 1897, Kurt Hensel introduced p-adic numbers.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The 20th century saw mathematics become a major profession. By the end of the century, thousands of new Ph.D.s in mathematics were being awarded every year, and jobs were available in both teaching and industry. An effort to catalogue the areas and applications of mathematics was undertaken in Klein's encyclopedia.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In a 1900 speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians, David Hilbert set out a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. These problems, spanning many areas of mathematics, formed a central focus for much of 20th-century mathematics. Today, 10 have been solved, 7 are partially solved, and 2 are still open. The remaining 4 are too loosely formulated to be stated as solved or not.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Notable historical conjectures were finally proven. In 1976, Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel proved the four color theorem, controversial at the time for the use of a computer to do so. Andrew Wiles, building on the work of others, proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995. Paul Cohen and Kurt Gödel proved that the continuum hypothesis is independent of (could neither be proved nor disproved from) the standard axioms of set theory. In 1998 Thomas Callister Hales proved the Kepler conjecture.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Mathematical collaborations of unprecedented size and scope took place. An example is the classification of finite simple groups (also called the \"enormous theorem\"), whose proof between 1955 and 2004 required 500-odd journal articles by about 100 authors, and filling tens of thousands of pages. A group of French mathematicians, including Jean Dieudonné and André Weil, publishing under the pseudonym \"Nicolas Bourbaki\", attempted to exposit all of known mathematics as a coherent rigorous whole. The resulting several dozen volumes has had a controversial influence on mathematical education.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Differential geometry came into its own when Albert Einstein used it in general relativity. Entirely new areas of mathematics such as mathematical logic, topology, and John von Neumann's game theory changed the kinds of questions that could be answered by mathematical methods. All kinds of structures were abstracted using axioms and given names like metric spaces, topological spaces etc. As mathematicians do, the concept of an abstract structure was itself abstracted and led to category theory. Grothendieck and Serre recast algebraic geometry using sheaf theory. Large advances were made in the qualitative study of dynamical systems that Poincaré had begun in the 1890s. Measure theory was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Applications of measures include the Lebesgue integral, Kolmogorov's axiomatisation of probability theory, and ergodic theory. Knot theory greatly expanded. Quantum mechanics led to the development of functional analysis. Other new areas include Laurent Schwartz's distribution theory, fixed point theory, singularity theory and René Thom's catastrophe theory, model theory, and Mandelbrot's fractals. Lie theory with its Lie groups and Lie algebras became one of the major areas of study.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Non-standard analysis, introduced by Abraham Robinson, rehabilitated the infinitesimal approach to calculus, which had fallen into disrepute in favour of the theory of limits, by extending the field of real numbers to the Hyperreal numbers which include infinitesimal and infinite quantities. An even larger number system, the surreal numbers were discovered by John Horton Conway in connection with combinatorial games.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The development and continual improvement of computers, at first mechanical analog machines and then digital electronic machines, allowed industry to deal with larger and larger amounts of data to facilitate mass production and distribution and communication, and new areas of mathematics were developed to deal with this: Alan Turing's computability theory; complexity theory; Derrick Henry Lehmer's use of ENIAC to further number theory and the Lucas–Lehmer primality test; Rózsa Péter's recursive function theory; Claude Shannon's information theory; signal processing; data analysis; optimization and other areas of operations research. In the preceding centuries much mathematical focus was on calculus and continuous functions, but the rise of computing and communication networks led to an increasing importance of discrete concepts and the expansion of combinatorics including graph theory. The speed and data processing abilities of computers also enabled the handling of mathematical problems that were too time-consuming to deal with by pencil and paper calculations, leading to areas such as numerical analysis and symbolic computation. Some of the most important methods and algorithms of the 20th century are: the simplex algorithm, the fast Fourier transform, error-correcting codes, the Kalman filter from control theory and the RSA algorithm of public-key cryptography.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "At the same time, deep insights were made about the limitations to mathematics. In 1929 and 1930, it was proved the truth or falsity of all statements formulated about the natural numbers plus either addition or multiplication (but not both), was decidable, i.e. could be determined by some algorithm. In 1931, Kurt Gödel found that this was not the case for the natural numbers plus both addition and multiplication; this system, known as Peano arithmetic, was in fact incompletable. (Peano arithmetic is adequate for a good deal of number theory, including the notion of prime number.) A consequence of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems is that in any mathematical system that includes Peano arithmetic (including all of analysis and geometry), truth necessarily outruns proof, i.e. there are true statements that cannot be proved within the system. Hence mathematics cannot be reduced to mathematical logic, and David Hilbert's dream of making all of mathematics complete and consistent needed to be reformulated.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "One of the more colorful figures in 20th-century mathematics was Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (1887–1920), an Indian autodidact who conjectured or proved over 3000 theorems, including properties of highly composite numbers, the partition function and its asymptotics, and mock theta functions. He also made major investigations in the areas of gamma functions, modular forms, divergent series, hypergeometric series and prime number theory.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Paul Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. Mathematicians have a game equivalent to the Kevin Bacon Game, which leads to the Erdős number of a mathematician. This describes the \"collaborative distance\" between a person and Erdős, as measured by joint authorship of mathematical papers.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Emmy Noether has been described by many as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. She studied the theories of rings, fields, and algebras.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "As in most areas of study, the explosion of knowledge in the scientific age has led to specialization: by the end of the century there were hundreds of specialized areas in mathematics and the Mathematics Subject Classification was dozens of pages long. More and more mathematical journals were published and, by the end of the century, the development of the World Wide Web led to online publishing.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the seven Millennium Prize Problems, and in 2003 the Poincaré conjecture was solved by Grigori Perelman (who declined to accept an award, as he was critical of the mathematics establishment).",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Most mathematical journals now have online versions as well as print versions, and many online-only journals are launched. There is an increasing drive toward open access publishing, first popularized by arXiv.",
"title": "Modern"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "There are many observable trends in mathematics, the most notable being that the subject is growing ever larger as computers are ever more important and powerful; the volume of data being produced by science and industry, facilitated by computers, continues expanding exponentially. As a result, there is a corresponding growth in the demand for mathematics to help process and understand this big data. Math science careers are also expected to continue to grow, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating (in 2018) that \"employment of mathematical science occupations is projected to grow 27.9 percent from 2016 to 2026.\"",
"title": "Future"
}
]
| The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars. The earliest mathematical texts available are from Mesopotamia and Egypt – Plimpton 322, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus. All of these texts mention the so-called Pythagorean triples, so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry. The study of mathematics as a "demonstrative discipline" began in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, who coined the term "mathematics" from the ancient Greek μάθημα (mathema), meaning "subject of instruction". Greek mathematics greatly refined the methods and expanded the subject matter of mathematics. Although they made virtually no contributions to theoretical mathematics, the ancient Romans used applied mathematics in surveying, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, bookkeeping, creation of lunar and solar calendars, and even arts and crafts. Chinese mathematics made early contributions, including a place value system and the first use of negative numbers. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics through the work of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Islamic mathematics, in turn, developed and expanded the mathematics known to these civilizations. Contemporaneous with but independent of these traditions were the mathematics developed by the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America, where the concept of zero was given a standard symbol in Maya numerals. Many Greek and Arabic texts on mathematics were translated into Latin from the 12th century onward, leading to further development of mathematics in Medieval Europe. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, periods of mathematical discovery were often followed by centuries of stagnation. Beginning in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century, new mathematical developments, interacting with new scientific discoveries, were made at an increasing pace that continues through the present day. This includes the groundbreaking work of both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the development of infinitesimal calculus during the course of the 17th century. | 2001-11-29T22:00:48Z | 2023-12-20T01:27:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics |
14,223 | HSK | HSK may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "HSK may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| HSK may refer to: H. S. Krishnaswamy Iyengar
Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi or Chinese Proficiency Test
Hassocks railway station, a railway station in Sussex, England
Helsingfors Segelklubb, a Finnish sailing club
Helsingfors Skridskoklubb, a Finnish figure skating club
Henderson Silver Knights, an American Hockey league team based in Henderson, Nevada.
Homoserine kinase, an enzyme
Horrendous Space Kablooie, a Calvin and Hobbes reference to the Big Bang
Hung Shui Kiu station in Hong Kong
Hung Shui Kiu stop in Hong Kong
Huesca–Pirineos Airport, in Spain
Handels-Stör-Kreuzer, a German auxiliary cruiser
Hohlschaftkegel, a form of machine taper | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-08-03T18:57:30Z | [
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:Disambiguation"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSK |
14,225 | Hydrogen atom | A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively charged proton and a single negatively charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force. Atomic hydrogen constitutes about 75% of the baryonic mass of the universe.
In everyday life on Earth, isolated hydrogen atoms (called "atomic hydrogen") are extremely rare. Instead, a hydrogen atom tends to combine with other atoms in compounds, or with another hydrogen atom to form ordinary (diatomic) hydrogen gas, H2. "Atomic hydrogen" and "hydrogen atom" in ordinary English use have overlapping, yet distinct, meanings. For example, a water molecule contains two hydrogen atoms, but does not contain atomic hydrogen (which would refer to isolated hydrogen atoms).
Atomic spectroscopy shows that there is a discrete infinite set of states in which a hydrogen (or any) atom can exist, contrary to the predictions of classical physics. Attempts to develop a theoretical understanding of the states of the hydrogen atom have been important to the history of quantum mechanics, since all other atoms can be roughly understood by knowing in detail about this simplest atomic structure.
The most abundant isotope, hydrogen-1, protium, or light hydrogen, contains no neutrons and is simply a proton and an electron. Protium is stable and makes up 99.985% of naturally occurring hydrogen atoms.
Deuterium (H) contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus. Deuterium is stable and makes up 0.0156% of naturally occurring hydrogen and is used in industrial processes like nuclear reactors and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.
Tritium (H) contains two neutrons and one proton in its nucleus and is not stable, decaying with a half-life of 12.32 years. Because of its short half-life, tritium does not exist in nature except in trace amounts.
Heavier isotopes of hydrogen are only created artificially in particle accelerators and have half-lives on the order of 10 seconds. They are unbound resonances located beyond the neutron drip line; this results in prompt emission of a neutron.
The formulas below are valid for all three isotopes of hydrogen, but slightly different values of the Rydberg constant (correction formula given below) must be used for each hydrogen isotope.
Lone neutral hydrogen atoms are rare under normal conditions. However, neutral hydrogen is common when it is covalently bound to another atom, and hydrogen atoms can also exist in cationic and anionic forms.
If a neutral hydrogen atom loses its electron, it becomes a cation. The resulting ion, which consists solely of a proton for the usual isotope, is written as "H" and sometimes called hydron. Free protons are common in the interstellar medium, and solar wind. In the context of aqueous solutions of classical Brønsted–Lowry acids, such as hydrochloric acid, it is actually hydronium, H3O, that is meant. Instead of a literal ionized single hydrogen atom being formed, the acid transfers the hydrogen to H2O, forming H3O.
If instead a hydrogen atom gains a second electron, it becomes an anion. The hydrogen anion is written as "H" and called hydride.
The hydrogen atom has special significance in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory as a simple two-body problem physical system which has yielded many simple analytical solutions in closed-form.
Experiments by Ernest Rutherford in 1909 showed the structure of the atom to be a dense, positive nucleus with a tenuous negative charge cloud around it. This immediately raised questions about how such a system could be stable. Classical electromagnetism had shown that any accelerating charge radiates energy, as shown by the Larmor formula. If the electron is assumed to orbit in a perfect circle and radiates energy continuously, the electron would rapidly spiral into the nucleus with a fall time of:
where a 0 {\displaystyle a_{0}} is the Bohr radius and r 0 {\displaystyle r_{0}} is the classical electron radius. If this were true, all atoms would instantly collapse, however atoms seem to be stable. Furthermore, the spiral inward would release a smear of electromagnetic frequencies as the orbit got smaller. Instead, atoms were observed to only emit discrete frequencies of radiation. The resolution would lie in the development of quantum mechanics.
In 1913, Niels Bohr obtained the energy levels and spectral frequencies of the hydrogen atom after making a number of simple assumptions in order to correct the failed classical model. The assumptions included:
Bohr supposed that the electron's angular momentum is quantized with possible values:
where n = 1 , 2 , 3 , … {\displaystyle n=1,2,3,\ldots }
and ℏ {\displaystyle \hbar } is Planck constant over 2 π {\displaystyle 2\pi } . He also supposed that the centripetal force which keeps the electron in its orbit is provided by the Coulomb force, and that energy is conserved. Bohr derived the energy of each orbit of the hydrogen atom to be:
where m e {\displaystyle m_{e}} is the electron mass, e {\displaystyle e} is the electron charge, ε 0 {\displaystyle \varepsilon _{0}} is the vacuum permittivity, and n {\displaystyle n} is the quantum number (now known as the principal quantum number). Bohr's predictions matched experiments measuring the hydrogen spectral series to the first order, giving more confidence to a theory that used quantized values.
For n = 1 {\displaystyle n=1} , the value
is called the Rydberg unit of energy. It is related to the Rydberg constant R ∞ {\displaystyle R_{\infty }} of atomic physics by 1 Ry ≡ h c R ∞ . {\displaystyle 1\,{\text{Ry}}\equiv hcR_{\infty }.}
The exact value of the Rydberg constant assumes that the nucleus is infinitely massive with respect to the electron. For hydrogen-1, hydrogen-2 (deuterium), and hydrogen-3 (tritium) which have finite mass, the constant must be slightly modified to use the reduced mass of the system, rather than simply the mass of the electron. This includes the kinetic energy of the nucleus in the problem, because the total (electron plus nuclear) kinetic energy is equivalent to the kinetic energy of the reduced mass moving with a velocity equal to the electron velocity relative to the nucleus. However, since the nucleus is much heavier than the electron, the electron mass and reduced mass are nearly the same. The Rydberg constant RM for a hydrogen atom (one electron), R is given by
where M {\displaystyle M} is the mass of the atomic nucleus. For hydrogen-1, the quantity m e / M , {\displaystyle m_{\text{e}}/M,} is about 1/1836 (i.e. the electron-to-proton mass ratio). For deuterium and tritium, the ratios are about 1/3670 and 1/5497 respectively. These figures, when added to 1 in the denominator, represent very small corrections in the value of R, and thus only small corrections to all energy levels in corresponding hydrogen isotopes.
There were still problems with Bohr's model:
Most of these shortcomings were resolved by Arnold Sommerfeld's modification of the Bohr model. Sommerfeld introduced two additional degrees of freedom, allowing an electron to move on an elliptical orbit characterized by its eccentricity and declination with respect to a chosen axis. This introduced two additional quantum numbers, which correspond to the orbital angular momentum and its projection on the chosen axis. Thus the correct multiplicity of states (except for the factor 2 accounting for the yet unknown electron spin) was found. Further, by applying special relativity to the elliptic orbits, Sommerfeld succeeded in deriving the correct expression for the fine structure of hydrogen spectra (which happens to be exactly the same as in the most elaborate Dirac theory). However, some observed phenomena, such as the anomalous Zeeman effect, remained unexplained. These issues were resolved with the full development of quantum mechanics and the Dirac equation. It is often alleged that the Schrödinger equation is superior to the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory in describing hydrogen atom. This is not the case, as most of the results of both approaches coincide or are very close (a remarkable exception is the problem of hydrogen atom in crossed electric and magnetic fields, which cannot be self-consistently solved in the framework of the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory), and in both theories the main shortcomings result from the absence of the electron spin. It was the complete failure of the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory to explain many-electron systems (such as helium atom or hydrogen molecule) which demonstrated its inadequacy in describing quantum phenomena.
The Schrödinger equation allows one to calculate the stationary states and also the time evolution of quantum systems. Exact analytical answers are available for the nonrelativistic hydrogen atom. Before we go to present a formal account, here we give an elementary overview.
Given that the hydrogen atom contains a nucleus and an electron, quantum mechanics allows one to predict the probability of finding the electron at any given radial distance r {\displaystyle r} . It is given by the square of a mathematical function known as the "wavefunction", which is a solution of the Schrödinger equation. The lowest energy equilibrium state of the hydrogen atom is known as the ground state. The ground state wave function is known as the 1 s {\displaystyle 1\mathrm {s} } wavefunction. It is written as:
Here, a 0 {\displaystyle a_{0}} is the numerical value of the Bohr radius. The probability density of finding the electron at a distance r {\displaystyle r} in any radial direction is the squared value of the wavefunction:
The 1 s {\displaystyle 1\mathrm {s} } wavefunction is spherically symmetric, and the surface area of a shell at distance r {\displaystyle r} is 4 π r 2 {\displaystyle 4\pi r^{2}} , so the total probability P ( r ) d r {\displaystyle P(r)\,dr} of the electron being in a shell at a distance r {\displaystyle r} and thickness d r {\displaystyle dr} is
It turns out that this is a maximum at r = a 0 {\displaystyle r=a_{0}} . That is, the Bohr picture of an electron orbiting the nucleus at radius a 0 {\displaystyle a_{0}} corresponds to the most probable radius. Actually, there is a finite probability that the electron may be found at any place r {\displaystyle r} , with the probability indicated by the square of the wavefunction. Since the probability of finding the electron somewhere in the whole volume is unity, the integral of P ( r ) d r {\displaystyle P(r)\,dr} is unity. Then we say that the wavefunction is properly normalized.
As discussed below, the ground state 1 s {\displaystyle 1\mathrm {s} } is also indicated by the quantum numbers ( n = 1 , ℓ = 0 , m = 0 ) {\displaystyle (n=1,\ell =0,m=0)} . The second lowest energy states, just above the ground state, are given by the quantum numbers ( 2 , 0 , 0 ) {\displaystyle (2,0,0)} , ( 2 , 1 , 0 ) {\displaystyle (2,1,0)} , and ( 2 , 1 , ± 1 ) {\displaystyle (2,1,\pm 1)} . These n = 2 {\displaystyle n=2} states all have the same energy and are known as the 2 s {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {s} } and 2 p {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {p} } states. There is one 2 s {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {s} } state:
and there are three 2 p {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {p} } states:
An electron in the 2 s {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {s} } or 2 p {\displaystyle 2\mathrm {p} } state is most likely to be found in the second Bohr orbit with energy given by the Bohr formula.
The Hamiltonian of the hydrogen atom is the radial kinetic energy operator and Coulomb attraction force between the positive proton and negative electron. Using the time-independent Schrödinger equation, ignoring all spin-coupling interactions and using the reduced mass μ = m e M / ( m e + M ) {\displaystyle \mu =m_{e}M/(m_{e}+M)} , the equation is written as:
Expanding the Laplacian in spherical coordinates:
This is a separable, partial differential equation which can be solved in terms of special functions. When the wavefunction is separated as product of functions R ( r ) {\displaystyle R(r)} , Θ ( θ ) {\displaystyle \Theta (\theta )} , and Φ ( φ ) {\displaystyle \Phi (\varphi )} three independent differential functions appears with A and B being the separation constants:
The normalized position wavefunctions, given in spherical coordinates are:
where:
The quantum numbers can take the following values:
Additionally, these wavefunctions are normalized (i.e., the integral of their modulus square equals 1) and orthogonal:
where | n , ℓ , m ⟩ {\displaystyle |n,\ell ,m\rangle } is the state represented by the wavefunction ψ n ℓ m {\displaystyle \psi _{n\ell m}} in Dirac notation, and δ {\displaystyle \delta } is the Kronecker delta function.
The wavefunctions in momentum space are related to the wavefunctions in position space through a Fourier transform
which, for the bound states, results in
where C N α ( x ) {\displaystyle C_{N}^{\alpha }(x)} denotes a Gegenbauer polynomial and p {\displaystyle p} is in units of ℏ / a 0 ∗ {\displaystyle \hbar /a_{0}^{*}} .
The solutions to the Schrödinger equation for hydrogen are analytical, giving a simple expression for the hydrogen energy levels and thus the frequencies of the hydrogen spectral lines and fully reproduced the Bohr model and went beyond it. It also yields two other quantum numbers and the shape of the electron's wave function ("orbital") for the various possible quantum-mechanical states, thus explaining the anisotropic character of atomic bonds.
The Schrödinger equation also applies to more complicated atoms and molecules. When there is more than one electron or nucleus the solution is not analytical and either computer calculations are necessary or simplifying assumptions must be made.
Since the Schrödinger equation is only valid for non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the solutions it yields for the hydrogen atom are not entirely correct. The Dirac equation of relativistic quantum theory improves these solutions (see below).
The solution of the Schrödinger equation (wave equation) for the hydrogen atom uses the fact that the Coulomb potential produced by the nucleus is isotropic (it is radially symmetric in space and only depends on the distance to the nucleus). Although the resulting energy eigenfunctions (the orbitals) are not necessarily isotropic themselves, their dependence on the angular coordinates follows completely generally from this isotropy of the underlying potential: the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian (that is, the energy eigenstates) can be chosen as simultaneous eigenstates of the angular momentum operator. This corresponds to the fact that angular momentum is conserved in the orbital motion of the electron around the nucleus. Therefore, the energy eigenstates may be classified by two angular momentum quantum numbers, ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } and m {\displaystyle m} (both are integers). The angular momentum quantum number ℓ = 0 , 1 , 2 , … {\displaystyle \ell =0,1,2,\ldots } determines the magnitude of the angular momentum. The magnetic quantum number m = − ℓ , … , + ℓ {\displaystyle m=-\ell ,\ldots ,+\ell } determines the projection of the angular momentum on the (arbitrarily chosen) z {\displaystyle z} -axis.
In addition to mathematical expressions for total angular momentum and angular momentum projection of wavefunctions, an expression for the radial dependence of the wave functions must be found. It is only here that the details of the 1 / r {\displaystyle 1/r} Coulomb potential enter (leading to Laguerre polynomials in r {\displaystyle r} ). This leads to a third quantum number, the principal quantum number n = 1 , 2 , 3 , … {\displaystyle n=1,2,3,\ldots } . The principal quantum number in hydrogen is related to the atom's total energy.
Note that the maximum value of the angular momentum quantum number is limited by the principal quantum number: it can run only up to n − 1 {\displaystyle n-1} , i.e., ℓ = 0 , 1 , … , n − 1 {\displaystyle \ell =0,1,\ldots ,n-1} .
Due to angular momentum conservation, states of the same ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } but different m {\displaystyle m} have the same energy (this holds for all problems with rotational symmetry). In addition, for the hydrogen atom, states of the same n {\displaystyle n} but different ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } are also degenerate (i.e., they have the same energy). However, this is a specific property of hydrogen and is no longer true for more complicated atoms which have an (effective) potential differing from the form 1 / r {\displaystyle 1/r} (due to the presence of the inner electrons shielding the nucleus potential).
Taking into account the spin of the electron adds a last quantum number, the projection of the electron's spin angular momentum along the z {\displaystyle z} -axis, which can take on two values. Therefore, any eigenstate of the electron in the hydrogen atom is described fully by four quantum numbers. According to the usual rules of quantum mechanics, the actual state of the electron may be any superposition of these states. This explains also why the choice of z {\displaystyle z} -axis for the directional quantization of the angular momentum vector is immaterial: an orbital of given ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } and m ′ {\displaystyle m'} obtained for another preferred axis z ′ {\displaystyle z'} can always be represented as a suitable superposition of the various states of different m {\displaystyle m} (but same ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } ) that have been obtained for z {\displaystyle z} .
In 1928, Paul Dirac found an equation that was fully compatible with special relativity, and (as a consequence) made the wave function a 4-component "Dirac spinor" including "up" and "down" spin components, with both positive and "negative" energy (or matter and antimatter). The solution to this equation gave the following results, more accurate than the Schrödinger solution.
The energy levels of hydrogen, including fine structure (excluding Lamb shift and hyperfine structure), are given by the Sommerfeld fine-structure expression:
where α {\displaystyle \alpha } is the fine-structure constant and j {\displaystyle j} is the total angular momentum quantum number, which is equal to | ℓ ± 1 2 | {\displaystyle \left|\ell \pm {\tfrac {1}{2}}\right|} , depending on the orientation of the electron spin relative to the orbital angular momentum. This formula represents a small correction to the energy obtained by Bohr and Schrödinger as given above. The factor in square brackets in the last expression is nearly one; the extra term arises from relativistic effects (for details, see #Features going beyond the Schrödinger solution). It is worth noting that this expression was first obtained by A. Sommerfeld in 1916 based on the relativistic version of the old Bohr theory. Sommerfeld has however used different notation for the quantum numbers.
The coherent states have been proposed as
which satisfies d Ω ¯ ≡ sin θ ¯ d θ ¯ d φ ¯ d ψ ¯ / 8 π 2 {\displaystyle d{\bar {\Omega }}\equiv \sin {\bar {\theta }}\,d{\bar {\theta }}\,d{\bar {\varphi }}\,d{\bar {\psi }}/8\pi ^{2}} and takes the form
The image to the right shows the first few hydrogen atom orbitals (energy eigenfunctions). These are cross-sections of the probability density that are color-coded (black represents zero density and white represents the highest density). The angular momentum (orbital) quantum number ℓ is denoted in each column, using the usual spectroscopic letter code (s means ℓ = 0, p means ℓ = 1, d means ℓ = 2). The main (principal) quantum number n (= 1, 2, 3, ...) is marked to the right of each row. For all pictures the magnetic quantum number m has been set to 0, and the cross-sectional plane is the xz-plane (z is the vertical axis). The probability density in three-dimensional space is obtained by rotating the one shown here around the z-axis.
The "ground state", i.e. the state of lowest energy, in which the electron is usually found, is the first one, the 1s state (principal quantum level n = 1, ℓ = 0).
Black lines occur in each but the first orbital: these are the nodes of the wavefunction, i.e. where the probability density is zero. (More precisely, the nodes are spherical harmonics that appear as a result of solving the Schrödinger equation in spherical coordinates.)
The quantum numbers determine the layout of these nodes. There are:
There are several important effects that are neglected by the Schrödinger equation and which are responsible for certain small but measurable deviations of the real spectral lines from the predicted ones:
Both of these features (and more) are incorporated in the relativistic Dirac equation, with predictions that come still closer to experiment. Again the Dirac equation may be solved analytically in the special case of a two-body system, such as the hydrogen atom. The resulting solution quantum states now must be classified by the total angular momentum number j (arising through the coupling between electron spin and orbital angular momentum). States of the same j and the same n are still degenerate. Thus, direct analytical solution of Dirac equation predicts 2S(1/2) and 2P(1/2) levels of hydrogen to have exactly the same energy, which is in a contradiction with observations (Lamb–Retherford experiment).
For these developments, it was essential that the solution of the Dirac equation for the hydrogen atom could be worked out exactly, such that any experimentally observed deviation had to be taken seriously as a signal of failure of the theory.
In the language of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, the hydrogen atom was first solved by Wolfgang Pauli using a rotational symmetry in four dimensions [O(4)-symmetry] generated by the angular momentum and the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector. By extending the symmetry group O(4) to the dynamical group O(4,2), the entire spectrum and all transitions were embedded in a single irreducible group representation.
In 1979 the (non-relativistic) hydrogen atom was solved for the first time within Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics by Duru and Kleinert. This work greatly extended the range of applicability of Feynman's method. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively charged proton and a single negatively charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force. Atomic hydrogen constitutes about 75% of the baryonic mass of the universe.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In everyday life on Earth, isolated hydrogen atoms (called \"atomic hydrogen\") are extremely rare. Instead, a hydrogen atom tends to combine with other atoms in compounds, or with another hydrogen atom to form ordinary (diatomic) hydrogen gas, H2. \"Atomic hydrogen\" and \"hydrogen atom\" in ordinary English use have overlapping, yet distinct, meanings. For example, a water molecule contains two hydrogen atoms, but does not contain atomic hydrogen (which would refer to isolated hydrogen atoms).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Atomic spectroscopy shows that there is a discrete infinite set of states in which a hydrogen (or any) atom can exist, contrary to the predictions of classical physics. Attempts to develop a theoretical understanding of the states of the hydrogen atom have been important to the history of quantum mechanics, since all other atoms can be roughly understood by knowing in detail about this simplest atomic structure.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The most abundant isotope, hydrogen-1, protium, or light hydrogen, contains no neutrons and is simply a proton and an electron. Protium is stable and makes up 99.985% of naturally occurring hydrogen atoms.",
"title": "Isotopes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Deuterium (H) contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus. Deuterium is stable and makes up 0.0156% of naturally occurring hydrogen and is used in industrial processes like nuclear reactors and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.",
"title": "Isotopes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Tritium (H) contains two neutrons and one proton in its nucleus and is not stable, decaying with a half-life of 12.32 years. Because of its short half-life, tritium does not exist in nature except in trace amounts.",
"title": "Isotopes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Heavier isotopes of hydrogen are only created artificially in particle accelerators and have half-lives on the order of 10 seconds. They are unbound resonances located beyond the neutron drip line; this results in prompt emission of a neutron.",
"title": "Isotopes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The formulas below are valid for all three isotopes of hydrogen, but slightly different values of the Rydberg constant (correction formula given below) must be used for each hydrogen isotope.",
"title": "Isotopes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Lone neutral hydrogen atoms are rare under normal conditions. However, neutral hydrogen is common when it is covalently bound to another atom, and hydrogen atoms can also exist in cationic and anionic forms.",
"title": "Hydrogen ion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "If a neutral hydrogen atom loses its electron, it becomes a cation. The resulting ion, which consists solely of a proton for the usual isotope, is written as \"H\" and sometimes called hydron. Free protons are common in the interstellar medium, and solar wind. In the context of aqueous solutions of classical Brønsted–Lowry acids, such as hydrochloric acid, it is actually hydronium, H3O, that is meant. Instead of a literal ionized single hydrogen atom being formed, the acid transfers the hydrogen to H2O, forming H3O.",
"title": "Hydrogen ion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "If instead a hydrogen atom gains a second electron, it becomes an anion. The hydrogen anion is written as \"H\" and called hydride.",
"title": "Hydrogen ion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The hydrogen atom has special significance in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory as a simple two-body problem physical system which has yielded many simple analytical solutions in closed-form.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Experiments by Ernest Rutherford in 1909 showed the structure of the atom to be a dense, positive nucleus with a tenuous negative charge cloud around it. This immediately raised questions about how such a system could be stable. Classical electromagnetism had shown that any accelerating charge radiates energy, as shown by the Larmor formula. If the electron is assumed to orbit in a perfect circle and radiates energy continuously, the electron would rapidly spiral into the nucleus with a fall time of:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "where a 0 {\\displaystyle a_{0}} is the Bohr radius and r 0 {\\displaystyle r_{0}} is the classical electron radius. If this were true, all atoms would instantly collapse, however atoms seem to be stable. Furthermore, the spiral inward would release a smear of electromagnetic frequencies as the orbit got smaller. Instead, atoms were observed to only emit discrete frequencies of radiation. The resolution would lie in the development of quantum mechanics.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1913, Niels Bohr obtained the energy levels and spectral frequencies of the hydrogen atom after making a number of simple assumptions in order to correct the failed classical model. The assumptions included:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Bohr supposed that the electron's angular momentum is quantized with possible values:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "where n = 1 , 2 , 3 , … {\\displaystyle n=1,2,3,\\ldots }",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "and ℏ {\\displaystyle \\hbar } is Planck constant over 2 π {\\displaystyle 2\\pi } . He also supposed that the centripetal force which keeps the electron in its orbit is provided by the Coulomb force, and that energy is conserved. Bohr derived the energy of each orbit of the hydrogen atom to be:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "where m e {\\displaystyle m_{e}} is the electron mass, e {\\displaystyle e} is the electron charge, ε 0 {\\displaystyle \\varepsilon _{0}} is the vacuum permittivity, and n {\\displaystyle n} is the quantum number (now known as the principal quantum number). Bohr's predictions matched experiments measuring the hydrogen spectral series to the first order, giving more confidence to a theory that used quantized values.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "For n = 1 {\\displaystyle n=1} , the value",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "is called the Rydberg unit of energy. It is related to the Rydberg constant R ∞ {\\displaystyle R_{\\infty }} of atomic physics by 1 Ry ≡ h c R ∞ . {\\displaystyle 1\\,{\\text{Ry}}\\equiv hcR_{\\infty }.}",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The exact value of the Rydberg constant assumes that the nucleus is infinitely massive with respect to the electron. For hydrogen-1, hydrogen-2 (deuterium), and hydrogen-3 (tritium) which have finite mass, the constant must be slightly modified to use the reduced mass of the system, rather than simply the mass of the electron. This includes the kinetic energy of the nucleus in the problem, because the total (electron plus nuclear) kinetic energy is equivalent to the kinetic energy of the reduced mass moving with a velocity equal to the electron velocity relative to the nucleus. However, since the nucleus is much heavier than the electron, the electron mass and reduced mass are nearly the same. The Rydberg constant RM for a hydrogen atom (one electron), R is given by",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "where M {\\displaystyle M} is the mass of the atomic nucleus. For hydrogen-1, the quantity m e / M , {\\displaystyle m_{\\text{e}}/M,} is about 1/1836 (i.e. the electron-to-proton mass ratio). For deuterium and tritium, the ratios are about 1/3670 and 1/5497 respectively. These figures, when added to 1 in the denominator, represent very small corrections in the value of R, and thus only small corrections to all energy levels in corresponding hydrogen isotopes.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There were still problems with Bohr's model:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Most of these shortcomings were resolved by Arnold Sommerfeld's modification of the Bohr model. Sommerfeld introduced two additional degrees of freedom, allowing an electron to move on an elliptical orbit characterized by its eccentricity and declination with respect to a chosen axis. This introduced two additional quantum numbers, which correspond to the orbital angular momentum and its projection on the chosen axis. Thus the correct multiplicity of states (except for the factor 2 accounting for the yet unknown electron spin) was found. Further, by applying special relativity to the elliptic orbits, Sommerfeld succeeded in deriving the correct expression for the fine structure of hydrogen spectra (which happens to be exactly the same as in the most elaborate Dirac theory). However, some observed phenomena, such as the anomalous Zeeman effect, remained unexplained. These issues were resolved with the full development of quantum mechanics and the Dirac equation. It is often alleged that the Schrödinger equation is superior to the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory in describing hydrogen atom. This is not the case, as most of the results of both approaches coincide or are very close (a remarkable exception is the problem of hydrogen atom in crossed electric and magnetic fields, which cannot be self-consistently solved in the framework of the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory), and in both theories the main shortcomings result from the absence of the electron spin. It was the complete failure of the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory to explain many-electron systems (such as helium atom or hydrogen molecule) which demonstrated its inadequacy in describing quantum phenomena.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Schrödinger equation allows one to calculate the stationary states and also the time evolution of quantum systems. Exact analytical answers are available for the nonrelativistic hydrogen atom. Before we go to present a formal account, here we give an elementary overview.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Given that the hydrogen atom contains a nucleus and an electron, quantum mechanics allows one to predict the probability of finding the electron at any given radial distance r {\\displaystyle r} . It is given by the square of a mathematical function known as the \"wavefunction\", which is a solution of the Schrödinger equation. The lowest energy equilibrium state of the hydrogen atom is known as the ground state. The ground state wave function is known as the 1 s {\\displaystyle 1\\mathrm {s} } wavefunction. It is written as:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Here, a 0 {\\displaystyle a_{0}} is the numerical value of the Bohr radius. The probability density of finding the electron at a distance r {\\displaystyle r} in any radial direction is the squared value of the wavefunction:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The 1 s {\\displaystyle 1\\mathrm {s} } wavefunction is spherically symmetric, and the surface area of a shell at distance r {\\displaystyle r} is 4 π r 2 {\\displaystyle 4\\pi r^{2}} , so the total probability P ( r ) d r {\\displaystyle P(r)\\,dr} of the electron being in a shell at a distance r {\\displaystyle r} and thickness d r {\\displaystyle dr} is",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "It turns out that this is a maximum at r = a 0 {\\displaystyle r=a_{0}} . That is, the Bohr picture of an electron orbiting the nucleus at radius a 0 {\\displaystyle a_{0}} corresponds to the most probable radius. Actually, there is a finite probability that the electron may be found at any place r {\\displaystyle r} , with the probability indicated by the square of the wavefunction. Since the probability of finding the electron somewhere in the whole volume is unity, the integral of P ( r ) d r {\\displaystyle P(r)\\,dr} is unity. Then we say that the wavefunction is properly normalized.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As discussed below, the ground state 1 s {\\displaystyle 1\\mathrm {s} } is also indicated by the quantum numbers ( n = 1 , ℓ = 0 , m = 0 ) {\\displaystyle (n=1,\\ell =0,m=0)} . The second lowest energy states, just above the ground state, are given by the quantum numbers ( 2 , 0 , 0 ) {\\displaystyle (2,0,0)} , ( 2 , 1 , 0 ) {\\displaystyle (2,1,0)} , and ( 2 , 1 , ± 1 ) {\\displaystyle (2,1,\\pm 1)} . These n = 2 {\\displaystyle n=2} states all have the same energy and are known as the 2 s {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {s} } and 2 p {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {p} } states. There is one 2 s {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {s} } state:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "and there are three 2 p {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {p} } states:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "An electron in the 2 s {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {s} } or 2 p {\\displaystyle 2\\mathrm {p} } state is most likely to be found in the second Bohr orbit with energy given by the Bohr formula.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Hamiltonian of the hydrogen atom is the radial kinetic energy operator and Coulomb attraction force between the positive proton and negative electron. Using the time-independent Schrödinger equation, ignoring all spin-coupling interactions and using the reduced mass μ = m e M / ( m e + M ) {\\displaystyle \\mu =m_{e}M/(m_{e}+M)} , the equation is written as:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Expanding the Laplacian in spherical coordinates:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "This is a separable, partial differential equation which can be solved in terms of special functions. When the wavefunction is separated as product of functions R ( r ) {\\displaystyle R(r)} , Θ ( θ ) {\\displaystyle \\Theta (\\theta )} , and Φ ( φ ) {\\displaystyle \\Phi (\\varphi )} three independent differential functions appears with A and B being the separation constants:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The normalized position wavefunctions, given in spherical coordinates are:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "where:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The quantum numbers can take the following values:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Additionally, these wavefunctions are normalized (i.e., the integral of their modulus square equals 1) and orthogonal:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "where | n , ℓ , m ⟩ {\\displaystyle |n,\\ell ,m\\rangle } is the state represented by the wavefunction ψ n ℓ m {\\displaystyle \\psi _{n\\ell m}} in Dirac notation, and δ {\\displaystyle \\delta } is the Kronecker delta function.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The wavefunctions in momentum space are related to the wavefunctions in position space through a Fourier transform",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "which, for the bound states, results in",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "where C N α ( x ) {\\displaystyle C_{N}^{\\alpha }(x)} denotes a Gegenbauer polynomial and p {\\displaystyle p} is in units of ℏ / a 0 ∗ {\\displaystyle \\hbar /a_{0}^{*}} .",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The solutions to the Schrödinger equation for hydrogen are analytical, giving a simple expression for the hydrogen energy levels and thus the frequencies of the hydrogen spectral lines and fully reproduced the Bohr model and went beyond it. It also yields two other quantum numbers and the shape of the electron's wave function (\"orbital\") for the various possible quantum-mechanical states, thus explaining the anisotropic character of atomic bonds.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Schrödinger equation also applies to more complicated atoms and molecules. When there is more than one electron or nucleus the solution is not analytical and either computer calculations are necessary or simplifying assumptions must be made.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Since the Schrödinger equation is only valid for non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the solutions it yields for the hydrogen atom are not entirely correct. The Dirac equation of relativistic quantum theory improves these solutions (see below).",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The solution of the Schrödinger equation (wave equation) for the hydrogen atom uses the fact that the Coulomb potential produced by the nucleus is isotropic (it is radially symmetric in space and only depends on the distance to the nucleus). Although the resulting energy eigenfunctions (the orbitals) are not necessarily isotropic themselves, their dependence on the angular coordinates follows completely generally from this isotropy of the underlying potential: the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian (that is, the energy eigenstates) can be chosen as simultaneous eigenstates of the angular momentum operator. This corresponds to the fact that angular momentum is conserved in the orbital motion of the electron around the nucleus. Therefore, the energy eigenstates may be classified by two angular momentum quantum numbers, ℓ {\\displaystyle \\ell } and m {\\displaystyle m} (both are integers). The angular momentum quantum number ℓ = 0 , 1 , 2 , … {\\displaystyle \\ell =0,1,2,\\ldots } determines the magnitude of the angular momentum. The magnetic quantum number m = − ℓ , … , + ℓ {\\displaystyle m=-\\ell ,\\ldots ,+\\ell } determines the projection of the angular momentum on the (arbitrarily chosen) z {\\displaystyle z} -axis.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In addition to mathematical expressions for total angular momentum and angular momentum projection of wavefunctions, an expression for the radial dependence of the wave functions must be found. It is only here that the details of the 1 / r {\\displaystyle 1/r} Coulomb potential enter (leading to Laguerre polynomials in r {\\displaystyle r} ). This leads to a third quantum number, the principal quantum number n = 1 , 2 , 3 , … {\\displaystyle n=1,2,3,\\ldots } . The principal quantum number in hydrogen is related to the atom's total energy.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Note that the maximum value of the angular momentum quantum number is limited by the principal quantum number: it can run only up to n − 1 {\\displaystyle n-1} , i.e., ℓ = 0 , 1 , … , n − 1 {\\displaystyle \\ell =0,1,\\ldots ,n-1} .",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Due to angular momentum conservation, states of the same ℓ {\\displaystyle \\ell } but different m {\\displaystyle m} have the same energy (this holds for all problems with rotational symmetry). In addition, for the hydrogen atom, states of the same n {\\displaystyle n} but different ℓ {\\displaystyle \\ell } are also degenerate (i.e., they have the same energy). However, this is a specific property of hydrogen and is no longer true for more complicated atoms which have an (effective) potential differing from the form 1 / r {\\displaystyle 1/r} (due to the presence of the inner electrons shielding the nucleus potential).",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Taking into account the spin of the electron adds a last quantum number, the projection of the electron's spin angular momentum along the z {\\displaystyle z} -axis, which can take on two values. Therefore, any eigenstate of the electron in the hydrogen atom is described fully by four quantum numbers. According to the usual rules of quantum mechanics, the actual state of the electron may be any superposition of these states. This explains also why the choice of z {\\displaystyle z} -axis for the directional quantization of the angular momentum vector is immaterial: an orbital of given ℓ {\\displaystyle \\ell } and m ′ {\\displaystyle m'} obtained for another preferred axis z ′ {\\displaystyle z'} can always be represented as a suitable superposition of the various states of different m {\\displaystyle m} (but same ℓ {\\displaystyle \\ell } ) that have been obtained for z {\\displaystyle z} .",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In 1928, Paul Dirac found an equation that was fully compatible with special relativity, and (as a consequence) made the wave function a 4-component \"Dirac spinor\" including \"up\" and \"down\" spin components, with both positive and \"negative\" energy (or matter and antimatter). The solution to this equation gave the following results, more accurate than the Schrödinger solution.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The energy levels of hydrogen, including fine structure (excluding Lamb shift and hyperfine structure), are given by the Sommerfeld fine-structure expression:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "where α {\\displaystyle \\alpha } is the fine-structure constant and j {\\displaystyle j} is the total angular momentum quantum number, which is equal to | ℓ ± 1 2 | {\\displaystyle \\left|\\ell \\pm {\\tfrac {1}{2}}\\right|} , depending on the orientation of the electron spin relative to the orbital angular momentum. This formula represents a small correction to the energy obtained by Bohr and Schrödinger as given above. The factor in square brackets in the last expression is nearly one; the extra term arises from relativistic effects (for details, see #Features going beyond the Schrödinger solution). It is worth noting that this expression was first obtained by A. Sommerfeld in 1916 based on the relativistic version of the old Bohr theory. Sommerfeld has however used different notation for the quantum numbers.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The coherent states have been proposed as",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "which satisfies d Ω ¯ ≡ sin θ ¯ d θ ¯ d φ ¯ d ψ ¯ / 8 π 2 {\\displaystyle d{\\bar {\\Omega }}\\equiv \\sin {\\bar {\\theta }}\\,d{\\bar {\\theta }}\\,d{\\bar {\\varphi }}\\,d{\\bar {\\psi }}/8\\pi ^{2}} and takes the form",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The image to the right shows the first few hydrogen atom orbitals (energy eigenfunctions). These are cross-sections of the probability density that are color-coded (black represents zero density and white represents the highest density). The angular momentum (orbital) quantum number ℓ is denoted in each column, using the usual spectroscopic letter code (s means ℓ = 0, p means ℓ = 1, d means ℓ = 2). The main (principal) quantum number n (= 1, 2, 3, ...) is marked to the right of each row. For all pictures the magnetic quantum number m has been set to 0, and the cross-sectional plane is the xz-plane (z is the vertical axis). The probability density in three-dimensional space is obtained by rotating the one shown here around the z-axis.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The \"ground state\", i.e. the state of lowest energy, in which the electron is usually found, is the first one, the 1s state (principal quantum level n = 1, ℓ = 0).",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Black lines occur in each but the first orbital: these are the nodes of the wavefunction, i.e. where the probability density is zero. (More precisely, the nodes are spherical harmonics that appear as a result of solving the Schrödinger equation in spherical coordinates.)",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The quantum numbers determine the layout of these nodes. There are:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "There are several important effects that are neglected by the Schrödinger equation and which are responsible for certain small but measurable deviations of the real spectral lines from the predicted ones:",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Both of these features (and more) are incorporated in the relativistic Dirac equation, with predictions that come still closer to experiment. Again the Dirac equation may be solved analytically in the special case of a two-body system, such as the hydrogen atom. The resulting solution quantum states now must be classified by the total angular momentum number j (arising through the coupling between electron spin and orbital angular momentum). States of the same j and the same n are still degenerate. Thus, direct analytical solution of Dirac equation predicts 2S(1/2) and 2P(1/2) levels of hydrogen to have exactly the same energy, which is in a contradiction with observations (Lamb–Retherford experiment).",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "For these developments, it was essential that the solution of the Dirac equation for the hydrogen atom could be worked out exactly, such that any experimentally observed deviation had to be taken seriously as a signal of failure of the theory.",
"title": "Theoretical analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In the language of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, the hydrogen atom was first solved by Wolfgang Pauli using a rotational symmetry in four dimensions [O(4)-symmetry] generated by the angular momentum and the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector. By extending the symmetry group O(4) to the dynamical group O(4,2), the entire spectrum and all transitions were embedded in a single irreducible group representation.",
"title": "Alternatives to the Schrödinger theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 1979 the (non-relativistic) hydrogen atom was solved for the first time within Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics by Duru and Kleinert. This work greatly extended the range of applicability of Feynman's method.",
"title": "Alternatives to the Schrödinger theory"
}
]
| A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively charged proton and a single negatively charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force. Atomic hydrogen constitutes about 75% of the baryonic mass of the universe. In everyday life on Earth, isolated hydrogen atoms (called "atomic hydrogen") are extremely rare. Instead, a hydrogen atom tends to combine with other atoms in compounds, or with another hydrogen atom to form ordinary (diatomic) hydrogen gas, H2. "Atomic hydrogen" and "hydrogen atom" in ordinary English use have overlapping, yet distinct, meanings. For example, a water molecule contains two hydrogen atoms, but does not contain atomic hydrogen (which would refer to isolated hydrogen atoms). Atomic spectroscopy shows that there is a discrete infinite set of states in which a hydrogen (or any) atom can exist, contrary to the predictions of classical physics. Attempts to develop a theoretical understanding of the states of the hydrogen atom have been important to the history of quantum mechanics, since all other atoms can be roughly understood by knowing in detail about this simplest atomic structure. | 2001-12-01T13:46:36Z | 2023-10-26T19:48:51Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_atom |
14,227 | Elagabalus | Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, c. 204 – 11/12 March 222), better known by his nicknames Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/, EL-ə-GAB-ə-ləs) and Heliogabalus (/ˌhiːliə-, -lioʊ-/ HEE-lee-ə-, -lee-oh-), was Roman emperor from 218 to 222, while he was still a teenager. His short reign was notorious for sex scandals and religious controversy. A close relative to the Severan dynasty, he came from a prominent Arab family in Emesa (Homs), Syria, where since his early youth he served as head priest of the sun god Elagabal. After the death of his cousin, the emperor Caracalla, Elagabalus was raised to the principate at 14 years of age in an army revolt instigated by his grandmother Julia Maesa against Caracalla's short-lived successor, Macrinus. He only posthumously became known by the Latinised name of his god.
Later historians suggest Elagabalus showed a disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos. He replaced the traditional head of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter, with the deity Elagabal, of whom he had been high priest. He forced leading members of Rome's government to participate in religious rites celebrating this deity, presiding over them in person. He married four women, including a Vestal Virgin, in addition to lavishing favours on male courtiers thought to have been his lovers. He was also reported to have prostituted himself. His behavior estranged the Praetorian Guard, the Senate and the common people alike. Amidst growing opposition, at just 18 years of age he was assassinated and replaced by his cousin Severus Alexander in March 222. The assassination plot against Elagabalus was devised by Julia Maesa and carried out by disaffected members of the Praetorian Guard.
Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. This tradition has persisted; among writers of the early modern age he endured one of the worst reputations among Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, notably, wrote that Elagabalus "abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury". According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, "the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others" because of his "unspeakably disgusting life". An example of a modern historian's assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy's: "Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had." Despite near-universal condemnation of his reign, some scholars write warmly about his religious innovations, including the 6th-century Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, as well as Warwick Ball, a modern historian who described him as "a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice".
Elagabalus was born in 203 or 204, to Sextus Varius Marcellus and Julia Soaemias Bassiana, who had probably married around the year 200 (and no later than 204). Elagabalus's full birth name was probably (Sextus) Varius Avitus Bassianus, the last name being apparently a cognomen of the Emesene dynasty. Marcellus was an equestrian, later elevated to a senatorial position. Julia Soaemias was a cousin of the emperor Caracalla, and there were rumors (which Soaemias later publicly supported) that Elagabalus was Caracalla's child.
Marcellus's tombstone attests that Elagabalus had at least one brother, about whom nothing is known. Elagabalus's grandmother, Julia Maesa, was the widow of the consul Julius Avitus Alexianus, the sister of Julia Domna, and the sister-in-law of the emperor Septimius Severus. Other relatives included Elagabalus's aunt Julia Avita Mamaea and uncle Marcus Julius Gessius Marcianus and their son Severus Alexander.
Elagabalus's family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal, of whom Elagabalus was the high priest at Emesa (modern Homs) in Roman Syria as part of the Arab Emesene dynasty. The deity's Latin name, "Elagabalus", is a Latinized version of the Arabic إِلٰهُ الْجَبَلِ Ilāh al-Jabal, from ilāh ("god") and jabal ("mountain"), meaning "God of the Mountain", the Emesene manifestation of Ba'al.
Initially venerated at Emesa, the deity's cult spread to other parts of the Roman Empire in the second century; a dedication has been found as far away as Woerden (in the Netherlands), near the Roman limes. The god was later imported to Rome and assimilated with the sun god known as Sol Indiges in the era of the Roman Republic and as Sol Invictus during the late third century. In Greek, the sun god is Helios, hence Elagabal was later known as "Heliogabalus", a hybrid of "Helios" and "Elagabalus".
Herodian writes that when the emperor Macrinus came to power, he suppressed the threat to his reign from the family of his assassinated predecessor, Caracalla, by exiling them—Julia Maesa, her two daughters, and her eldest grandson Elagabalus—to their estate at Emesa in Syria. Almost upon arrival in Syria, Maesa began a plot with her advisor and Elagabalus's tutor, Gannys, to overthrow Macrinus and elevate the fourteen-year-old Elagabalus to the imperial throne.
Maesa spread a rumor, which Soaemias publicly supported, that Elagabalus was the illegitimate child of Caracalla and so deserved the loyalty of Roman soldiers and senators who had sworn allegiance to Caracalla. The soldiers of the Third Legion Gallica at Raphana, who had enjoyed greater privileges under Caracalla and resented Macrinus (and may have been impressed or bribed by Maesa's wealth), supported this claim. At sunrise on 16 May 218, Elagabalus was declared emperor by Publius Valerius Comazon, commander of the legion. To strengthen his legitimacy, Elagabalus adopted the same name Caracalla bore as emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Cassius Dio states that some officers tried to keep the soldiers loyal to Macrinus, but they were unsuccessful.
Praetorian prefect Ulpius Julianus responded by attacking the Third Legion, most likely on Macrinus's orders (though one account says he acted on his own before Macrinus knew of the rebellion). Herodian suggests Macrinus underestimated the threat, considering the rebellion inconsequential. During the fighting, Julianus's soldiers killed their officers and joined Elagabalus's forces.
Macrinus asked the Roman Senate to denounce Elagabalus as "the False Antoninus", and they complied, declaring war on Elagabalus and his family. Macrinus made his son Diadumenian co-emperor, and attempted to secure the loyalty of the Second Legion with large cash payments. During a banquet to celebrate this at Apamea, however, a messenger presented Macrinus with the severed head of his defeated prefect Julianus. Macrinus therefore retreated to Antioch, after which the Second Legion shifted its loyalties to Elagabalus.
Elagabalus's legionaries, commanded by Gannys, defeated Macrinus and Diadumenian and their Praetorian Guard at the Battle of Antioch on 8 June 218, prevailing when Macrinus's troops broke ranks after he fled the battlefield. Macrinus made for Italy, but was intercepted near Chalcedon and executed in Cappadocia, while Diadumenian was captured at Zeugma and executed.
That month, Elagabalus wrote to the Senate, assuming the imperial titles without waiting for senatorial approval, which violated tradition but was a common practice among third-century emperors. Letters of reconciliation were dispatched to Rome extending amnesty to the Senate and recognizing its laws, while also condemning the administration of Macrinus and his son.
The senators responded by acknowledging Elagabalus as emperor and accepting his claim to be the son of Caracalla. Elagabalus was made consul for the year 218 in the middle of June. Caracalla and Julia Domna were both deified by the Senate, both Julia Maesa and Julia Soaemias were elevated to the rank of Augustae, and the memory of Macrinus was expunged by the Senate. (Elagabalus's imperial artifacts assert that he succeeded Caracalla directly.) Comazon was appointed commander of the Praetorian Guard. Elagabalus was named Pater Patriae by the Senate before 13 July 218. On 14 July, Elagabalus was inducted into the colleges of all the Roman priesthoods, including the College of Pontiffs, of which he was named pontifex maximus.
Elagabalus stayed for a time at Antioch, apparently to quell various mutinies. Dio outlines several, which historian Fergus Millar places prior to the winter of 218–219. These included one by Gellius Maximus, who commanded the Fourth Legion and was executed, and one by Verus, who commanded the Third Legion Gallica, which was disbanded once the revolt was put down.
Next, according to Herodian, Elagabalus and his entourage spent the winter of 218–219 in Bithynia at Nicomedia, and then traveled through Thrace and Moesia to Italy in the first half of 219, the year of Elagabalus's second consulship. Herodian says that Elagabalus had a painting of himself sent ahead to Rome to be hung over a statue of the goddess Victoria in the Senate House so people would not be surprised by his Eastern garb, but it is unclear if such a painting actually existed, and Dio does not mention it. If the painting was indeed hung over Victoria, it put senators in the position of seeming to make offerings to Elagabalus when they made offerings to Victoria.
On his way to Rome, Elagabalus and his allies executed several prominent supporters of Macrinus, such as Syrian governor Fabius Agrippinus and former Thracian governor C. Claudius Attalus Paterculianus. Arriving at the imperial capital in August or September 219, Elagabalus staged an adventus, a ceremonial entrance to the city. In Rome, his offer of amnesty for the Roman upper class was largely honored, though the jurist Ulpian was exiled. Elagabalus made Comazon praetorian prefect, and later consul (220) and prefect of the city (three times, 220–222), which Dio regarded as a violation of Roman norms. Elagabalus himself held a consulship for the third year in a row in 220. Herodian and the Augustan History say that Elagabalus alienated many by giving powerful positions to other allies.
He developed the imperial palace at Horti Spei Veteris with the inclusion of the nearby land inherited from his father Sextus Varius Marcellus. Elagabalus made it his favourite retreat and designed it (as for Nero's Domus Aurea project) as a vast suburban villa divided into various building and landscape nuclei with the Amphitheatrum Castrense which he built and the Circus Varianus hippodrome fired by his unbridled passion for circuses and his habit of driving chariots inside the villa. He raced chariots under the family name of Varius.
Dio states that Elagabalus wanted to marry a charioteer named Hierocles and to declare him caesar, just as (Dio says) he had previously wanted to marry Gannys and name him caesar. The athlete Aurelius Zoticus is said by Dio to have been Elagabalus's lover and cubicularius (a non-administrative role), while the Augustan History says Zoticus was a husband to Elagabalus and held greater political influence.
Elagabalus's relationships to his mother Julia Soaemias and grandmother Julia Maesa were strong at first; they were influential supporters from the beginning, and Macrinus declared war on them as well as Elagabalus. Accordingly, they became the first women allowed into the Senate, and both received senatorial titles: Soaemias the established title of Clarissima, and Maesa the more unorthodox Mater Castrorum et Senatus ("Mother of the army camp and of the Senate"). They exercised influence over the young emperor throughout his reign, and are found on many coins and inscriptions, a rare honour for Roman women.
Under Elagabalus, the gradual devaluation of Roman aurei and denarii continued (with the silver purity of the denarius dropping from 58% to 46.5%), though antoniniani had a higher metal content than under Caracalla.
Since the reign of Septimius Severus, sun worship had increased throughout the Empire. At the end of 220, Elagabalus instated Elagabal as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon, possibly on the date of the winter solstice. In his official titulature, Elagabalus was then entitled in Latin: sacerdos amplissimus dei invicti Soli Elagabali, pontifex maximus, lit. 'highest priest of the unconquered god, the Sun Elgabal, supreme pontiff'. That a foreign god should be honored above Jupiter, with Elagabalus himself as chief priest, shocked many Romans.
As a token of respect for Roman religion, however, Elagabalus joined either Astarte, Minerva, Urania, or some combination of the three to Elagabal as consort. A union between Elagabal and a traditional goddess would have served to strengthen ties between the new religion and the imperial cult. There may have been an effort to introduce Elagabal, Urania, and Athena as the new Capitoline Triad of Rome—replacing Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.
He aroused further discontent when he married the Vestal Virgin Aquilia Severa, Vesta's high priestess, claiming the marriage would produce "godlike children". This was a flagrant breach of Roman law and tradition, which held that any Vestal found to have engaged in sexual intercourse was to be buried alive.
A lavish temple called the Elagabalium was built on the east face of the Palatine Hill to house Elagabal, who was represented by a black conical meteorite from Emesa. This was a baetylus. Herodian wrote "this stone is worshipped as though it were sent from heaven; on it there are some small projecting pieces and markings that are pointed out, which the people would like to believe are a rough picture of the sun, because this is how they see them".
Dio writes that in order to increase his piety as high priest of Elagabal atop a new Roman pantheon, Elagabalus had himself circumcised and swore to abstain from swine. He forced senators to watch while he danced circling the altar of Elagabal to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals. Each summer solstice he held a festival dedicated to the god, which became popular with the masses because of the free food distributed on these occasions. During this festival, Elagabalus placed the black stone on a chariot adorned with gold and jewels, which he paraded through the city:
A six horse chariot carried the divinity, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode in the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backward in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses' reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god.
The most sacred relics from the Roman religion were transferred from their respective shrines to the Elagabalium, including the emblem of the Great Mother, the fire of Vesta, the Shields of the Salii, and the Palladium, so that no other god could be worshipped except in association with Elagabal. Although his native cult was widely ridiculed by contemporaries, sun-worship was popular among the soldiers and would be promoted by several later emperors.
The question of Elagabalus's sexual orientation and gender identity is confused, owing to salacious and unreliable sources. Cassius Dio states that Elagabalus was married five times (twice to the same woman). His first wife was Julia Cornelia Paula, whom he married prior to 29 August 219; between then and 28 August 220, he divorced Paula, took the Vestal Virgin Julia Aquilia Severa as his second wife, divorced her, and took a third wife, who Herodian says was Annia Aurelia Faustina, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius and the widow of a man Elagabalus had recently executed, Pomponius Bassus. In the last year of his reign, Elagabalus divorced Annia Faustina and remarried Aquilia Severa.
Dio states that another "husband of this woman [Elagabalus] was Hierocles", an ex-slave and chariot driver from Caria. The Augustan History claims that Elagabalus also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna, while Dio says only that Zoticus was his cubicularius. Dio says that Elagabalus prostituted himself in taverns and brothels.
Dio says Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles's mistress, wife, and queen. The emperor reportedly wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, and supposedly offered vast sums to any physician who could provide him with a vagina by means of incision. Some writers suggest that Elagabalus may have identified as female or been transgender, and may have sought sex reassignment surgery. Some historians treat these accounts with caution, as sources for Elagabalus' life were often antagonistic towards him.
In November 2023, the North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin, United Kingdom, announced that Elagabalus would be considered as transgender and hence referred to with female pronouns in its exhibits due to claims that the emperor had said "call me not Lord, for I am a Lady". The museum has one Elagabalus coin.
Elagabalus stoked the animus of Roman elites and the Praetorian Guard through his perceptibly foreign conduct and his religious provocations. When Elagabalus's grandmother Julia Maesa perceived that popular support for the emperor was waning, she decided that he and his mother, who had encouraged his religious practices, had to be replaced. As alternatives, she turned to her other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea, and her daughter's son, the fifteen-year-old Severus Alexander.
Prevailing on Elagabalus, she arranged that he appoint his cousin Alexander as his heir and that the boy be given the title of caesar. Alexander was elevated to caesar in June 221, possibly on 26 June. Elagabalus and Alexander were each named consul designatus for the following year, probably on 1 July. Elagabalus took up his fourth consulship for the year of 222. Alexander shared the consulship with the emperor that year. However, Elagabalus reconsidered this arrangement when he began to suspect that the Praetorian Guard preferred his cousin to himself.
Elagabalus ordered various attempts on Alexander's life, after failing to obtain approval from the Senate for stripping Alexander of his shared title. According to Dio, Elagabalus invented the rumor that Alexander was near death, in order to see how the Praetorians would react. A riot ensued, and the Guard demanded to see Elagabalus and Alexander in the Praetorian camp.
The emperor complied and on 11 or 12 March 222 he publicly presented his cousin along with his own mother, Julia Soaemias. On their arrival the soldiers started cheering Alexander while ignoring Elagabalus, who ordered the summary arrest and execution of anyone who had taken part in this display of insubordination. In response, members of the Praetorian Guard attacked Elagabalus and his mother:
He made an attempt to flee, and would have got away somewhere by being placed in a chest had he not been discovered and slain, at the age of eighteen. His mother, who embraced him and clung tightly to him, perished with him; their heads were cut off and their bodies, after being stripped naked, were first dragged all over the city, and then the mother's body was cast aside somewhere or other, while his was thrown into the Tiber.
Following his assassination, many associates of Elagabalus were killed or deposed. His lover Hierocles was executed. His religious edicts were reversed and the stone of Elagabal was sent back to Emesa. Women were again barred from attending meetings of the Senate. The practice of damnatio memoriae—erasing from the public record a disgraced personage formerly of note—was systematically applied in his case. Several images, including an over-life-size statue of him as Hercules now in Naples, were re-carved with the face of Alexander Severus.
The historian Cassius Dio, who lived from the second half of the second century until sometime after 229, wrote a contemporary account of Elagabalus. Born into a patrician family, Dio spent the greater part of his life in public service. He was a senator under emperor Commodus and governor of Smyrna after the death of Septimius Severus, and then he served as suffect consul around 205, and as proconsul in Africa and Pannonia.
Dio's Roman History spans nearly a millennium, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229. His contemporaneous account of Elagabalus's reign is generally considered more reliable than the Augustan History or other accounts for this general time period, though by his own admission Dio spent the greater part of the relevant period outside of Rome and had to rely on second-hand information.
Furthermore, the political climate in the aftermath of Elagabalus's reign, as well as Dio's own position within the government of Severus Alexander, who held him in high esteem and made him consul again, likely influenced the truth of this part of his history for the worse. Dio regularly refers to Elagabalus as Sardanapalus, partly to distinguish him from his divine namesake, but chiefly to do his part in maintaining the damnatio memoriae and to associate him with another autocrat notorious for a dissolute life.
Historian Clare Rowan calls Dio's account a mixture of reliable information and "literary exaggeration", noting that Elagabalus's marriages and time as consul are confirmed by numismatic and epigraphic records. In other instances, Dio's account is inaccurate, such as when he says Elagabalus appointed entirely unqualified officials and that Comazon had no military experience before being named to head the Praetorian Guard, when in fact Comazon had commanded the Third Legion. Dio also gives different accounts in different places of when and by whom Diadumenian (whose forces Elagabalus fought) was given imperial names and titles.
Another contemporary of Elagabalus was Herodian, a minor Roman civil servant who lived from c. 170 until 240. His work, History of the Roman Empire since Marcus Aurelius, commonly abbreviated as Roman History, is an eyewitness account of the reign of Commodus until the beginning of the reign of Gordian III. His work largely overlaps with Dio's own Roman History, and the texts, written independently of each other, agree more often than not about Elagabalus and his short but eventful reign.
Arrizabalaga writes that Herodian is in most ways "less detailed and punctilious than Dio", and he is deemed less reliable by many modern scholars, though Rowan considers his account of Elagabalus's reign more reliable than Dio's and Herodian's lack of literary and scholarly pretensions are considered to make him less biased than senatorial historians. He is considered an important source for the religious reforms which took place during the reign of Elagabalus, which have been confirmed by numismatic and archaeological evidence.
The source of many stories of Elagabalus's depravity is the Augustan History (Historia Augusta), which includes controversial claims. It is most likely that the Historia Augusta was written towards the end of the fourth century, during the reign of emperor Theodosius I. The account of Elagabalus in the Augustan History is of uncertain historical merit. Sections 13 to 17, relating to the fall of Elagabalus, are less controversial among historians. The author of the most scandalous stories in the Augustan History concedes that "both these matters and some others which pass belief were, I think, invented by people who wanted to depreciate Heliogabalus to win favour with Alexander".
For readers of the modern age, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) further cemented the scandalous reputation of Elagabalus. Gibbon not only accepted and expressed outrage at the allegations of the ancient historians, but he might have added some details of his own; for example, he is the first historian known to claim that Gannys was a eunuch. Gibbon wrote:
To confound the order of the season and climate, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements. A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions. The master of the Roman world affected to copy the manners and dress of the female sex, preferring the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonored the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor's, or, as he more properly styled himself, the empress's husband. It may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy, and blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country.
The 20th-century anthropologist James George Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) took seriously the monotheistic aspirations of the emperor, but also ridiculed him: "The dainty priest of the Sun [was] the most abandoned reprobate who ever sat upon a throne ... It was the intention of this eminently religious but crack-brained despot to supersede the worship of all the gods, not only at Rome but throughout the world, by the single worship of Elagabalus or the Sun." The first book-length biography was The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911) by J. Stuart Hay, "a serious and systematic study" more sympathetic than that of previous historians, which nonetheless stressed the exoticism of Elagabalus, calling his reign one of "enormous wealth and excessive prodigality, luxury and aestheticism, carried to their ultimate extreme, and sensuality in all the refinements of its Eastern habit".
Some recent historians paint a more favourable picture of the emperor's rule. Martijn Icks, in Images of Elagabalus (2008; republished as The Crimes of Elagabalus in 2011 and 2012), doubts the reliability of the ancient sources and argues that it was the emperor's unorthodox religious policies that alienated the power elite of Rome, to the point that his grandmother saw fit to eliminate him and replace him with his cousin. He described ancient stories pertaining to the emperor as "part of a long tradition of 'character assassination' in ancient historiography and biography".
Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado, in The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction? (2008), is also critical of the ancient historians and speculates that neither religion nor sexuality played a role in the fall of the young emperor. Prado instead suggests Elagabalus was the loser in a power struggle within the imperial family, that the loyalty of the Praetorian Guards was up for sale, and that Julia Maesa had the resources to outmaneuver and outbribe her grandson. In this version of events, once Elagabalus, his mother, and his immediate circle had been murdered, a campaign of character assassination began, resulting in a grotesque caricature that has persisted to the present day. Other historians, including Icks, criticized Prado for being overly skeptical of primary sources.
Warwick Ball, in his book Rome in the East, writes an apologetic account of the emperor, arguing that descriptions of his religious rites were exaggerated and should be dismissed as propaganda, similar to how pagan descriptions of Christian rites have since been dismissed. Ball describes the emperor's ritual processions as sound political and religious policy, arguing that syncretism of eastern and western deities deserves praise rather than ridicule. Ultimately, he paints Elagabalus as a child forced to become emperor who, as expected of the high-priest of a cult, continued his rituals even after becoming emperor. Ball justified Elagabalus's executions of prominent Roman figures who criticized his religious activities in the same way. Finally, Ball asserts Elagabalus's eventual victory in the sense that his deity would be welcomed by Rome in its Sol Invictus form 50 years later. Ball claims that Sol Invictus came to influence the monotheist Christian beliefs of Constantine, asserting that this influence remains in Christianity to this day.
Despite the attempted damnatio memoriae, stories about Elagabalus survived and figured in many works of art and literature. In Spanish, his name became a word for "glutton", heliogábalo. Due to the ancient stories about him, he often appears in literature and other creative media as a decadent figure (becoming something of an anti-hero in the Decadent movement of the late 19th century, and inspiring many famous works of art, especially by Decadents) and the epitome of a young, amoral aesthete. The most notable of these works include: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, c. 204 – 11/12 March 222), better known by his nicknames Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/, EL-ə-GAB-ə-ləs) and Heliogabalus (/ˌhiːliə-, -lioʊ-/ HEE-lee-ə-, -lee-oh-), was Roman emperor from 218 to 222, while he was still a teenager. His short reign was notorious for sex scandals and religious controversy. A close relative to the Severan dynasty, he came from a prominent Arab family in Emesa (Homs), Syria, where since his early youth he served as head priest of the sun god Elagabal. After the death of his cousin, the emperor Caracalla, Elagabalus was raised to the principate at 14 years of age in an army revolt instigated by his grandmother Julia Maesa against Caracalla's short-lived successor, Macrinus. He only posthumously became known by the Latinised name of his god.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Later historians suggest Elagabalus showed a disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos. He replaced the traditional head of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter, with the deity Elagabal, of whom he had been high priest. He forced leading members of Rome's government to participate in religious rites celebrating this deity, presiding over them in person. He married four women, including a Vestal Virgin, in addition to lavishing favours on male courtiers thought to have been his lovers. He was also reported to have prostituted himself. His behavior estranged the Praetorian Guard, the Senate and the common people alike. Amidst growing opposition, at just 18 years of age he was assassinated and replaced by his cousin Severus Alexander in March 222. The assassination plot against Elagabalus was devised by Julia Maesa and carried out by disaffected members of the Praetorian Guard.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. This tradition has persisted; among writers of the early modern age he endured one of the worst reputations among Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, notably, wrote that Elagabalus \"abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury\". According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, \"the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others\" because of his \"unspeakably disgusting life\". An example of a modern historian's assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy's: \"Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.\" Despite near-universal condemnation of his reign, some scholars write warmly about his religious innovations, including the 6th-century Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, as well as Warwick Ball, a modern historian who described him as \"a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Elagabalus was born in 203 or 204, to Sextus Varius Marcellus and Julia Soaemias Bassiana, who had probably married around the year 200 (and no later than 204). Elagabalus's full birth name was probably (Sextus) Varius Avitus Bassianus, the last name being apparently a cognomen of the Emesene dynasty. Marcellus was an equestrian, later elevated to a senatorial position. Julia Soaemias was a cousin of the emperor Caracalla, and there were rumors (which Soaemias later publicly supported) that Elagabalus was Caracalla's child.",
"title": "Family and priesthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Marcellus's tombstone attests that Elagabalus had at least one brother, about whom nothing is known. Elagabalus's grandmother, Julia Maesa, was the widow of the consul Julius Avitus Alexianus, the sister of Julia Domna, and the sister-in-law of the emperor Septimius Severus. Other relatives included Elagabalus's aunt Julia Avita Mamaea and uncle Marcus Julius Gessius Marcianus and their son Severus Alexander.",
"title": "Family and priesthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Elagabalus's family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal, of whom Elagabalus was the high priest at Emesa (modern Homs) in Roman Syria as part of the Arab Emesene dynasty. The deity's Latin name, \"Elagabalus\", is a Latinized version of the Arabic إِلٰهُ الْجَبَلِ Ilāh al-Jabal, from ilāh (\"god\") and jabal (\"mountain\"), meaning \"God of the Mountain\", the Emesene manifestation of Ba'al.",
"title": "Family and priesthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Initially venerated at Emesa, the deity's cult spread to other parts of the Roman Empire in the second century; a dedication has been found as far away as Woerden (in the Netherlands), near the Roman limes. The god was later imported to Rome and assimilated with the sun god known as Sol Indiges in the era of the Roman Republic and as Sol Invictus during the late third century. In Greek, the sun god is Helios, hence Elagabal was later known as \"Heliogabalus\", a hybrid of \"Helios\" and \"Elagabalus\".",
"title": "Family and priesthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Herodian writes that when the emperor Macrinus came to power, he suppressed the threat to his reign from the family of his assassinated predecessor, Caracalla, by exiling them—Julia Maesa, her two daughters, and her eldest grandson Elagabalus—to their estate at Emesa in Syria. Almost upon arrival in Syria, Maesa began a plot with her advisor and Elagabalus's tutor, Gannys, to overthrow Macrinus and elevate the fourteen-year-old Elagabalus to the imperial throne.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Maesa spread a rumor, which Soaemias publicly supported, that Elagabalus was the illegitimate child of Caracalla and so deserved the loyalty of Roman soldiers and senators who had sworn allegiance to Caracalla. The soldiers of the Third Legion Gallica at Raphana, who had enjoyed greater privileges under Caracalla and resented Macrinus (and may have been impressed or bribed by Maesa's wealth), supported this claim. At sunrise on 16 May 218, Elagabalus was declared emperor by Publius Valerius Comazon, commander of the legion. To strengthen his legitimacy, Elagabalus adopted the same name Caracalla bore as emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Cassius Dio states that some officers tried to keep the soldiers loyal to Macrinus, but they were unsuccessful.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Praetorian prefect Ulpius Julianus responded by attacking the Third Legion, most likely on Macrinus's orders (though one account says he acted on his own before Macrinus knew of the rebellion). Herodian suggests Macrinus underestimated the threat, considering the rebellion inconsequential. During the fighting, Julianus's soldiers killed their officers and joined Elagabalus's forces.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Macrinus asked the Roman Senate to denounce Elagabalus as \"the False Antoninus\", and they complied, declaring war on Elagabalus and his family. Macrinus made his son Diadumenian co-emperor, and attempted to secure the loyalty of the Second Legion with large cash payments. During a banquet to celebrate this at Apamea, however, a messenger presented Macrinus with the severed head of his defeated prefect Julianus. Macrinus therefore retreated to Antioch, after which the Second Legion shifted its loyalties to Elagabalus.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Elagabalus's legionaries, commanded by Gannys, defeated Macrinus and Diadumenian and their Praetorian Guard at the Battle of Antioch on 8 June 218, prevailing when Macrinus's troops broke ranks after he fled the battlefield. Macrinus made for Italy, but was intercepted near Chalcedon and executed in Cappadocia, while Diadumenian was captured at Zeugma and executed.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "That month, Elagabalus wrote to the Senate, assuming the imperial titles without waiting for senatorial approval, which violated tradition but was a common practice among third-century emperors. Letters of reconciliation were dispatched to Rome extending amnesty to the Senate and recognizing its laws, while also condemning the administration of Macrinus and his son.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The senators responded by acknowledging Elagabalus as emperor and accepting his claim to be the son of Caracalla. Elagabalus was made consul for the year 218 in the middle of June. Caracalla and Julia Domna were both deified by the Senate, both Julia Maesa and Julia Soaemias were elevated to the rank of Augustae, and the memory of Macrinus was expunged by the Senate. (Elagabalus's imperial artifacts assert that he succeeded Caracalla directly.) Comazon was appointed commander of the Praetorian Guard. Elagabalus was named Pater Patriae by the Senate before 13 July 218. On 14 July, Elagabalus was inducted into the colleges of all the Roman priesthoods, including the College of Pontiffs, of which he was named pontifex maximus.",
"title": "Rise to power"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Elagabalus stayed for a time at Antioch, apparently to quell various mutinies. Dio outlines several, which historian Fergus Millar places prior to the winter of 218–219. These included one by Gellius Maximus, who commanded the Fourth Legion and was executed, and one by Verus, who commanded the Third Legion Gallica, which was disbanded once the revolt was put down.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Next, according to Herodian, Elagabalus and his entourage spent the winter of 218–219 in Bithynia at Nicomedia, and then traveled through Thrace and Moesia to Italy in the first half of 219, the year of Elagabalus's second consulship. Herodian says that Elagabalus had a painting of himself sent ahead to Rome to be hung over a statue of the goddess Victoria in the Senate House so people would not be surprised by his Eastern garb, but it is unclear if such a painting actually existed, and Dio does not mention it. If the painting was indeed hung over Victoria, it put senators in the position of seeming to make offerings to Elagabalus when they made offerings to Victoria.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On his way to Rome, Elagabalus and his allies executed several prominent supporters of Macrinus, such as Syrian governor Fabius Agrippinus and former Thracian governor C. Claudius Attalus Paterculianus. Arriving at the imperial capital in August or September 219, Elagabalus staged an adventus, a ceremonial entrance to the city. In Rome, his offer of amnesty for the Roman upper class was largely honored, though the jurist Ulpian was exiled. Elagabalus made Comazon praetorian prefect, and later consul (220) and prefect of the city (three times, 220–222), which Dio regarded as a violation of Roman norms. Elagabalus himself held a consulship for the third year in a row in 220. Herodian and the Augustan History say that Elagabalus alienated many by giving powerful positions to other allies.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He developed the imperial palace at Horti Spei Veteris with the inclusion of the nearby land inherited from his father Sextus Varius Marcellus. Elagabalus made it his favourite retreat and designed it (as for Nero's Domus Aurea project) as a vast suburban villa divided into various building and landscape nuclei with the Amphitheatrum Castrense which he built and the Circus Varianus hippodrome fired by his unbridled passion for circuses and his habit of driving chariots inside the villa. He raced chariots under the family name of Varius.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Dio states that Elagabalus wanted to marry a charioteer named Hierocles and to declare him caesar, just as (Dio says) he had previously wanted to marry Gannys and name him caesar. The athlete Aurelius Zoticus is said by Dio to have been Elagabalus's lover and cubicularius (a non-administrative role), while the Augustan History says Zoticus was a husband to Elagabalus and held greater political influence.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Elagabalus's relationships to his mother Julia Soaemias and grandmother Julia Maesa were strong at first; they were influential supporters from the beginning, and Macrinus declared war on them as well as Elagabalus. Accordingly, they became the first women allowed into the Senate, and both received senatorial titles: Soaemias the established title of Clarissima, and Maesa the more unorthodox Mater Castrorum et Senatus (\"Mother of the army camp and of the Senate\"). They exercised influence over the young emperor throughout his reign, and are found on many coins and inscriptions, a rare honour for Roman women.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Under Elagabalus, the gradual devaluation of Roman aurei and denarii continued (with the silver purity of the denarius dropping from 58% to 46.5%), though antoniniani had a higher metal content than under Caracalla.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Since the reign of Septimius Severus, sun worship had increased throughout the Empire. At the end of 220, Elagabalus instated Elagabal as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon, possibly on the date of the winter solstice. In his official titulature, Elagabalus was then entitled in Latin: sacerdos amplissimus dei invicti Soli Elagabali, pontifex maximus, lit. 'highest priest of the unconquered god, the Sun Elgabal, supreme pontiff'. That a foreign god should be honored above Jupiter, with Elagabalus himself as chief priest, shocked many Romans.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As a token of respect for Roman religion, however, Elagabalus joined either Astarte, Minerva, Urania, or some combination of the three to Elagabal as consort. A union between Elagabal and a traditional goddess would have served to strengthen ties between the new religion and the imperial cult. There may have been an effort to introduce Elagabal, Urania, and Athena as the new Capitoline Triad of Rome—replacing Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "He aroused further discontent when he married the Vestal Virgin Aquilia Severa, Vesta's high priestess, claiming the marriage would produce \"godlike children\". This was a flagrant breach of Roman law and tradition, which held that any Vestal found to have engaged in sexual intercourse was to be buried alive.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A lavish temple called the Elagabalium was built on the east face of the Palatine Hill to house Elagabal, who was represented by a black conical meteorite from Emesa. This was a baetylus. Herodian wrote \"this stone is worshipped as though it were sent from heaven; on it there are some small projecting pieces and markings that are pointed out, which the people would like to believe are a rough picture of the sun, because this is how they see them\".",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Dio writes that in order to increase his piety as high priest of Elagabal atop a new Roman pantheon, Elagabalus had himself circumcised and swore to abstain from swine. He forced senators to watch while he danced circling the altar of Elagabal to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals. Each summer solstice he held a festival dedicated to the god, which became popular with the masses because of the free food distributed on these occasions. During this festival, Elagabalus placed the black stone on a chariot adorned with gold and jewels, which he paraded through the city:",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A six horse chariot carried the divinity, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode in the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backward in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses' reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The most sacred relics from the Roman religion were transferred from their respective shrines to the Elagabalium, including the emblem of the Great Mother, the fire of Vesta, the Shields of the Salii, and the Palladium, so that no other god could be worshipped except in association with Elagabal. Although his native cult was widely ridiculed by contemporaries, sun-worship was popular among the soldiers and would be promoted by several later emperors.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The question of Elagabalus's sexual orientation and gender identity is confused, owing to salacious and unreliable sources. Cassius Dio states that Elagabalus was married five times (twice to the same woman). His first wife was Julia Cornelia Paula, whom he married prior to 29 August 219; between then and 28 August 220, he divorced Paula, took the Vestal Virgin Julia Aquilia Severa as his second wife, divorced her, and took a third wife, who Herodian says was Annia Aurelia Faustina, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius and the widow of a man Elagabalus had recently executed, Pomponius Bassus. In the last year of his reign, Elagabalus divorced Annia Faustina and remarried Aquilia Severa.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Dio states that another \"husband of this woman [Elagabalus] was Hierocles\", an ex-slave and chariot driver from Caria. The Augustan History claims that Elagabalus also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna, while Dio says only that Zoticus was his cubicularius. Dio says that Elagabalus prostituted himself in taverns and brothels.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Dio says Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles's mistress, wife, and queen. The emperor reportedly wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, and supposedly offered vast sums to any physician who could provide him with a vagina by means of incision. Some writers suggest that Elagabalus may have identified as female or been transgender, and may have sought sex reassignment surgery. Some historians treat these accounts with caution, as sources for Elagabalus' life were often antagonistic towards him.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In November 2023, the North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin, United Kingdom, announced that Elagabalus would be considered as transgender and hence referred to with female pronouns in its exhibits due to claims that the emperor had said \"call me not Lord, for I am a Lady\". The museum has one Elagabalus coin.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Elagabalus stoked the animus of Roman elites and the Praetorian Guard through his perceptibly foreign conduct and his religious provocations. When Elagabalus's grandmother Julia Maesa perceived that popular support for the emperor was waning, she decided that he and his mother, who had encouraged his religious practices, had to be replaced. As alternatives, she turned to her other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea, and her daughter's son, the fifteen-year-old Severus Alexander.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Prevailing on Elagabalus, she arranged that he appoint his cousin Alexander as his heir and that the boy be given the title of caesar. Alexander was elevated to caesar in June 221, possibly on 26 June. Elagabalus and Alexander were each named consul designatus for the following year, probably on 1 July. Elagabalus took up his fourth consulship for the year of 222. Alexander shared the consulship with the emperor that year. However, Elagabalus reconsidered this arrangement when he began to suspect that the Praetorian Guard preferred his cousin to himself.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Elagabalus ordered various attempts on Alexander's life, after failing to obtain approval from the Senate for stripping Alexander of his shared title. According to Dio, Elagabalus invented the rumor that Alexander was near death, in order to see how the Praetorians would react. A riot ensued, and the Guard demanded to see Elagabalus and Alexander in the Praetorian camp.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The emperor complied and on 11 or 12 March 222 he publicly presented his cousin along with his own mother, Julia Soaemias. On their arrival the soldiers started cheering Alexander while ignoring Elagabalus, who ordered the summary arrest and execution of anyone who had taken part in this display of insubordination. In response, members of the Praetorian Guard attacked Elagabalus and his mother:",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "He made an attempt to flee, and would have got away somewhere by being placed in a chest had he not been discovered and slain, at the age of eighteen. His mother, who embraced him and clung tightly to him, perished with him; their heads were cut off and their bodies, after being stripped naked, were first dragged all over the city, and then the mother's body was cast aside somewhere or other, while his was thrown into the Tiber.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Following his assassination, many associates of Elagabalus were killed or deposed. His lover Hierocles was executed. His religious edicts were reversed and the stone of Elagabal was sent back to Emesa. Women were again barred from attending meetings of the Senate. The practice of damnatio memoriae—erasing from the public record a disgraced personage formerly of note—was systematically applied in his case. Several images, including an over-life-size statue of him as Hercules now in Naples, were re-carved with the face of Alexander Severus.",
"title": "Emperor (218–222)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The historian Cassius Dio, who lived from the second half of the second century until sometime after 229, wrote a contemporary account of Elagabalus. Born into a patrician family, Dio spent the greater part of his life in public service. He was a senator under emperor Commodus and governor of Smyrna after the death of Septimius Severus, and then he served as suffect consul around 205, and as proconsul in Africa and Pannonia.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Dio's Roman History spans nearly a millennium, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229. His contemporaneous account of Elagabalus's reign is generally considered more reliable than the Augustan History or other accounts for this general time period, though by his own admission Dio spent the greater part of the relevant period outside of Rome and had to rely on second-hand information.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Furthermore, the political climate in the aftermath of Elagabalus's reign, as well as Dio's own position within the government of Severus Alexander, who held him in high esteem and made him consul again, likely influenced the truth of this part of his history for the worse. Dio regularly refers to Elagabalus as Sardanapalus, partly to distinguish him from his divine namesake, but chiefly to do his part in maintaining the damnatio memoriae and to associate him with another autocrat notorious for a dissolute life.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Historian Clare Rowan calls Dio's account a mixture of reliable information and \"literary exaggeration\", noting that Elagabalus's marriages and time as consul are confirmed by numismatic and epigraphic records. In other instances, Dio's account is inaccurate, such as when he says Elagabalus appointed entirely unqualified officials and that Comazon had no military experience before being named to head the Praetorian Guard, when in fact Comazon had commanded the Third Legion. Dio also gives different accounts in different places of when and by whom Diadumenian (whose forces Elagabalus fought) was given imperial names and titles.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Another contemporary of Elagabalus was Herodian, a minor Roman civil servant who lived from c. 170 until 240. His work, History of the Roman Empire since Marcus Aurelius, commonly abbreviated as Roman History, is an eyewitness account of the reign of Commodus until the beginning of the reign of Gordian III. His work largely overlaps with Dio's own Roman History, and the texts, written independently of each other, agree more often than not about Elagabalus and his short but eventful reign.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Arrizabalaga writes that Herodian is in most ways \"less detailed and punctilious than Dio\", and he is deemed less reliable by many modern scholars, though Rowan considers his account of Elagabalus's reign more reliable than Dio's and Herodian's lack of literary and scholarly pretensions are considered to make him less biased than senatorial historians. He is considered an important source for the religious reforms which took place during the reign of Elagabalus, which have been confirmed by numismatic and archaeological evidence.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The source of many stories of Elagabalus's depravity is the Augustan History (Historia Augusta), which includes controversial claims. It is most likely that the Historia Augusta was written towards the end of the fourth century, during the reign of emperor Theodosius I. The account of Elagabalus in the Augustan History is of uncertain historical merit. Sections 13 to 17, relating to the fall of Elagabalus, are less controversial among historians. The author of the most scandalous stories in the Augustan History concedes that \"both these matters and some others which pass belief were, I think, invented by people who wanted to depreciate Heliogabalus to win favour with Alexander\".",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "For readers of the modern age, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) further cemented the scandalous reputation of Elagabalus. Gibbon not only accepted and expressed outrage at the allegations of the ancient historians, but he might have added some details of his own; for example, he is the first historian known to claim that Gannys was a eunuch. Gibbon wrote:",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "To confound the order of the season and climate, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements. A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions. The master of the Roman world affected to copy the manners and dress of the female sex, preferring the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonored the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor's, or, as he more properly styled himself, the empress's husband. It may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy, and blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The 20th-century anthropologist James George Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) took seriously the monotheistic aspirations of the emperor, but also ridiculed him: \"The dainty priest of the Sun [was] the most abandoned reprobate who ever sat upon a throne ... It was the intention of this eminently religious but crack-brained despot to supersede the worship of all the gods, not only at Rome but throughout the world, by the single worship of Elagabalus or the Sun.\" The first book-length biography was The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911) by J. Stuart Hay, \"a serious and systematic study\" more sympathetic than that of previous historians, which nonetheless stressed the exoticism of Elagabalus, calling his reign one of \"enormous wealth and excessive prodigality, luxury and aestheticism, carried to their ultimate extreme, and sensuality in all the refinements of its Eastern habit\".",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Some recent historians paint a more favourable picture of the emperor's rule. Martijn Icks, in Images of Elagabalus (2008; republished as The Crimes of Elagabalus in 2011 and 2012), doubts the reliability of the ancient sources and argues that it was the emperor's unorthodox religious policies that alienated the power elite of Rome, to the point that his grandmother saw fit to eliminate him and replace him with his cousin. He described ancient stories pertaining to the emperor as \"part of a long tradition of 'character assassination' in ancient historiography and biography\".",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado, in The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction? (2008), is also critical of the ancient historians and speculates that neither religion nor sexuality played a role in the fall of the young emperor. Prado instead suggests Elagabalus was the loser in a power struggle within the imperial family, that the loyalty of the Praetorian Guards was up for sale, and that Julia Maesa had the resources to outmaneuver and outbribe her grandson. In this version of events, once Elagabalus, his mother, and his immediate circle had been murdered, a campaign of character assassination began, resulting in a grotesque caricature that has persisted to the present day. Other historians, including Icks, criticized Prado for being overly skeptical of primary sources.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Warwick Ball, in his book Rome in the East, writes an apologetic account of the emperor, arguing that descriptions of his religious rites were exaggerated and should be dismissed as propaganda, similar to how pagan descriptions of Christian rites have since been dismissed. Ball describes the emperor's ritual processions as sound political and religious policy, arguing that syncretism of eastern and western deities deserves praise rather than ridicule. Ultimately, he paints Elagabalus as a child forced to become emperor who, as expected of the high-priest of a cult, continued his rituals even after becoming emperor. Ball justified Elagabalus's executions of prominent Roman figures who criticized his religious activities in the same way. Finally, Ball asserts Elagabalus's eventual victory in the sense that his deity would be welcomed by Rome in its Sol Invictus form 50 years later. Ball claims that Sol Invictus came to influence the monotheist Christian beliefs of Constantine, asserting that this influence remains in Christianity to this day.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Despite the attempted damnatio memoriae, stories about Elagabalus survived and figured in many works of art and literature. In Spanish, his name became a word for \"glutton\", heliogábalo. Due to the ancient stories about him, he often appears in literature and other creative media as a decadent figure (becoming something of an anti-hero in the Decadent movement of the late 19th century, and inspiring many famous works of art, especially by Decadents) and the epitome of a young, amoral aesthete. The most notable of these works include:",
"title": "Cultural references"
}
]
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known by his nicknames Elagabalus and Heliogabalus, was Roman emperor from 218 to 222, while he was still a teenager. His short reign was notorious for sex scandals and religious controversy. A close relative to the Severan dynasty, he came from a prominent Arab family in Emesa (Homs), Syria, where since his early youth he served as head priest of the sun god Elagabal. After the death of his cousin, the emperor Caracalla, Elagabalus was raised to the principate at 14 years of age in an army revolt instigated by his grandmother Julia Maesa against Caracalla's short-lived successor, Macrinus. He only posthumously became known by the Latinised name of his god. Later historians suggest Elagabalus showed a disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos. He replaced the traditional head of the Roman pantheon, Jupiter, with the deity Elagabal, of whom he had been high priest. He forced leading members of Rome's government to participate in religious rites celebrating this deity, presiding over them in person. He married four women, including a Vestal Virgin, in addition to lavishing favours on male courtiers thought to have been his lovers. He was also reported to have prostituted himself. His behavior estranged the Praetorian Guard, the Senate and the common people alike. Amidst growing opposition, at just 18 years of age he was assassinated and replaced by his cousin Severus Alexander in March 222. The assassination plot against Elagabalus was devised by Julia Maesa and carried out by disaffected members of the Praetorian Guard. Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. This tradition has persisted; among writers of the early modern age he endured one of the worst reputations among Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, notably, wrote that Elagabalus "abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury". According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, "the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others" because of his "unspeakably disgusting life". An example of a modern historian's assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy's: "Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had." Despite near-universal condemnation of his reign, some scholars write warmly about his religious innovations, including the 6th-century Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, as well as Warwick Ball, a modern historian who described him as "a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice". | 2001-12-01T17:42:35Z | 2023-12-12T17:25:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus |
14,229 | Homeopathy | Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths or homeopathic physicians, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people; this doctrine is called similia similibus curentur, or "like cures like". Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent. Often not even a single molecule of the original substance can be expected to remain in the product. Between each dilution homeopaths may hit and/or shake the product, claiming this makes the diluent "remember" the original substance after its removal. Practitioners claim that such preparations, upon oral intake, can treat or cure disease.
All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology contradicts homeopathy. Homeopathic remedies are typically biochemically inert, and have no effect on any known disease. Its theory of disease, centered around principles Hahnemann termed miasms, is inconsistent with subsequent identification of viruses and bacteria as causes of disease. Clinical trials have been conducted and generally demonstrated no objective effect from homeopathic preparations. The fundamental implausibility of homeopathy as well as a lack of demonstrable effectiveness has led to it being characterized within the scientific and medical communities as quackery and fraud.
Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825, and the first American homeopathic school opened in 1835. Throughout the 19th century, dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and the United States. During this period, homeopathy was able to appear relatively successful, as other forms of treatment could be harmful and ineffective. By the end of the century the practice began to wane, with the last exclusively homeopathic medical school in the United States closing in 1920. During the 1970s, homeopathy made a significant comeback, with sales of some homeopathic products increasing tenfold. The trend corresponded with the rise of the New Age movement, and may be in part due to chemophobia, an irrational aversion to synthetic chemicals, and the longer consultation times homeopathic practitioners provided.
In the 21st century, a series of meta-analyses have shown that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. As a result, national and international bodies have recommended the withdrawal of government funding for homeopathy in healthcare. National bodies from Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France, as well as the European Academies' Science Advisory Council and the Russian Academy of Sciences have all concluded that homeopathy is ineffective, and recommended against the practice receiving any further funding. The National Health Service in England no longer provides funding for homeopathic remedies and asked the Department of Health to add homeopathic remedies to the list of forbidden prescription items. France removed funding in 2021, while Spain has also announced moves to ban homeopathy and other pseudotherapies from health centers.
Homeopathy was created in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann rejected the mainstream medicine of the late 18th century as irrational and inadvisable because it was largely ineffective and often harmful. He advocated the use of single drugs at lower doses and promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of how living organisms function. The term homeopathy was coined by Hahnemann and first appeared in print in 1807. He also coined the expression "allopathic medicine", which was used to pejoratively refer to traditional Western medicine.
Hahnemann conceived of homeopathy while translating a medical treatise by the Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen into German. Being sceptical of Cullen's theory that cinchona cured malaria because it was bitter, Hahnemann ingested some bark specifically to investigate what would happen. He experienced fever, shivering and joint pain: symptoms similar to those of malaria itself. From this, Hahnemann came to believe that all effective drugs produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases that they treat. This led to the name "homeopathy", which comes from the Greek: ὅμοιος hómoios, "-like" and πάθος páthos, "suffering".
The doctrine that those drugs are effective which produce symptoms similar to the symptoms caused by the diseases they treat, called "the law of similars", was expressed by Hahnemann with the Latin phrase similia similibus curentur, or "like cures like". Hahnemann's law of similars is unproven and does not derive from the scientific method. An account of the effects of eating cinchona bark noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, published in 1861, failed to reproduce the symptoms Hahnemann reported. Subsequent scientific work showed that cinchona cures malaria because it contains quinine, which kills the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease; the mechanism of action is unrelated to Hahnemann's ideas.
Hahnemann began to test what effects various substances may produce in humans, a procedure later called "homeopathic proving". These tests required subjects to test the effects of ingesting substances by recording all their symptoms as well as the ancillary conditions under which they appeared. He published a collection of provings in 1805, and a second collection of 65 preparations appeared in his book, Materia Medica Pura (1810).
As Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs that caused similar symptoms would only aggravate illness, he advocated for extreme dilutions. A technique was devised for making dilutions that Hahnemann claimed would preserve the substance's therapeutic properties while removing its harmful effects. Hahnemann believed that this process enhanced "the spirit-like medicinal powers of the crude substances". He gathered and published an overview of his new medical system in his book, The Organon of the Healing Art (1810), with a sixth edition published in 1921 that homeopaths still use today.
In the Organon, Hahnemann introduced the concept of "miasms" as the "infectious principles" underlying chronic disease and as "peculiar morbid derangement[s] of vital force". Hahnemann associated each miasm with specific diseases, and thought that initial exposure to miasms causes local symptoms, such as skin or venereal diseases. His assertion was that if these symptoms were suppressed by medication, the cause went deeper and began to manifest itself as diseases of the internal organs. Homeopathy maintains that treating diseases by directly alleviating their symptoms, as is sometimes done in conventional medicine, is ineffective because all "disease can generally be traced to some latent, deep-seated, underlying chronic, or inherited tendency". The underlying imputed miasm still remains, and deep-seated ailments can be corrected only by removing the deeper disturbance of the vital force.
Hahnemann's hypotheses for miasms originally presented only three local symptoms: psora (the itch), syphilis (venereal disease) or sycosis (fig-wart disease). Of these the most important was psora, described as being related to any itching diseases of the skin and was claimed to be the foundation of many further disease conditions. Hahnemann believed it to be the cause of such diseases as epilepsy, cancer, jaundice, deafness, and cataracts. Since Hahnemann's time, other miasms have been proposed, some replacing illnesses previously attributed to the psora, including tuberculosis and cancer miasms.
Hahnemann's miasm theory remains disputed and controversial within homeopathy even in modern times. The theory of miasms has been criticized as an explanation developed to preserve the system of homeopathy in the face of treatment failures, and for being inadequate to cover the many hundreds of sorts of diseases, as well as for failing to explain disease predispositions, as well as genetics, environmental factors, and the unique disease history of each patient.
Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825 by Hans Birch Gram, a student of Hahnemann. The first homeopathic school in the United States opened in 1835 and the American Institute of Homeopathy was established in 1844. Throughout the 19th century, dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and the United States, and by 1900, there were 22 homeopathic colleges and 15,000 practitioners in the United States.
Because medical practice of the time relied on treatments which were often ineffective and harmful, patients of homeopaths often had better outcomes than those being treated by medical practitioners. Though ineffective, homeopathic preparations are rarely detrimental, thus users are less likely to be harmed by the treatment that is supposed to be helping them. The relative success of homeopathy in the 19th century may have led to the abandonment of the ineffective and harmful treatments of bloodletting and purging and begun the move towards more effective, science-based medicine. One reason for the growing popularity of homeopathy was its apparent success in treating people suffering from infectious disease epidemics. During 19th-century epidemics of diseases such as cholera, death rates in homeopathic hospitals were often lower than in conventional hospitals, where the treatments used at the time were often harmful and did little or nothing to combat the diseases.
Even during its rise in popularity, homeopathy was criticized by scientists and physicians. Sir John Forbes, physician to Queen Victoria, said in 1843 that the extremely small doses of homeopathy were regularly derided as useless and considered it "an outrage to human reason". James Young Simpson said in 1853 of the highly diluted drugs: "No poison, however strong or powerful, the billionth or decillionth of which would in the least degree affect a man or harm a fly." Nineteenth-century American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was also a vocal critic of homeopathy and published an essay entitled Homœopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842). The members of the French Homeopathic Society observed in 1867 that some leading homeopaths of Europe not only were abandoning the practice of administering infinitesimal doses but were also no longer defending it. The last school in the United States exclusively teaching homeopathy closed in 1920.
According to academics Paul U. Unschuld [de] and Edzard Ernst, the Nazi regime in Germany was fond of homeopathy, and spent large sums of money on researching its mechanisms, but without gaining a positive result. Unschuld also states that homeopathy never subsequently took root in the United States, but remained more deeply established in European thinking. In the United States, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (sponsored by Royal Copeland, a Senator from New York and homeopathic physician) recognized homeopathic preparations as drugs. In the 1950s, there were only 75 solely homeopathic practitioners in the U.S. By the mid to late 1970s, homeopathy made a significant comeback and the sales of some homeopathic companies increased tenfold.
Some homeopaths credit the revival to Greek homeopath George Vithoulkas, who conducted a "great deal of research to update the scenarios and refine the theories and practice of homeopathy" in the 1970s, but Ernst and Simon Singh consider it to be linked to the rise of the New Age movement. Bruce Hood has argued that the increased popularity of homeopathy in recent times may be due to the comparatively long consultations practitioners are willing to give their patients, and to a preference for "natural" products, which people think are the basis of homeopathic preparations.
Towards the end of the century opposition to homeopathy began to increase again; with William T. Jarvis, the President of the National Council Against Health Fraud, saying that "Homeopathy is a fraud perpetrated on the public with the government's blessing, thanks to the abuse of political power of Sen. Royal S. Copeland."
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a series of meta-analyses have further shown that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. This had led to a decrease or suspension of funding by many governments. In a 2010 report, the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons recommended that homeopathy should no longer receive National Health Service (NHS) funding due its lack of scientific credibility; NHS funding for homeopathy ceased in 2017. They also asked the Department of Health in the UK to add homeopathic remedies to the list of forbidden prescription items.
In 2015, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia found that "there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective". The federal government only ended up accepting three of the 45 recommendations made by the 2018 review of Pharmacy Remuneration and Regulation. The same year the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a hearing requesting public comment on the regulation of homeopathic drugs. In 2017 the FDA announced it would strengthen regulation of homeopathic products.
The American non-profit Center for Inquiry (CFI) filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the CVS pharmacy for consumer fraud over its sale of homeopathic medicines. It claimed that CVS was selling homeopathic products on an easier-to-obtain basis than standard medication. In 2019, CFI brought a similar lawsuit against Walmart for "committing wide-scale consumer fraud and endangering the health of its customers through its sale and marketing of homeopathic medicines". They also conducted a survey in which they found consumers felt ripped off when informed of the lack of evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, such as those sold by Walmart and CVS.
In 2021, the French healthcare minister phased out social security reimbursements for homeopathic drugs. France has long had a stronger belief in the virtues of homeopathic drugs than many other countries and the world's biggest manufacturer of alternative medicine drugs, Boiron, is located in that country. Spain has also announced moves to ban homeopathy and other pseudotherapies. In 2016, the University of Barcelona cancelled its master's degree in Homeopathy citing "lack of scientific basis", after advice from the Spanish Ministry of Health. Shortly afterwards the University of Valencia announced the elimination of its Masters in Homeopathy.
Homeopathic preparations are referred to as "homeopathic remedies". Practitioners rely on two types of reference when prescribing: Materia medica and repertories. A homeopathic materia medica is a collection of "drug pictures", organized alphabetically. A homeopathic repertory is a quick reference version of the materia medica that indexes the symptoms and then the associated remedies for each. In both cases different compilers may dispute particular inclusions in the references. The first symptomatic homeopathic materia medica was arranged by Hahnemann. The first homeopathic repertory was Georg Jahr's Symptomenkodex, published in German in 1835, and translated into English as the Repertory to the more Characteristic Symptoms of Materia Medica in 1838. This version was less focused on disease categories and was the forerunner to later works by James Tyler Kent. There are over 118 repertories published in English, with Kent's being one of the most used.
Homeopaths generally begin with a consultation, which can be a 10–15 minute appointment or last for over an hour, where the patient describes their medical history. The patient describes the "modalities", or if their symptoms change depending on the weather and other external factors. The practitioner also solicits information on mood, likes and dislikes, physical, mental and emotional states, life circumstances, and any physical or emotional illnesses. This information (also called the "symptom picture") is matched to the "drug picture" in the materia medica or repertory and used to determine the appropriate homeopathic remedies. In classical homeopathy, the practitioner attempts to match a single preparation to the totality of symptoms (the simlilum), while "clinical homeopathy" involves combinations of preparations based on the illness's symptoms.
Homeopathy uses animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic substances in its preparations, generally referring to them using Latin names. Examples include arsenicum album (arsenic oxide), natrum muriaticum (sodium chloride or table salt), Lachesis muta (the venom of the bushmaster snake), opium, and thyroidinum (thyroid hormone). Homeopaths say this is to ensure accuracy. In the USA the common name must be displayed, although the Latin one can also be present. Homeopathic pills are made from an inert substance (often sugars, typically lactose), upon which a drop of liquid homeopathic preparation is placed and allowed to evaporate.
Isopathy is a therapy derived from homeopathy in which the preparations come from diseased or pathological products such as fecal, urinary and respiratory discharges, blood, and tissue. They are called nosodes (from the Greek nosos, disease) with preparations made from "healthy" specimens being termed "sarcodes". Many so-called "homeopathic vaccines" are a form of isopathy. Tautopathy is a form of isopathy where the preparations are composed of drugs or vaccines that a person has consumed in the past, in the belief that this can reverse the supposed lingering damage caused by the initial use. There is no convincing scientific evidence for isopathy as an effective method of treatment.
Some modern homeopaths use preparations they call "imponderables" because they do not originate from a substance but some other phenomenon presumed to have been "captured" by alcohol or lactose. Examples include X-rays and sunlight. Another derivative is electrohomeopathy, where an electric bio-energy of therapeutic value is supposedly extracted from plants. Popular in the late nineteenth century, electrohomeopathy is extremely pseudo-scientific. In 2012, the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh, India, handed down a decree stating that electrohomeopathy was quackery and no longer recognized it as a system of medicine .
Other minority practices include paper preparations, in which the terms for substances and dilutions are written on pieces of paper and either pinned to the patients' clothing, put in their pockets, or placed under glasses of water that are then given to the patients. Radionics, the use of electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves, can also be used to manufacture preparations. Such practices have been strongly criticized by classical homeopaths as unfounded, speculative, and verging upon magic and superstition. Flower preparations are produced by placing flowers in water and exposing them to sunlight. The most famous of these are the Bach flower remedies, which were developed by Edward Bach.
Hahnemann claimed that undiluted doses caused reactions, sometimes dangerous ones, and thus that preparations be given at the lowest possible dose. A solution that is more dilute is described as having a higher "potency", and thus are claimed to be stronger and deeper-acting. The general method of dilution is serial dilution, where solvent is added to part of the previous mixture, but the "Korsakovian" method may also be used. In the Korsakovian method, the vessel in which the preparations are manufactured is emptied, refilled with solvent, with the volume of fluid adhering to the walls of the vessel deemed sufficient for the new batch. The Korsakovian method is sometimes referred to as K on the label of a homeopathic preparation. Another method is Fluxion, which dilutes the substance by continuously passing water through the vial. Insoluble solids, such as granite, diamond, and platinum, are diluted by grinding them with lactose ("trituration").
Three main logarithmic dilution scales are in regular use in homeopathy. Hahnemann created the "centesimal" or "C scale", diluting a substance by a factor of 100 at each stage. There is also a decimal dilution scale (notated as "X" or "D") in which the preparation is diluted by a factor of 10 at each stage. The centesimal scale was favoured by Hahnemann for most of his life, although in his last ten years Hahnemann developed a quintamillesimal (Q) scale which diluted the drug 1 part in 50,000. A 2C dilution works out to one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution. In standard chemistry, this produces a substance with a concentration of 0.01% (volume-volume percentage). A 6C dilution ends up with the original substance diluted by a factor of 100 (one part in one trillion). The end product is usually so diluted as to be indistinguishable from the diluent (pure water, sugar or alcohol). The greatest dilution reasonably likely to contain at least one molecule of the original substance is approximately 12C.
Hahnemann advocated dilutions of 1 part to 10 or 30C. Hahnemann regularly used dilutions of up to 30C but opined that "there must be a limit to the matter". To counter the reduced potency at high dilutions he formed the view that vigorous shaking by striking on an elastic surface – a process termed succussion – was necessary. Homeopaths are unable to agree on the number and force of strikes needed, and there is no way that the claimed results of succussion can be tested.
Critics of homeopathy commonly emphasize the dilutions involved in homeopathy, using analogies. One mathematically correct example is that a 12C solution is equivalent to "a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans". One-third of a drop of some original substance diluted into all the water on earth would produce a preparation with a concentration of about 13C. A 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum, would require 10 universes worth of molecules to contain just one original molecule in the final substance. The high dilutions characteristically used are often considered to be the most controversial and implausible aspect of homeopathy.
Homeopaths claim that they can determine the properties of their preparations by following a method which they call "proving". As performed by Hahnemann, provings involved administering various preparations to healthy volunteers. The volunteers were then observed, often for months at a time. They were made to keep extensive journals detailing all of their symptoms at specific times throughout the day. They were forbidden from consuming coffee, tea, spices, or wine for the duration of the experiment; playing chess was also prohibited because Hahnemann considered it to be "too exciting", though they were allowed to drink beer and encouraged to exercise in moderation. At first Hahnemann used undiluted doses for provings, but he later advocated provings with preparations at a 30C dilution, and most modern provings are carried out using ultra-dilute preparations.
Provings are claimed to have been important in the development of the clinical trial, due to their early use of simple control groups, systematic and quantitative procedures, and some of the first application of statistics in medicine. The lengthy records of self-experimentation by homeopaths have occasionally proven useful in the development of modern drugs: For example, evidence that nitroglycerin might be useful as a treatment for angina was discovered by looking through homeopathic provings, though homeopaths themselves never used it for that purpose at that time. The first recorded provings were published by Hahnemann in his 1796 Essay on a New Principle. His Fragmenta de Viribus (1805) contained the results of 27 provings, and his 1810 Materia Medica Pura contained 65. For James Tyler Kent's 1905 Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica, 217 preparations underwent provings and newer substances are continually added to contemporary versions.
Though the proving process has superficial similarities with clinical trials, it is fundamentally different in that the process is subjective, not blinded, and modern provings are unlikely to use pharmacologically active levels of the substance under proving. As early as 1842, Oliver Holmes had noted that provings were impossibly vague, and the purported effect was not repeatable among different subjects.
Outside of the alternative medicine community, scientists have long considered homeopathy a sham or a pseudoscience, and the medical community regards it as quackery. There is an overall absence of sound statistical evidence of therapeutic efficacy, which is consistent with the lack of any biologically plausible pharmacological agent or mechanism. Proponents argue that homeopathic medicines must work by some, as yet undefined, biophysical mechanism. No homeopathic preparation has been shown to be different from placebo.
The lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy and its use of preparations without active ingredients have led to characterizations of homeopathy as pseudoscience and quackery, or, in the words of a 1998 medical review, "placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst". The Russian Academy of Sciences considers homeopathy a "dangerous 'pseudoscience' that does not work", and "urges people to treat homeopathy 'on a par with magic'". The Chief Medical Officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, has stated that homeopathic preparations are "rubbish" and do not serve as anything more than placebos. In 2013, Mark Walport, the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and head of the Government Office for Science said "homeopathy is nonsense, it is non-science." His predecessor, John Beddington, also said that homeopathy "has no underpinning of scientific basis" and is being "fundamentally ignored" by the Government.
Jack Killen, acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, says homeopathy "goes beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics". He adds: "There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment." Ben Goldacre says that homeopaths who misrepresent scientific evidence to a scientifically illiterate public, have "... walled themselves off from academic medicine, and critique has been all too often met with avoidance rather than argument". Homeopaths often prefer to ignore meta-analyses in favour of cherry picked positive results, such as by promoting a particular observational study (one which Goldacre describes as "little more than a customer-satisfaction survey") as if it were more informative than a series of randomized controlled trials.
In an article entitled "Should We Maintain an Open Mind about Homeopathy?" published in the American Journal of Medicine, Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst – writing to other physicians – wrote that "Homeopathy is among the worst examples of faith-based medicine... These axioms [of homeopathy] are not only out of line with scientific facts but also directly opposed to them. If homeopathy is correct, much of physics, chemistry, and pharmacology must be incorrect...".
The exceedingly low concentration of homeopathic preparations, which often lack even a single molecule of the diluted substance, has been the basis of questions about the effects of the preparations since the 19th century. The laws of chemistry give this dilution limit, which is related to the Avogadro number, as being roughly equal to 12C homeopathic dilutions (1 part in 10). James Randi and the 10:23 campaign groups have highlighted the lack of active ingredients by taking large 'overdoses'. None of the hundreds of demonstrators in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US were injured and "no one was cured of anything, either".
Modern advocates of homeopathy have proposed a concept of "water memory", according to which water "remembers" the substances mixed in it, and transmits the effect of those substances when consumed. This concept is inconsistent with the current understanding of matter, and water memory has never been demonstrated to have any detectable effect, biological or otherwise. Existence of a pharmacological effect in the absence of any true active ingredient is inconsistent with the law of mass action and the observed dose-response relationships characteristic of therapeutic drugs. Homeopaths contend that their methods produce a therapeutically active preparation, selectively including only the intended substance, though in reality any water will have been in contact with millions of different substances throughout its history, and homeopaths cannot account for the selected homeopathic substance being isolated as a special case in their process.
Practitioners also hold that higher dilutions produce stronger medicinal effects. This idea is also inconsistent with observed dose-response relationships, where effects are dependent on the concentration of the active ingredient in the body. Some contend that the phenomenon of hormesis may support the idea of dilution increasing potency, but the dose-response relationship outside the zone of hormesis declines with dilution as normal, and nonlinear pharmacological effects do not provide any credible support for homeopathy.
No individual homeopathic preparation has been unambiguously shown by research to be different from placebo. The methodological quality of the early primary research was low, with problems such as weaknesses in study design and reporting, small sample size, and selection bias. Since better quality trials have become available, the evidence for efficacy of homeopathy preparations has diminished; the highest-quality trials indicate that the preparations themselves exert no intrinsic effect. A review conducted in 2010 of all the pertinent studies of "best evidence" produced by the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that "the most reliable evidence – that produced by Cochrane reviews – fails to demonstrate that homeopathic medicines have effects beyond placebo."
In 2009, the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that there was no compelling evidence of effect other than placebo. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council completed a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of homeopathic preparations in 2015, in which it concluded that "there were no health conditions for which there was reliable evidence that homeopathy was effective." The European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC) published its official analysis in 2017 finding a lack of evidence that homeopathic products are effective, and raising concerns about quality control. In contrast a 2011 book was published, purportedly financed by the Swiss government, that concluded that homeopathy was effective and cost efficient. Although hailed by proponents as proof that homeopathy works, it was found to be scientifically, logically and ethically flawed, with most authors having a conflict of interest. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health later released a statement saying the book was published without the consent of the Swiss government.
Meta-analyses, essential tools to summarize evidence of therapeutic efficacy, and systematic reviews have found that the methodological quality in the majority of randomized trials in homeopathy have shortcomings and that such trials were generally of lower quality than trials of conventional medicine. A major issue has been publication bias, where positive results are more likely to be published in journals. This has been particularly marked in alternative medicine journals, where few of the published articles (just 5% during the year 2000) tend to report null results. A systematic review of the available systematic reviews confirmed in 2002 that higher-quality trials tended to have less positive results, and found no convincing evidence that any homeopathic preparation exerts clinical effects different from placebo. The same conclusion was also reached in 2005 in a meta-analysis published in The Lancet. A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis found that the most reliable evidence did not support the effectiveness of non-individualized homeopathy.
Health organizations, including the UK's National Health Service, the American Medical Association, the FASEB, and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, have issued statements saying that there is no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition. In 2009, World Health Organization official Mario Raviglione criticized the use of homeopathy to treat tuberculosis; similarly, another WHO spokesperson argued there was no evidence homeopathy would be an effective treatment for diarrhoea. They warned against the use of homeopathy for serious conditions such as depression, HIV and malaria. The American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology recommend that no one use homeopathic treatment for disease or as a preventive health measure. These organizations report that no evidence exists that homeopathic treatment is effective, but that there is evidence that using these treatments produces harm and can bring indirect health risks by delaying conventional treatment.
While some articles have suggested that homeopathic solutions of high dilution can have statistically significant effects on organic processes including the growth of grain and enzyme reactions, such evidence is disputed since attempts to replicate them have failed. In 2001 and 2004, Madeleine Ennis published a number of studies that reported that homeopathic dilutions of histamine exerted an effect on the activity of basophils. In response to the first of these studies, Horizon aired a programme in which British scientists attempted to replicate Ennis' results; they were unable to do so. A 2007 systematic review of high-dilution experiments found that none of the experiments with positive results could be reproduced by all investigators.
In 1988, French immunologist Jacques Benveniste published a paper in the journal Nature while working at INSERM. The paper purported to have discovered that basophils released histamine when exposed to a homeopathic dilution of anti-immunoglobulin E antibody. Skeptical of the findings, Nature assembled an independent investigative team to determine the accuracy of the research. After investigation the team found that the experiments were "statistically ill-controlled", "interpretation has been clouded by the exclusion of measurements in conflict with the claim", and concluded, "We believe that experimental data have been uncritically assessed and their imperfections inadequately reported."
The provision of homeopathic preparations has been described as unethical. Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery and visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London (UCL), has described homeopathy as a "cruel deception". Edzard Ernst, the first professor of complementary medicine in the United Kingdom and a former homeopathic practitioner, has expressed his concerns about pharmacists who violate their ethical code by failing to provide customers with "necessary and relevant information" about the true nature of the homeopathic products they advertise and sell. In 2013 the UK Advertising Standards Authority concluded that the Society of Homeopaths were targeting vulnerable ill people and discouraging the use of essential medical treatment while making misleading claims of efficacy for homeopathic products. In 2015 the Federal Court of Australia imposed penalties on a homeopathic company for making false or misleading statements about the efficacy of the whooping cough vaccine and recommending homeopathic remedies as an alternative.
A 2000 review by homeopaths reported that homeopathic preparations are "unlikely to provoke severe adverse reactions". In 2012, a systematic review evaluating evidence of homeopathy's possible adverse effects concluded that "homeopathy has the potential to harm patients and consumers in both direct and indirect ways". A 2016 systematic review and meta-analysis found that, in homeopathic clinical trials, adverse effects were reported among the patients who received homeopathy about as often as they were reported among patients who received placebo or conventional medicine.
Some homeopathic preparations involve poisons such as Belladonna, arsenic, and poison ivy. In rare cases, the original ingredients are present at detectable levels. This may be due to improper preparation or intentional low dilution. Serious adverse effects such as seizures and death have been reported or associated with some homeopathic preparations. Instances of arsenic poisoning have occurred. In 2009, the FDA advised consumers to stop using three discontinued cold remedy Zicam products because it could cause permanent damage to users' sense of smell. In 2016 the FDA issued a safety alert to consumers warning against the use of homeopathic teething gels and tablets following reports of adverse events after their use. A previous FDA investigation had found that these products were improperly diluted and contained "unsafe levels of belladonna" and that the reports of serious adverse events in children using this product were "consistent with belladonna toxicity".
Patients who choose to use homeopathy rather than evidence-based medicine risk missing timely diagnosis and effective treatment, thereby worsening the outcomes of serious conditions such as cancer. The Russian Commission on Pseudoscience has said homeopathy is not safe because "patients spend significant amounts of money, buying medicines that do not work and disregard already known effective treatment." Critics have cited cases of patients failing to receive proper treatment for diseases that could have been easily managed with conventional medicine and who have died as a result. They have also condemned the "marketing practice" of criticizing and downplaying the effectiveness of medicine. Homeopaths claim that use of conventional medicines will "push the disease deeper" and cause more serious conditions, a process referred to as "suppression". In 1978, Anthony Campbell, a consultant physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, criticized statements by George Vithoulkas claiming that syphilis, when treated with antibiotics, would develop into secondary and tertiary syphilis with involvement of the central nervous system. Vithoulkas' claims echo the idea that treating a disease with external medication used to treat the symptoms would only drive it deeper into the body and conflict with scientific studies, which indicate that penicillin treatment produces a complete cure of syphilis in more than 90% of cases.
The use of homeopathy as a preventive for serious infectious diseases, called homeoprophylaxis, is especially controversial. Some homeopaths (particularly those who are non-physicians) advise their patients against immunization. Others have suggested that vaccines be replaced with homeopathic "nosodes". While Hahnemann was opposed to such preparations, modern homeopaths often use them although there is no evidence to indicate they have any beneficial effects. Promotion of homeopathic alternatives to vaccines has been characterized as dangerous, inappropriate and irresponsible. In December 2014, the Australian homeopathy supplier Homeopathy Plus! was found to have acted deceptively in promoting homeopathic alternatives to vaccines. In 2019, an investigative journalism piece by the Telegraph revealed that homeopathy practitioners were actively discouraging patients from vaccinating their children. Cases of homeopaths advising against the use of anti-malarial drugs have also been identified, putting visitors to the tropics in severe danger.
A 2006 review recommends that pharmacy colleges include a required course where ethical dilemmas inherent in recommending products lacking proven safety and efficacy data be discussed and that students should be taught where unproven systems such as homeopathy depart from evidence-based medicine.
Homeopathy is fairly common in some countries while being uncommon in others; is highly regulated in some countries and mostly unregulated in others. It is practiced worldwide and professional qualifications and licences are needed in most countries. A 2019 WHO report found that 100 out of 133 Member States surveyed in 2012 acknowledged that their population used homeopathy, with 22 saying the practice was regulated and 13 providing health insurance coverage. In some countries, there are no specific legal regulations concerning the use of homeopathy, while in others, licences or degrees in conventional medicine from accredited universities are required. In 2001 homeopathy had been integrated into the national health care systems of many countries, including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.
Some homeopathic treatment is covered by the public health service of several European countries, including Scotland, and Luxembourg. It used to be covered in France until 2021. In other countries, such as Belgium, homeopathy is not covered. In Austria, the public health service requires scientific proof of effectiveness in order to reimburse medical treatments and homeopathy is listed as not reimbursable, but exceptions can be made; private health insurance policies sometimes include homeopathic treatments. In 2018, Austria's Medical University of Vienna stopped teaching homeopathy. The Swiss government withdrew coverage of homeopathy and four other complementary treatments in 2005, stating that they did not meet efficacy and cost-effectiveness criteria, but following a referendum in 2009 the five therapies were reinstated for a further 6-year trial period. In Germany, homeopathic treatments are covered by 70 percent of government medical plans, and available in almost every pharmacy.
The English NHS recommended against prescribing homeopathic preparations in 2017. In 2018, prescriptions worth £55,000 were written in defiance of the guidelines, representing less than 0.001% of the total NHS prescribing budget. In 2016 the UK's Committee of Advertising Practice compliance team wrote to homeopaths in the UK to "remind them of the rules that govern what they can and can't say in their marketing materials". The letter told homeopaths to "ensure that they do not make any direct or implied claims that homeopathy can treat medical conditions" and asks them to review their marketing communications "including websites and social media pages" to ensure compliance. Homeopathic services offered at Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in the UK ceased in October 2015.
Member states of the European Union are required to ensure that homeopathic products are registered, although this process does not require any proof of efficacy. In Spain, the Association for the protection of patients from pseudo-scientific therapies is lobbying to get rid of the easy registration procedure for homeopathic remedies. In Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Romania and Slovenia homeopathy, by law, can only be practiced by medical practitioners. However, in Slovenia if doctors practice homeopathy their medical license will be revoked. In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training program, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness. Homeopaths in the UK are under no legal regulations, meaning anyone can call themselves homeopaths and administer homeopathic remedies.
The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine and they are sold with medical claims. It has established the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The south Indian state of Kerala also has a cabinet-level AYUSH department. The Central Council of Homoeopathy was established in 1973 to monitor higher education in homeopathy, and the National Institute of Homoeopathy in 1975. Principals and standards for homeopathic products are covered by the Homoeopathic pharmacopoeia of India. A minimum of a recognized diploma in homeopathy and registration on a state register or the Central Register of Homoeopathy is required to practice homeopathy in India.
Some medical schools in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, offer an undergraduate degree programme in homeopathy. Upon completion the college may award a Bachelor of Homoeopathy Medicine and Surgery (B.H.M.S.).
In the United States each state is responsible for the laws and licensing requirements for homeopathy. In 2015, the FDA held a hearing on homeopathic product regulation. At the hearing, representatives from the Center for Inquiry and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry summarized the harm that is done to the general public from homeopathics and proposed regulatory actions: In 2016 the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued an "Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter Homeopathic Drugs" which specified that the FTC will apply the same standard to homeopathic drugs that it applies to other products claiming similar benefits. A related report concluded that claims of homeopathy effectiveness "are not accepted by most modern medical experts and do not constitute competent and reliable scientific evidence that these products have the claimed treatment effects." In 2019, the FDA removed an enforcement policy that permitted unapproved homeopathics to be sold. Currently no homeopathic products are approved by the FDA.
Homeopathic remedies are regulated as natural health products in Canada. Ontario became the first province in the country to regulate the practice of homeopathy, a move that was widely criticized by scientists and doctors. Health Canada requires all products to have a licence before being sold and applicants have to submit evidence on "the safety, efficacy and quality of a homeopathic medicine". In 2015 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tested the system by applying for and then receiving a government approved licence for a made-up drug aimed at kids.
In Australia, the sale of homeopathic products is regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. In 2015, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia concluded that there is "no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective and should not be used to treat health conditions that are chronic, serious, or could become serious". They recommended anyone considering using homeopathy should first get advice from a registered health practitioner. A 2017 review into Pharmacy Remuneration and Regulation recommended that products be banned from pharmacies; while noting the concerns the government did not adopt the recommendation. In New Zealand there are no regulations specific to homeopathy and the New Zealand Medical Association does not oppose the use of homeopathy, a stance that has been called unethical by some doctors.
Homeopathy is one of the most commonly used forms of alternative medicines and it has a large worldwide market. The exact size is uncertain, but information available on homeopathic sales suggests it forms a large share of the medical market.
In 1999, about 1000 UK doctors practiced homeopathy, most being general practitioners who prescribe a limited number of remedies. A further 1500 homeopaths with no medical training are also thought to practice. Over ten thousand German and French doctors use homeopathy. In the United States a National Health Interview Survey estimated 5 million adults and 1 million children used homeopathy in 2011. An analysis of this survey concluded that most cases were self-prescribed for colds and musculoskeletal pain. Major retailers like Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens sell homeopathic products that are packaged to resemble conventional medicines.
The homeopathic drug market in Germany is worth about 650 million euro with a 2014 survey finding that 60 percent of Germans reported trying homeopathy. A 2009 survey found that only 17 percent of respondents knew how homeopathic medicine was made. France spent more than US$408 million on homeopathic products in 2008. In the United States the homeopathic market is worth about $3 billion-a-year; with 2.9 billion spent in 2007. Australia spent US$7.3 million on homeopathic medicines in 2008.
In India, a 2014 national health survey found that homeopathy was used by about 3% of the population. Homeopathy is used in China, although it arrived a lot later than in many other countries, partly due to the restriction on foreigners that persisted until late in the nineteenth century. Throughout Africa there is a high reliance on traditional medicines, which can be attributed to the cost of modern medicines and the relative prevalence of practitioners. Many African countries do not have any official training facilities.
Using homeopathy as a treatment for animals is termed "veterinary homeopathy" and dates back to the inception of homeopathy; Hahnemann himself wrote and spoke of the use of homeopathy in animals other than humans. The use of homeopathy in the organic farming industry is heavily promoted. Given that homeopathy's effects in humans are due to the placebo effect and the counseling aspects of the consultation, such treatments are even less effective in animals. Studies have also found that giving animals placebos can play active roles in influencing pet owners to believe in the effectiveness of the treatment when none exists. This means that animals given homeopathic remedies will continue to suffer, resulting in animal welfare concerns.
Little existing research on the subject is of a high enough scientific standard to provide reliable data on efficacy. A 2016 review of peer-reviewed articles from 1981 to 2014 by scientists from the University of Kassel, Germany, concluded that there is not enough evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment of infectious diseases in livestock. The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has adopted a robust position against use of "alternative" pet preparations including homeopathy. The British Veterinary Association's position statement on alternative medicines says that it "cannot endorse" homeopathy, and the Australian Veterinary Association includes it on its list of "ineffective therapies". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths or homeopathic physicians, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people; this doctrine is called similia similibus curentur, or \"like cures like\". Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent. Often not even a single molecule of the original substance can be expected to remain in the product. Between each dilution homeopaths may hit and/or shake the product, claiming this makes the diluent \"remember\" the original substance after its removal. Practitioners claim that such preparations, upon oral intake, can treat or cure disease.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology contradicts homeopathy. Homeopathic remedies are typically biochemically inert, and have no effect on any known disease. Its theory of disease, centered around principles Hahnemann termed miasms, is inconsistent with subsequent identification of viruses and bacteria as causes of disease. Clinical trials have been conducted and generally demonstrated no objective effect from homeopathic preparations. The fundamental implausibility of homeopathy as well as a lack of demonstrable effectiveness has led to it being characterized within the scientific and medical communities as quackery and fraud.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825, and the first American homeopathic school opened in 1835. Throughout the 19th century, dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and the United States. During this period, homeopathy was able to appear relatively successful, as other forms of treatment could be harmful and ineffective. By the end of the century the practice began to wane, with the last exclusively homeopathic medical school in the United States closing in 1920. During the 1970s, homeopathy made a significant comeback, with sales of some homeopathic products increasing tenfold. The trend corresponded with the rise of the New Age movement, and may be in part due to chemophobia, an irrational aversion to synthetic chemicals, and the longer consultation times homeopathic practitioners provided.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In the 21st century, a series of meta-analyses have shown that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. As a result, national and international bodies have recommended the withdrawal of government funding for homeopathy in healthcare. National bodies from Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France, as well as the European Academies' Science Advisory Council and the Russian Academy of Sciences have all concluded that homeopathy is ineffective, and recommended against the practice receiving any further funding. The National Health Service in England no longer provides funding for homeopathic remedies and asked the Department of Health to add homeopathic remedies to the list of forbidden prescription items. France removed funding in 2021, while Spain has also announced moves to ban homeopathy and other pseudotherapies from health centers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Homeopathy was created in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann rejected the mainstream medicine of the late 18th century as irrational and inadvisable because it was largely ineffective and often harmful. He advocated the use of single drugs at lower doses and promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of how living organisms function. The term homeopathy was coined by Hahnemann and first appeared in print in 1807. He also coined the expression \"allopathic medicine\", which was used to pejoratively refer to traditional Western medicine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hahnemann conceived of homeopathy while translating a medical treatise by the Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen into German. Being sceptical of Cullen's theory that cinchona cured malaria because it was bitter, Hahnemann ingested some bark specifically to investigate what would happen. He experienced fever, shivering and joint pain: symptoms similar to those of malaria itself. From this, Hahnemann came to believe that all effective drugs produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases that they treat. This led to the name \"homeopathy\", which comes from the Greek: ὅμοιος hómoios, \"-like\" and πάθος páthos, \"suffering\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The doctrine that those drugs are effective which produce symptoms similar to the symptoms caused by the diseases they treat, called \"the law of similars\", was expressed by Hahnemann with the Latin phrase similia similibus curentur, or \"like cures like\". Hahnemann's law of similars is unproven and does not derive from the scientific method. An account of the effects of eating cinchona bark noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, published in 1861, failed to reproduce the symptoms Hahnemann reported. Subsequent scientific work showed that cinchona cures malaria because it contains quinine, which kills the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease; the mechanism of action is unrelated to Hahnemann's ideas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Hahnemann began to test what effects various substances may produce in humans, a procedure later called \"homeopathic proving\". These tests required subjects to test the effects of ingesting substances by recording all their symptoms as well as the ancillary conditions under which they appeared. He published a collection of provings in 1805, and a second collection of 65 preparations appeared in his book, Materia Medica Pura (1810).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "As Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs that caused similar symptoms would only aggravate illness, he advocated for extreme dilutions. A technique was devised for making dilutions that Hahnemann claimed would preserve the substance's therapeutic properties while removing its harmful effects. Hahnemann believed that this process enhanced \"the spirit-like medicinal powers of the crude substances\". He gathered and published an overview of his new medical system in his book, The Organon of the Healing Art (1810), with a sixth edition published in 1921 that homeopaths still use today.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the Organon, Hahnemann introduced the concept of \"miasms\" as the \"infectious principles\" underlying chronic disease and as \"peculiar morbid derangement[s] of vital force\". Hahnemann associated each miasm with specific diseases, and thought that initial exposure to miasms causes local symptoms, such as skin or venereal diseases. His assertion was that if these symptoms were suppressed by medication, the cause went deeper and began to manifest itself as diseases of the internal organs. Homeopathy maintains that treating diseases by directly alleviating their symptoms, as is sometimes done in conventional medicine, is ineffective because all \"disease can generally be traced to some latent, deep-seated, underlying chronic, or inherited tendency\". The underlying imputed miasm still remains, and deep-seated ailments can be corrected only by removing the deeper disturbance of the vital force.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Hahnemann's hypotheses for miasms originally presented only three local symptoms: psora (the itch), syphilis (venereal disease) or sycosis (fig-wart disease). Of these the most important was psora, described as being related to any itching diseases of the skin and was claimed to be the foundation of many further disease conditions. Hahnemann believed it to be the cause of such diseases as epilepsy, cancer, jaundice, deafness, and cataracts. Since Hahnemann's time, other miasms have been proposed, some replacing illnesses previously attributed to the psora, including tuberculosis and cancer miasms.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hahnemann's miasm theory remains disputed and controversial within homeopathy even in modern times. The theory of miasms has been criticized as an explanation developed to preserve the system of homeopathy in the face of treatment failures, and for being inadequate to cover the many hundreds of sorts of diseases, as well as for failing to explain disease predispositions, as well as genetics, environmental factors, and the unique disease history of each patient.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825 by Hans Birch Gram, a student of Hahnemann. The first homeopathic school in the United States opened in 1835 and the American Institute of Homeopathy was established in 1844. Throughout the 19th century, dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and the United States, and by 1900, there were 22 homeopathic colleges and 15,000 practitioners in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Because medical practice of the time relied on treatments which were often ineffective and harmful, patients of homeopaths often had better outcomes than those being treated by medical practitioners. Though ineffective, homeopathic preparations are rarely detrimental, thus users are less likely to be harmed by the treatment that is supposed to be helping them. The relative success of homeopathy in the 19th century may have led to the abandonment of the ineffective and harmful treatments of bloodletting and purging and begun the move towards more effective, science-based medicine. One reason for the growing popularity of homeopathy was its apparent success in treating people suffering from infectious disease epidemics. During 19th-century epidemics of diseases such as cholera, death rates in homeopathic hospitals were often lower than in conventional hospitals, where the treatments used at the time were often harmful and did little or nothing to combat the diseases.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Even during its rise in popularity, homeopathy was criticized by scientists and physicians. Sir John Forbes, physician to Queen Victoria, said in 1843 that the extremely small doses of homeopathy were regularly derided as useless and considered it \"an outrage to human reason\". James Young Simpson said in 1853 of the highly diluted drugs: \"No poison, however strong or powerful, the billionth or decillionth of which would in the least degree affect a man or harm a fly.\" Nineteenth-century American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was also a vocal critic of homeopathy and published an essay entitled Homœopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842). The members of the French Homeopathic Society observed in 1867 that some leading homeopaths of Europe not only were abandoning the practice of administering infinitesimal doses but were also no longer defending it. The last school in the United States exclusively teaching homeopathy closed in 1920.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "According to academics Paul U. Unschuld [de] and Edzard Ernst, the Nazi regime in Germany was fond of homeopathy, and spent large sums of money on researching its mechanisms, but without gaining a positive result. Unschuld also states that homeopathy never subsequently took root in the United States, but remained more deeply established in European thinking. In the United States, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (sponsored by Royal Copeland, a Senator from New York and homeopathic physician) recognized homeopathic preparations as drugs. In the 1950s, there were only 75 solely homeopathic practitioners in the U.S. By the mid to late 1970s, homeopathy made a significant comeback and the sales of some homeopathic companies increased tenfold.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Some homeopaths credit the revival to Greek homeopath George Vithoulkas, who conducted a \"great deal of research to update the scenarios and refine the theories and practice of homeopathy\" in the 1970s, but Ernst and Simon Singh consider it to be linked to the rise of the New Age movement. Bruce Hood has argued that the increased popularity of homeopathy in recent times may be due to the comparatively long consultations practitioners are willing to give their patients, and to a preference for \"natural\" products, which people think are the basis of homeopathic preparations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Towards the end of the century opposition to homeopathy began to increase again; with William T. Jarvis, the President of the National Council Against Health Fraud, saying that \"Homeopathy is a fraud perpetrated on the public with the government's blessing, thanks to the abuse of political power of Sen. Royal S. Copeland.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Since the beginning of the 21st century, a series of meta-analyses have further shown that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. This had led to a decrease or suspension of funding by many governments. In a 2010 report, the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons recommended that homeopathy should no longer receive National Health Service (NHS) funding due its lack of scientific credibility; NHS funding for homeopathy ceased in 2017. They also asked the Department of Health in the UK to add homeopathic remedies to the list of forbidden prescription items.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 2015, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia found that \"there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective\". The federal government only ended up accepting three of the 45 recommendations made by the 2018 review of Pharmacy Remuneration and Regulation. The same year the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a hearing requesting public comment on the regulation of homeopathic drugs. In 2017 the FDA announced it would strengthen regulation of homeopathic products.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The American non-profit Center for Inquiry (CFI) filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the CVS pharmacy for consumer fraud over its sale of homeopathic medicines. It claimed that CVS was selling homeopathic products on an easier-to-obtain basis than standard medication. In 2019, CFI brought a similar lawsuit against Walmart for \"committing wide-scale consumer fraud and endangering the health of its customers through its sale and marketing of homeopathic medicines\". They also conducted a survey in which they found consumers felt ripped off when informed of the lack of evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, such as those sold by Walmart and CVS.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2021, the French healthcare minister phased out social security reimbursements for homeopathic drugs. France has long had a stronger belief in the virtues of homeopathic drugs than many other countries and the world's biggest manufacturer of alternative medicine drugs, Boiron, is located in that country. Spain has also announced moves to ban homeopathy and other pseudotherapies. In 2016, the University of Barcelona cancelled its master's degree in Homeopathy citing \"lack of scientific basis\", after advice from the Spanish Ministry of Health. Shortly afterwards the University of Valencia announced the elimination of its Masters in Homeopathy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Homeopathic preparations are referred to as \"homeopathic remedies\". Practitioners rely on two types of reference when prescribing: Materia medica and repertories. A homeopathic materia medica is a collection of \"drug pictures\", organized alphabetically. A homeopathic repertory is a quick reference version of the materia medica that indexes the symptoms and then the associated remedies for each. In both cases different compilers may dispute particular inclusions in the references. The first symptomatic homeopathic materia medica was arranged by Hahnemann. The first homeopathic repertory was Georg Jahr's Symptomenkodex, published in German in 1835, and translated into English as the Repertory to the more Characteristic Symptoms of Materia Medica in 1838. This version was less focused on disease categories and was the forerunner to later works by James Tyler Kent. There are over 118 repertories published in English, with Kent's being one of the most used.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Homeopaths generally begin with a consultation, which can be a 10–15 minute appointment or last for over an hour, where the patient describes their medical history. The patient describes the \"modalities\", or if their symptoms change depending on the weather and other external factors. The practitioner also solicits information on mood, likes and dislikes, physical, mental and emotional states, life circumstances, and any physical or emotional illnesses. This information (also called the \"symptom picture\") is matched to the \"drug picture\" in the materia medica or repertory and used to determine the appropriate homeopathic remedies. In classical homeopathy, the practitioner attempts to match a single preparation to the totality of symptoms (the simlilum), while \"clinical homeopathy\" involves combinations of preparations based on the illness's symptoms.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Homeopathy uses animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic substances in its preparations, generally referring to them using Latin names. Examples include arsenicum album (arsenic oxide), natrum muriaticum (sodium chloride or table salt), Lachesis muta (the venom of the bushmaster snake), opium, and thyroidinum (thyroid hormone). Homeopaths say this is to ensure accuracy. In the USA the common name must be displayed, although the Latin one can also be present. Homeopathic pills are made from an inert substance (often sugars, typically lactose), upon which a drop of liquid homeopathic preparation is placed and allowed to evaporate.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Isopathy is a therapy derived from homeopathy in which the preparations come from diseased or pathological products such as fecal, urinary and respiratory discharges, blood, and tissue. They are called nosodes (from the Greek nosos, disease) with preparations made from \"healthy\" specimens being termed \"sarcodes\". Many so-called \"homeopathic vaccines\" are a form of isopathy. Tautopathy is a form of isopathy where the preparations are composed of drugs or vaccines that a person has consumed in the past, in the belief that this can reverse the supposed lingering damage caused by the initial use. There is no convincing scientific evidence for isopathy as an effective method of treatment.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Some modern homeopaths use preparations they call \"imponderables\" because they do not originate from a substance but some other phenomenon presumed to have been \"captured\" by alcohol or lactose. Examples include X-rays and sunlight. Another derivative is electrohomeopathy, where an electric bio-energy of therapeutic value is supposedly extracted from plants. Popular in the late nineteenth century, electrohomeopathy is extremely pseudo-scientific. In 2012, the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh, India, handed down a decree stating that electrohomeopathy was quackery and no longer recognized it as a system of medicine .",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Other minority practices include paper preparations, in which the terms for substances and dilutions are written on pieces of paper and either pinned to the patients' clothing, put in their pockets, or placed under glasses of water that are then given to the patients. Radionics, the use of electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves, can also be used to manufacture preparations. Such practices have been strongly criticized by classical homeopaths as unfounded, speculative, and verging upon magic and superstition. Flower preparations are produced by placing flowers in water and exposing them to sunlight. The most famous of these are the Bach flower remedies, which were developed by Edward Bach.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Hahnemann claimed that undiluted doses caused reactions, sometimes dangerous ones, and thus that preparations be given at the lowest possible dose. A solution that is more dilute is described as having a higher \"potency\", and thus are claimed to be stronger and deeper-acting. The general method of dilution is serial dilution, where solvent is added to part of the previous mixture, but the \"Korsakovian\" method may also be used. In the Korsakovian method, the vessel in which the preparations are manufactured is emptied, refilled with solvent, with the volume of fluid adhering to the walls of the vessel deemed sufficient for the new batch. The Korsakovian method is sometimes referred to as K on the label of a homeopathic preparation. Another method is Fluxion, which dilutes the substance by continuously passing water through the vial. Insoluble solids, such as granite, diamond, and platinum, are diluted by grinding them with lactose (\"trituration\").",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Three main logarithmic dilution scales are in regular use in homeopathy. Hahnemann created the \"centesimal\" or \"C scale\", diluting a substance by a factor of 100 at each stage. There is also a decimal dilution scale (notated as \"X\" or \"D\") in which the preparation is diluted by a factor of 10 at each stage. The centesimal scale was favoured by Hahnemann for most of his life, although in his last ten years Hahnemann developed a quintamillesimal (Q) scale which diluted the drug 1 part in 50,000. A 2C dilution works out to one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution. In standard chemistry, this produces a substance with a concentration of 0.01% (volume-volume percentage). A 6C dilution ends up with the original substance diluted by a factor of 100 (one part in one trillion). The end product is usually so diluted as to be indistinguishable from the diluent (pure water, sugar or alcohol). The greatest dilution reasonably likely to contain at least one molecule of the original substance is approximately 12C.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Hahnemann advocated dilutions of 1 part to 10 or 30C. Hahnemann regularly used dilutions of up to 30C but opined that \"there must be a limit to the matter\". To counter the reduced potency at high dilutions he formed the view that vigorous shaking by striking on an elastic surface – a process termed succussion – was necessary. Homeopaths are unable to agree on the number and force of strikes needed, and there is no way that the claimed results of succussion can be tested.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Critics of homeopathy commonly emphasize the dilutions involved in homeopathy, using analogies. One mathematically correct example is that a 12C solution is equivalent to \"a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans\". One-third of a drop of some original substance diluted into all the water on earth would produce a preparation with a concentration of about 13C. A 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum, would require 10 universes worth of molecules to contain just one original molecule in the final substance. The high dilutions characteristically used are often considered to be the most controversial and implausible aspect of homeopathy.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Homeopaths claim that they can determine the properties of their preparations by following a method which they call \"proving\". As performed by Hahnemann, provings involved administering various preparations to healthy volunteers. The volunteers were then observed, often for months at a time. They were made to keep extensive journals detailing all of their symptoms at specific times throughout the day. They were forbidden from consuming coffee, tea, spices, or wine for the duration of the experiment; playing chess was also prohibited because Hahnemann considered it to be \"too exciting\", though they were allowed to drink beer and encouraged to exercise in moderation. At first Hahnemann used undiluted doses for provings, but he later advocated provings with preparations at a 30C dilution, and most modern provings are carried out using ultra-dilute preparations.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Provings are claimed to have been important in the development of the clinical trial, due to their early use of simple control groups, systematic and quantitative procedures, and some of the first application of statistics in medicine. The lengthy records of self-experimentation by homeopaths have occasionally proven useful in the development of modern drugs: For example, evidence that nitroglycerin might be useful as a treatment for angina was discovered by looking through homeopathic provings, though homeopaths themselves never used it for that purpose at that time. The first recorded provings were published by Hahnemann in his 1796 Essay on a New Principle. His Fragmenta de Viribus (1805) contained the results of 27 provings, and his 1810 Materia Medica Pura contained 65. For James Tyler Kent's 1905 Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica, 217 preparations underwent provings and newer substances are continually added to contemporary versions.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Though the proving process has superficial similarities with clinical trials, it is fundamentally different in that the process is subjective, not blinded, and modern provings are unlikely to use pharmacologically active levels of the substance under proving. As early as 1842, Oliver Holmes had noted that provings were impossibly vague, and the purported effect was not repeatable among different subjects.",
"title": "Preparations and treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Outside of the alternative medicine community, scientists have long considered homeopathy a sham or a pseudoscience, and the medical community regards it as quackery. There is an overall absence of sound statistical evidence of therapeutic efficacy, which is consistent with the lack of any biologically plausible pharmacological agent or mechanism. Proponents argue that homeopathic medicines must work by some, as yet undefined, biophysical mechanism. No homeopathic preparation has been shown to be different from placebo.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy and its use of preparations without active ingredients have led to characterizations of homeopathy as pseudoscience and quackery, or, in the words of a 1998 medical review, \"placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst\". The Russian Academy of Sciences considers homeopathy a \"dangerous 'pseudoscience' that does not work\", and \"urges people to treat homeopathy 'on a par with magic'\". The Chief Medical Officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, has stated that homeopathic preparations are \"rubbish\" and do not serve as anything more than placebos. In 2013, Mark Walport, the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and head of the Government Office for Science said \"homeopathy is nonsense, it is non-science.\" His predecessor, John Beddington, also said that homeopathy \"has no underpinning of scientific basis\" and is being \"fundamentally ignored\" by the Government.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Jack Killen, acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, says homeopathy \"goes beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics\". He adds: \"There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment.\" Ben Goldacre says that homeopaths who misrepresent scientific evidence to a scientifically illiterate public, have \"... walled themselves off from academic medicine, and critique has been all too often met with avoidance rather than argument\". Homeopaths often prefer to ignore meta-analyses in favour of cherry picked positive results, such as by promoting a particular observational study (one which Goldacre describes as \"little more than a customer-satisfaction survey\") as if it were more informative than a series of randomized controlled trials.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In an article entitled \"Should We Maintain an Open Mind about Homeopathy?\" published in the American Journal of Medicine, Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst – writing to other physicians – wrote that \"Homeopathy is among the worst examples of faith-based medicine... These axioms [of homeopathy] are not only out of line with scientific facts but also directly opposed to them. If homeopathy is correct, much of physics, chemistry, and pharmacology must be incorrect...\".",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The exceedingly low concentration of homeopathic preparations, which often lack even a single molecule of the diluted substance, has been the basis of questions about the effects of the preparations since the 19th century. The laws of chemistry give this dilution limit, which is related to the Avogadro number, as being roughly equal to 12C homeopathic dilutions (1 part in 10). James Randi and the 10:23 campaign groups have highlighted the lack of active ingredients by taking large 'overdoses'. None of the hundreds of demonstrators in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US were injured and \"no one was cured of anything, either\".",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Modern advocates of homeopathy have proposed a concept of \"water memory\", according to which water \"remembers\" the substances mixed in it, and transmits the effect of those substances when consumed. This concept is inconsistent with the current understanding of matter, and water memory has never been demonstrated to have any detectable effect, biological or otherwise. Existence of a pharmacological effect in the absence of any true active ingredient is inconsistent with the law of mass action and the observed dose-response relationships characteristic of therapeutic drugs. Homeopaths contend that their methods produce a therapeutically active preparation, selectively including only the intended substance, though in reality any water will have been in contact with millions of different substances throughout its history, and homeopaths cannot account for the selected homeopathic substance being isolated as a special case in their process.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Practitioners also hold that higher dilutions produce stronger medicinal effects. This idea is also inconsistent with observed dose-response relationships, where effects are dependent on the concentration of the active ingredient in the body. Some contend that the phenomenon of hormesis may support the idea of dilution increasing potency, but the dose-response relationship outside the zone of hormesis declines with dilution as normal, and nonlinear pharmacological effects do not provide any credible support for homeopathy.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "No individual homeopathic preparation has been unambiguously shown by research to be different from placebo. The methodological quality of the early primary research was low, with problems such as weaknesses in study design and reporting, small sample size, and selection bias. Since better quality trials have become available, the evidence for efficacy of homeopathy preparations has diminished; the highest-quality trials indicate that the preparations themselves exert no intrinsic effect. A review conducted in 2010 of all the pertinent studies of \"best evidence\" produced by the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that \"the most reliable evidence – that produced by Cochrane reviews – fails to demonstrate that homeopathic medicines have effects beyond placebo.\"",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 2009, the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that there was no compelling evidence of effect other than placebo. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council completed a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of homeopathic preparations in 2015, in which it concluded that \"there were no health conditions for which there was reliable evidence that homeopathy was effective.\" The European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC) published its official analysis in 2017 finding a lack of evidence that homeopathic products are effective, and raising concerns about quality control. In contrast a 2011 book was published, purportedly financed by the Swiss government, that concluded that homeopathy was effective and cost efficient. Although hailed by proponents as proof that homeopathy works, it was found to be scientifically, logically and ethically flawed, with most authors having a conflict of interest. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health later released a statement saying the book was published without the consent of the Swiss government.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Meta-analyses, essential tools to summarize evidence of therapeutic efficacy, and systematic reviews have found that the methodological quality in the majority of randomized trials in homeopathy have shortcomings and that such trials were generally of lower quality than trials of conventional medicine. A major issue has been publication bias, where positive results are more likely to be published in journals. This has been particularly marked in alternative medicine journals, where few of the published articles (just 5% during the year 2000) tend to report null results. A systematic review of the available systematic reviews confirmed in 2002 that higher-quality trials tended to have less positive results, and found no convincing evidence that any homeopathic preparation exerts clinical effects different from placebo. The same conclusion was also reached in 2005 in a meta-analysis published in The Lancet. A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis found that the most reliable evidence did not support the effectiveness of non-individualized homeopathy.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Health organizations, including the UK's National Health Service, the American Medical Association, the FASEB, and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, have issued statements saying that there is no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition. In 2009, World Health Organization official Mario Raviglione criticized the use of homeopathy to treat tuberculosis; similarly, another WHO spokesperson argued there was no evidence homeopathy would be an effective treatment for diarrhoea. They warned against the use of homeopathy for serious conditions such as depression, HIV and malaria. The American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology recommend that no one use homeopathic treatment for disease or as a preventive health measure. These organizations report that no evidence exists that homeopathic treatment is effective, but that there is evidence that using these treatments produces harm and can bring indirect health risks by delaying conventional treatment.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "While some articles have suggested that homeopathic solutions of high dilution can have statistically significant effects on organic processes including the growth of grain and enzyme reactions, such evidence is disputed since attempts to replicate them have failed. In 2001 and 2004, Madeleine Ennis published a number of studies that reported that homeopathic dilutions of histamine exerted an effect on the activity of basophils. In response to the first of these studies, Horizon aired a programme in which British scientists attempted to replicate Ennis' results; they were unable to do so. A 2007 systematic review of high-dilution experiments found that none of the experiments with positive results could be reproduced by all investigators.",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 1988, French immunologist Jacques Benveniste published a paper in the journal Nature while working at INSERM. The paper purported to have discovered that basophils released histamine when exposed to a homeopathic dilution of anti-immunoglobulin E antibody. Skeptical of the findings, Nature assembled an independent investigative team to determine the accuracy of the research. After investigation the team found that the experiments were \"statistically ill-controlled\", \"interpretation has been clouded by the exclusion of measurements in conflict with the claim\", and concluded, \"We believe that experimental data have been uncritically assessed and their imperfections inadequately reported.\"",
"title": "Evidence and efficacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The provision of homeopathic preparations has been described as unethical. Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery and visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London (UCL), has described homeopathy as a \"cruel deception\". Edzard Ernst, the first professor of complementary medicine in the United Kingdom and a former homeopathic practitioner, has expressed his concerns about pharmacists who violate their ethical code by failing to provide customers with \"necessary and relevant information\" about the true nature of the homeopathic products they advertise and sell. In 2013 the UK Advertising Standards Authority concluded that the Society of Homeopaths were targeting vulnerable ill people and discouraging the use of essential medical treatment while making misleading claims of efficacy for homeopathic products. In 2015 the Federal Court of Australia imposed penalties on a homeopathic company for making false or misleading statements about the efficacy of the whooping cough vaccine and recommending homeopathic remedies as an alternative.",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "A 2000 review by homeopaths reported that homeopathic preparations are \"unlikely to provoke severe adverse reactions\". In 2012, a systematic review evaluating evidence of homeopathy's possible adverse effects concluded that \"homeopathy has the potential to harm patients and consumers in both direct and indirect ways\". A 2016 systematic review and meta-analysis found that, in homeopathic clinical trials, adverse effects were reported among the patients who received homeopathy about as often as they were reported among patients who received placebo or conventional medicine.",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Some homeopathic preparations involve poisons such as Belladonna, arsenic, and poison ivy. In rare cases, the original ingredients are present at detectable levels. This may be due to improper preparation or intentional low dilution. Serious adverse effects such as seizures and death have been reported or associated with some homeopathic preparations. Instances of arsenic poisoning have occurred. In 2009, the FDA advised consumers to stop using three discontinued cold remedy Zicam products because it could cause permanent damage to users' sense of smell. In 2016 the FDA issued a safety alert to consumers warning against the use of homeopathic teething gels and tablets following reports of adverse events after their use. A previous FDA investigation had found that these products were improperly diluted and contained \"unsafe levels of belladonna\" and that the reports of serious adverse events in children using this product were \"consistent with belladonna toxicity\".",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Patients who choose to use homeopathy rather than evidence-based medicine risk missing timely diagnosis and effective treatment, thereby worsening the outcomes of serious conditions such as cancer. The Russian Commission on Pseudoscience has said homeopathy is not safe because \"patients spend significant amounts of money, buying medicines that do not work and disregard already known effective treatment.\" Critics have cited cases of patients failing to receive proper treatment for diseases that could have been easily managed with conventional medicine and who have died as a result. They have also condemned the \"marketing practice\" of criticizing and downplaying the effectiveness of medicine. Homeopaths claim that use of conventional medicines will \"push the disease deeper\" and cause more serious conditions, a process referred to as \"suppression\". In 1978, Anthony Campbell, a consultant physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, criticized statements by George Vithoulkas claiming that syphilis, when treated with antibiotics, would develop into secondary and tertiary syphilis with involvement of the central nervous system. Vithoulkas' claims echo the idea that treating a disease with external medication used to treat the symptoms would only drive it deeper into the body and conflict with scientific studies, which indicate that penicillin treatment produces a complete cure of syphilis in more than 90% of cases.",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The use of homeopathy as a preventive for serious infectious diseases, called homeoprophylaxis, is especially controversial. Some homeopaths (particularly those who are non-physicians) advise their patients against immunization. Others have suggested that vaccines be replaced with homeopathic \"nosodes\". While Hahnemann was opposed to such preparations, modern homeopaths often use them although there is no evidence to indicate they have any beneficial effects. Promotion of homeopathic alternatives to vaccines has been characterized as dangerous, inappropriate and irresponsible. In December 2014, the Australian homeopathy supplier Homeopathy Plus! was found to have acted deceptively in promoting homeopathic alternatives to vaccines. In 2019, an investigative journalism piece by the Telegraph revealed that homeopathy practitioners were actively discouraging patients from vaccinating their children. Cases of homeopaths advising against the use of anti-malarial drugs have also been identified, putting visitors to the tropics in severe danger.",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "A 2006 review recommends that pharmacy colleges include a required course where ethical dilemmas inherent in recommending products lacking proven safety and efficacy data be discussed and that students should be taught where unproven systems such as homeopathy depart from evidence-based medicine.",
"title": "Ethics and safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Homeopathy is fairly common in some countries while being uncommon in others; is highly regulated in some countries and mostly unregulated in others. It is practiced worldwide and professional qualifications and licences are needed in most countries. A 2019 WHO report found that 100 out of 133 Member States surveyed in 2012 acknowledged that their population used homeopathy, with 22 saying the practice was regulated and 13 providing health insurance coverage. In some countries, there are no specific legal regulations concerning the use of homeopathy, while in others, licences or degrees in conventional medicine from accredited universities are required. In 2001 homeopathy had been integrated into the national health care systems of many countries, including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Some homeopathic treatment is covered by the public health service of several European countries, including Scotland, and Luxembourg. It used to be covered in France until 2021. In other countries, such as Belgium, homeopathy is not covered. In Austria, the public health service requires scientific proof of effectiveness in order to reimburse medical treatments and homeopathy is listed as not reimbursable, but exceptions can be made; private health insurance policies sometimes include homeopathic treatments. In 2018, Austria's Medical University of Vienna stopped teaching homeopathy. The Swiss government withdrew coverage of homeopathy and four other complementary treatments in 2005, stating that they did not meet efficacy and cost-effectiveness criteria, but following a referendum in 2009 the five therapies were reinstated for a further 6-year trial period. In Germany, homeopathic treatments are covered by 70 percent of government medical plans, and available in almost every pharmacy.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The English NHS recommended against prescribing homeopathic preparations in 2017. In 2018, prescriptions worth £55,000 were written in defiance of the guidelines, representing less than 0.001% of the total NHS prescribing budget. In 2016 the UK's Committee of Advertising Practice compliance team wrote to homeopaths in the UK to \"remind them of the rules that govern what they can and can't say in their marketing materials\". The letter told homeopaths to \"ensure that they do not make any direct or implied claims that homeopathy can treat medical conditions\" and asks them to review their marketing communications \"including websites and social media pages\" to ensure compliance. Homeopathic services offered at Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in the UK ceased in October 2015.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Member states of the European Union are required to ensure that homeopathic products are registered, although this process does not require any proof of efficacy. In Spain, the Association for the protection of patients from pseudo-scientific therapies is lobbying to get rid of the easy registration procedure for homeopathic remedies. In Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Romania and Slovenia homeopathy, by law, can only be practiced by medical practitioners. However, in Slovenia if doctors practice homeopathy their medical license will be revoked. In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training program, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness. Homeopaths in the UK are under no legal regulations, meaning anyone can call themselves homeopaths and administer homeopathic remedies.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine and they are sold with medical claims. It has established the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The south Indian state of Kerala also has a cabinet-level AYUSH department. The Central Council of Homoeopathy was established in 1973 to monitor higher education in homeopathy, and the National Institute of Homoeopathy in 1975. Principals and standards for homeopathic products are covered by the Homoeopathic pharmacopoeia of India. A minimum of a recognized diploma in homeopathy and registration on a state register or the Central Register of Homoeopathy is required to practice homeopathy in India.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Some medical schools in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, offer an undergraduate degree programme in homeopathy. Upon completion the college may award a Bachelor of Homoeopathy Medicine and Surgery (B.H.M.S.).",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In the United States each state is responsible for the laws and licensing requirements for homeopathy. In 2015, the FDA held a hearing on homeopathic product regulation. At the hearing, representatives from the Center for Inquiry and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry summarized the harm that is done to the general public from homeopathics and proposed regulatory actions: In 2016 the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued an \"Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter Homeopathic Drugs\" which specified that the FTC will apply the same standard to homeopathic drugs that it applies to other products claiming similar benefits. A related report concluded that claims of homeopathy effectiveness \"are not accepted by most modern medical experts and do not constitute competent and reliable scientific evidence that these products have the claimed treatment effects.\" In 2019, the FDA removed an enforcement policy that permitted unapproved homeopathics to be sold. Currently no homeopathic products are approved by the FDA.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Homeopathic remedies are regulated as natural health products in Canada. Ontario became the first province in the country to regulate the practice of homeopathy, a move that was widely criticized by scientists and doctors. Health Canada requires all products to have a licence before being sold and applicants have to submit evidence on \"the safety, efficacy and quality of a homeopathic medicine\". In 2015 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tested the system by applying for and then receiving a government approved licence for a made-up drug aimed at kids.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In Australia, the sale of homeopathic products is regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. In 2015, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia concluded that there is \"no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective and should not be used to treat health conditions that are chronic, serious, or could become serious\". They recommended anyone considering using homeopathy should first get advice from a registered health practitioner. A 2017 review into Pharmacy Remuneration and Regulation recommended that products be banned from pharmacies; while noting the concerns the government did not adopt the recommendation. In New Zealand there are no regulations specific to homeopathy and the New Zealand Medical Association does not oppose the use of homeopathy, a stance that has been called unethical by some doctors.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Homeopathy is one of the most commonly used forms of alternative medicines and it has a large worldwide market. The exact size is uncertain, but information available on homeopathic sales suggests it forms a large share of the medical market.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 1999, about 1000 UK doctors practiced homeopathy, most being general practitioners who prescribe a limited number of remedies. A further 1500 homeopaths with no medical training are also thought to practice. Over ten thousand German and French doctors use homeopathy. In the United States a National Health Interview Survey estimated 5 million adults and 1 million children used homeopathy in 2011. An analysis of this survey concluded that most cases were self-prescribed for colds and musculoskeletal pain. Major retailers like Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens sell homeopathic products that are packaged to resemble conventional medicines.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The homeopathic drug market in Germany is worth about 650 million euro with a 2014 survey finding that 60 percent of Germans reported trying homeopathy. A 2009 survey found that only 17 percent of respondents knew how homeopathic medicine was made. France spent more than US$408 million on homeopathic products in 2008. In the United States the homeopathic market is worth about $3 billion-a-year; with 2.9 billion spent in 2007. Australia spent US$7.3 million on homeopathic medicines in 2008.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In India, a 2014 national health survey found that homeopathy was used by about 3% of the population. Homeopathy is used in China, although it arrived a lot later than in many other countries, partly due to the restriction on foreigners that persisted until late in the nineteenth century. Throughout Africa there is a high reliance on traditional medicines, which can be attributed to the cost of modern medicines and the relative prevalence of practitioners. Many African countries do not have any official training facilities.",
"title": "Regulation and prevalence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Using homeopathy as a treatment for animals is termed \"veterinary homeopathy\" and dates back to the inception of homeopathy; Hahnemann himself wrote and spoke of the use of homeopathy in animals other than humans. The use of homeopathy in the organic farming industry is heavily promoted. Given that homeopathy's effects in humans are due to the placebo effect and the counseling aspects of the consultation, such treatments are even less effective in animals. Studies have also found that giving animals placebos can play active roles in influencing pet owners to believe in the effectiveness of the treatment when none exists. This means that animals given homeopathic remedies will continue to suffer, resulting in animal welfare concerns.",
"title": "Veterinary use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Little existing research on the subject is of a high enough scientific standard to provide reliable data on efficacy. A 2016 review of peer-reviewed articles from 1981 to 2014 by scientists from the University of Kassel, Germany, concluded that there is not enough evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment of infectious diseases in livestock. The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has adopted a robust position against use of \"alternative\" pet preparations including homeopathy. The British Veterinary Association's position statement on alternative medicines says that it \"cannot endorse\" homeopathy, and the Australian Veterinary Association includes it on its list of \"ineffective therapies\".",
"title": "Veterinary use"
}
]
| Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths or homeopathic physicians, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people; this doctrine is called similia similibus curentur, or "like cures like". Homeopathic preparations are termed remedies and are made using homeopathic dilution. In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent. Often not even a single molecule of the original substance can be expected to remain in the product. Between each dilution homeopaths may hit and/or shake the product, claiming this makes the diluent "remember" the original substance after its removal. Practitioners claim that such preparations, upon oral intake, can treat or cure disease. All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology contradicts homeopathy. Homeopathic remedies are typically biochemically inert, and have no effect on any known disease. Its theory of disease, centered around principles Hahnemann termed miasms, is inconsistent with subsequent identification of viruses and bacteria as causes of disease. Clinical trials have been conducted and generally demonstrated no objective effect from homeopathic preparations. The fundamental implausibility of homeopathy as well as a lack of demonstrable effectiveness has led to it being characterized within the scientific and medical communities as quackery and fraud. Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825, and the first American homeopathic school opened in 1835. Throughout the 19th century, dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and the United States. During this period, homeopathy was able to appear relatively successful, as other forms of treatment could be harmful and ineffective. By the end of the century the practice began to wane, with the last exclusively homeopathic medical school in the United States closing in 1920. During the 1970s, homeopathy made a significant comeback, with sales of some homeopathic products increasing tenfold. The trend corresponded with the rise of the New Age movement, and may be in part due to chemophobia, an irrational aversion to synthetic chemicals, and the longer consultation times homeopathic practitioners provided. In the 21st century, a series of meta-analyses have shown that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. As a result, national and international bodies have recommended the withdrawal of government funding for homeopathy in healthcare. National bodies from Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France, as well as the European Academies' Science Advisory Council and the Russian Academy of Sciences have all concluded that homeopathy is ineffective, and recommended against the practice receiving any further funding. The National Health Service in England no longer provides funding for homeopathic remedies and asked the Department of Health to add homeopathic remedies to the list of forbidden prescription items. France removed funding in 2021, while Spain has also announced moves to ban homeopathy and other pseudotherapies from health centers. | 2001-12-02T21:54:21Z | 2023-12-28T11:50:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy |
14,231 | Hairpin | A hairpin or hair pin is a long device used to hold a person's hair in place. It may be used simply to secure long hair out of the way for convenience or as part of an elaborate hairstyle or coiffure. The earliest evidence for dressing the hair may be seen in carved "Venus figurines" such as the Venus of Brassempouy and the Venus of Willendorf. The creation of different hairstyles, especially among women, seems to be common to all cultures and all periods and many past, and current, societies use hairpins.
Hairpins made of metal, ivory, bronze, carved wood, etc. were used in ancient Egypt. for securing decorated hairstyles. Such hairpins suggest, as graves show, that many were luxury objects among the Egyptians and later the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Major success came in 1901 with the invention of the spiral hairpin by New Zealand inventor Ernest Godward. This was a predecessor of the hair clip.
The hairpin may be decorative and encrusted with jewels and ornaments, or it may be utilitarian, and designed to be almost invisible while holding a hairstyle in place. Some hairpins are a single straight pin, but modern versions are more likely to be constructed from different lengths of wire that are bent in half with a u-shaped end and a few kinks along the two opposite portions. The finished pin may vary from two to six inches in last length. The length of the wires enables placement in several designs of hairstyles to hold the nature in place. The kinks enable retaining the pin during normal movements.
A hairpin patent was issued to Kelly Chamandy in 1925.
Hairpins (generally known as fa-zan; Chinese: 髮簪) are an important symbol in Chinese culture. In ancient China, hairpins were worn by men as well as women, and they were essential items for everyday hairstyling, mainly for securing and decorating a hair bun. Furthermore, hairpins worn by women could also represent their social status.
In Han Chinese culture, when young girls reached the age of fifteen, they were allowed to take part in a rite of passage known as ji li (Chinese: 筓禮), or "hairpin initiation". This ceremony marked the coming of age of young women. Particularly, before the age of fifteen, girls did not use hairpins as they wore their hair in braids, and they were considered as children. When they turned fifteen, they could be considered as young women after the ceremony, and they started to style their hair as buns secured and embellished by hairpins. This practice indicated that these young women could now enter into marriage. However, if a young woman had not been consented to marriage before age twenty, or she had not yet participated in a coming of age ceremony, she would attend a ceremony when she turned twenty.
In comparison with ji li, the male equivalent known as guan li (Chinese: 冠禮) or "hat initiation", usually took place five years later, at the age of twenty. In the 21st century hanfu movement, an attempt to revive the traditional Han Chinese coming-of-age ceremonies has been made, and the ideal age to attend the ceremony is twenty years old for all genders.
While hairpins can symbolize the transition from childhood to adulthood, they were closely connected to the concept of marriage as well. At the time of an engagement, the fiancée may take a hairpin from her hair and give it to her fiancé as a pledge: this can be seen as a reversal of the Western tradition, in which the future groom presents an engagement ring to his betrothed. After the wedding ceremony, the husband should put the hairpin back into his spouse's hair.
Hair has always carried many psychological, philosophical, romantic, and cultural meanings in Chinese culture. In Han culture, people call the union between two people jie-fa (Chinese: 結髮), literally "tying hair". During the wedding ceremony, some Chinese couples exchange a lock of hair as a pledge, while others break a hairpin into two parts, and then, each of the betrothed take one part with them for keeping. If this couple were ever to get separated in the future, when they reunite, they can piece the two halves together, and the completed hairpin would serve as a proof of their identities as well as a symbol of their reunion. In addition, a married couple is sometimes referred to as jie-fa fu-qi (Chinese: 結髮夫妻), an idiom which implies the relationship between the pair is very intimate and happy, just like how their hair has been tied together. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A hairpin or hair pin is a long device used to hold a person's hair in place. It may be used simply to secure long hair out of the way for convenience or as part of an elaborate hairstyle or coiffure. The earliest evidence for dressing the hair may be seen in carved \"Venus figurines\" such as the Venus of Brassempouy and the Venus of Willendorf. The creation of different hairstyles, especially among women, seems to be common to all cultures and all periods and many past, and current, societies use hairpins.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Hairpins made of metal, ivory, bronze, carved wood, etc. were used in ancient Egypt. for securing decorated hairstyles. Such hairpins suggest, as graves show, that many were luxury objects among the Egyptians and later the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Major success came in 1901 with the invention of the spiral hairpin by New Zealand inventor Ernest Godward. This was a predecessor of the hair clip.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The hairpin may be decorative and encrusted with jewels and ornaments, or it may be utilitarian, and designed to be almost invisible while holding a hairstyle in place. Some hairpins are a single straight pin, but modern versions are more likely to be constructed from different lengths of wire that are bent in half with a u-shaped end and a few kinks along the two opposite portions. The finished pin may vary from two to six inches in last length. The length of the wires enables placement in several designs of hairstyles to hold the nature in place. The kinks enable retaining the pin during normal movements.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A hairpin patent was issued to Kelly Chamandy in 1925.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Hairpins (generally known as fa-zan; Chinese: 髮簪) are an important symbol in Chinese culture. In ancient China, hairpins were worn by men as well as women, and they were essential items for everyday hairstyling, mainly for securing and decorating a hair bun. Furthermore, hairpins worn by women could also represent their social status.",
"title": "Hairpins in Chinese culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In Han Chinese culture, when young girls reached the age of fifteen, they were allowed to take part in a rite of passage known as ji li (Chinese: 筓禮), or \"hairpin initiation\". This ceremony marked the coming of age of young women. Particularly, before the age of fifteen, girls did not use hairpins as they wore their hair in braids, and they were considered as children. When they turned fifteen, they could be considered as young women after the ceremony, and they started to style their hair as buns secured and embellished by hairpins. This practice indicated that these young women could now enter into marriage. However, if a young woman had not been consented to marriage before age twenty, or she had not yet participated in a coming of age ceremony, she would attend a ceremony when she turned twenty.",
"title": "Hairpins in Chinese culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In comparison with ji li, the male equivalent known as guan li (Chinese: 冠禮) or \"hat initiation\", usually took place five years later, at the age of twenty. In the 21st century hanfu movement, an attempt to revive the traditional Han Chinese coming-of-age ceremonies has been made, and the ideal age to attend the ceremony is twenty years old for all genders.",
"title": "Hairpins in Chinese culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "While hairpins can symbolize the transition from childhood to adulthood, they were closely connected to the concept of marriage as well. At the time of an engagement, the fiancée may take a hairpin from her hair and give it to her fiancé as a pledge: this can be seen as a reversal of the Western tradition, in which the future groom presents an engagement ring to his betrothed. After the wedding ceremony, the husband should put the hairpin back into his spouse's hair.",
"title": "Hairpins in Chinese culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hair has always carried many psychological, philosophical, romantic, and cultural meanings in Chinese culture. In Han culture, people call the union between two people jie-fa (Chinese: 結髮), literally \"tying hair\". During the wedding ceremony, some Chinese couples exchange a lock of hair as a pledge, while others break a hairpin into two parts, and then, each of the betrothed take one part with them for keeping. If this couple were ever to get separated in the future, when they reunite, they can piece the two halves together, and the completed hairpin would serve as a proof of their identities as well as a symbol of their reunion. In addition, a married couple is sometimes referred to as jie-fa fu-qi (Chinese: 結髮夫妻), an idiom which implies the relationship between the pair is very intimate and happy, just like how their hair has been tied together.",
"title": "Hairpins in Chinese culture"
}
]
| A hairpin or hair pin is a long device used to hold a person's hair in place. It may be used simply to secure long hair out of the way for convenience or as part of an elaborate hairstyle or coiffure. The earliest evidence for dressing the hair may be seen in carved "Venus figurines" such as the Venus of Brassempouy and the Venus of Willendorf. The creation of different hairstyles, especially among women, seems to be common to all cultures and all periods and many past, and current, societies use hairpins. Hairpins made of metal, ivory, bronze, carved wood, etc. were used in ancient Egypt. for securing decorated hairstyles. Such hairpins suggest, as graves show, that many were luxury objects among the Egyptians and later the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Major success came in 1901 with the invention of the spiral hairpin by New Zealand inventor Ernest Godward. This was a predecessor of the hair clip. The hairpin may be decorative and encrusted with jewels and ornaments, or it may be utilitarian, and designed to be almost invisible while holding a hairstyle in place. Some hairpins are a single straight pin, but modern versions are more likely to be constructed from different lengths of wire that are bent in half with a u-shaped end and a few kinks along the two opposite portions. The finished pin may vary from two to six inches in last length. The length of the wires enables placement in several designs of hairstyles to hold the nature in place. The kinks enable retaining the pin during normal movements. A hairpin patent was issued to Kelly Chamandy in 1925. | 2001-12-03T15:47:36Z | 2023-11-13T18:25:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairpin |
14,233 | Hate speech | Hate speech is a legal term with varied meaning. It has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.
There has been much debate over freedom of speech, hate speech, and hate speech legislation. The laws of some countries describe hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing, or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group, or that disparage or intimidate a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group. The law may identify protected groups based on certain characteristics. In some countries, hate speech is not a legal term. Additionally, in some countries, including the United States, much of what falls under the category of "hate speech" is constitutionally protected. In other countries, a victim of hate speech may seek redress under civil law, criminal law, or both.
Hate speech is generally accepted to be one of the prerequisites for mass atrocities such as genocide. Incitement to genocide is an extreme form of hate speech, and has been prosecuted in international courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Starting in the 1940s and 50s, various American civil rights groups responded to the atrocities of World War II by advocating for restrictions on hateful speech targeting groups on the basis of race and religion. These organizations used group libel as a legal framework for describing the violence of hate speech and addressing its harm. In his discussion of the history of criminal libel, scholar Jeremy Waldron states that these laws helped "vindicate public order, not just by preempting violence, but by upholding against attack a shared sense of the basic elements of each person's status, dignity, and reputation as a citizen or member of society in good standing". A key legal victory for this view came in 1952 when group libel law was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Beauharnais v. Illinois. However, the group libel approach lost ground due to a rise in support for individual rights within civil rights movements during the 60s. Critiques of group defamation laws are not limited to defenders of individual rights. Some legal theorists, such as critical race theorist Richard Delgado, support legal limits on hate speech, but claim that defamation is too narrow a category to fully counter hate speech. Ultimately, Delgado advocates a legal strategy that would establish a specific section of tort law for responding to racist insults, citing the difficulty of receiving redress under the existing legal system.
After WWII, Germany criminalized Volksverhetzung ("incitement of popular hatred") to prevent resurgence of Nazism. Hate speech on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity also is banned in Germany. Most European countries have likewise implemented various laws and regulations regarding hate speech, and the European Union's Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA requires member states to criminalize hate crimes and speech (though individual implementation and interpretation of this framework varies by state).
International human rights laws from the United Nations Human Rights Committee have been protecting freedom of expression, and one of the most fundamental documents is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. Article 19 of the UDHR states that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Even though there are fundamental laws protecting freedom of expression, there are multiple international laws that expand on the UDHR and pose limitations and restrictions, specifically concerning the safety and protection of individuals.
A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998 expands on the UDHR, stating that restrictions on freedom of expression would be permitted when it threatens national security, incites racial or religious hatred, causes individual harm on health or morals, or threatens the rights and reputations of individuals. The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Laws against hate speech can be divided into two types: those intended to preserve public order and those intended to protect human dignity. The laws designed to protect public order require that a higher threshold be violated, so they are not often enforced. For example, a 1992 study found that only one person was prosecuted in Northern Ireland in the preceding 21 years for violating a law against incitement to religious violence. The laws meant to protect human dignity have a much lower threshold for violation, so those in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands tend to be more frequently enforced.
A few states, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Rwanda Hutu factions, actors in the Yugoslav Wars and Ethiopia have been described as spreading official hate speech or incitement to genocide.
The rise of the internet and social media has presented a new medium through which hate speech can spread. Hate speech on the internet traces all the way back to its initial years, with a 1983 bulletin board system created by neo-Nazi George Dietz considered the first instance of hate speech online. As the internet evolved over time hate speech continued to spread and create it's footprint; the first hate speech website Stormfront was published in 1996, and hate speech has become one of the central challenges for social media platforms.
The structure and nature of the internet contribute to both the creation and persistence of hate speech online. The widespread use and access to the internet gives hate mongers an easy way to spread their message to wide audiences with little cost and effort. According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 66% of the world population has access to the internet. Additionally, the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet imboldens many to make statements constituting hate speech that they otherwise wouldn't for fear of social or real life repercussions. While some governments and companies attempt to combat this type of behavior by leveraging real name systems, difficulties in verifying identities online, public opposition to such policies, and sites that don't enforce these policies leave large spaces for this behavior to persist.
The fact that the internet crosses national borders makes comprehensive government regulations on online hate speech difficult. Governments who want to regulate hate speech contend with issues around lack of jurisdiction and conflicting viewpoints from other countries. In an early example of this, the case of Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et l'Antisemitisme had a French court hold Yahoo! liable for allowing Nazi memorabilia auctions to be visible to the public. Yahoo! Refused to comply with the ruling and ultimately won relief in a U.S. court which found that the ruling was unenforceable in the U.S. Disagreements like these make national level regulations difficult, and while there are some international efforts and laws that attempt to regulate hate speech and its online presence, as with most as with most international agreements the implementation and interpretation of these treaties varies by country.
Much of the regulation regarding online hate speech is performed voluntarily by individual companies. Many major tech companies have adopted terms of service which outline allowed content on their platform, often banning hate speech. In a notable step for this, on 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours. Techniques employed by these companies to regulate hate speech include user reporting, Artificial Intelligence flagging, and manual review of content by employees. Major search engines like Google Search also tweak their algorithms to try and suppress hateful content from appearing in their results. However, despite these efforts hate speech remains a persistent problem online. According to a 2021 study by the Anti Defamation League 33% of Americans were the target of identity based harassment in the preceding year, a statistic which has not noticeably shifted downwards despite increasing self regulation by companies.
Several activists and scholars have criticized the practice of limiting hate speech. Civil liberties activist Nadine Strossen says that, while efforts to censor hate speech have the goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they are ineffective and may have the opposite effect: disadvantaged and ethnic minorities being charged with violating laws against hate speech. Kim Holmes, Vice President of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a critic of hate speech theory, has argued that it "assumes bad faith on the part of people regardless of their stated intentions" and that it "obliterates the ethical responsibility of the individual". Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor of Islamic and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham, argues that laws against hate speech constitute viewpoint discrimination (which is prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States) as the legal system punishes some viewpoints but not others. Other scholars, such as Gideon Elford, argue instead that "insofar as hate speech regulation targets the consequences of speech that are contingently connected with the substance of what is expressed then it is viewpoint discriminatory in only an indirect sense." John Bennett argues that restricting hate speech relies on questionable conceptual and empirical foundations and is reminiscent of efforts by totalitarian regimes to control the thoughts of their citizens.
Miisa Kreandner and Eriz Henze argue that hate speech laws are arbitrary, as they only protect some categories of people but not others. Henze argues the only way to resolve this problem without abolishing hate speech laws would be to extend them to all possible conceivable categories, which Henze argues would amount to totalitarian control over speech.
Michael Conklin argues that there are benefits to hate speech that are often overlooked. He contends that allowing hate speech provides a more accurate view of the human condition, provides opportunities to change people's minds, and identifies certain people that may need to be avoided in certain circumstances. According to one psychological research study, a high degree of psychopathy is "a significant predictor" for involvement in online hate activity, while none of the other 7 potential factors examined were found to have a statistically significant predictive power.
Political philosopher Jeffrey W. Howard considers the popular framing of hate speech as "free speech vs. other political values" as a mischaracterization. He refers to this as the "balancing model", and says it seeks to weigh the benefit of free speech against other values such as dignity and equality for historically marginalized groups. Instead, he believes that the crux of debate should be whether or not freedom of expression is inclusive of hate speech. Research indicates that when people support censoring hate speech, they are motivated more by concerns about the effects the speech has on others than they are about its effects on themselves. Women are somewhat more likely than men to support censoring hate speech due to greater perceived harm of hate speech, which some researchers believe may be due to gender differences in empathy towards targets of hate speech. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hate speech is a legal term with varied meaning. It has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as \"public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation\". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is \"usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation\". There is no single definition of what constitutes \"hate\" or \"disparagement\". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There has been much debate over freedom of speech, hate speech, and hate speech legislation. The laws of some countries describe hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing, or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group, or that disparage or intimidate a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group. The law may identify protected groups based on certain characteristics. In some countries, hate speech is not a legal term. Additionally, in some countries, including the United States, much of what falls under the category of \"hate speech\" is constitutionally protected. In other countries, a victim of hate speech may seek redress under civil law, criminal law, or both.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hate speech is generally accepted to be one of the prerequisites for mass atrocities such as genocide. Incitement to genocide is an extreme form of hate speech, and has been prosecuted in international courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Starting in the 1940s and 50s, various American civil rights groups responded to the atrocities of World War II by advocating for restrictions on hateful speech targeting groups on the basis of race and religion. These organizations used group libel as a legal framework for describing the violence of hate speech and addressing its harm. In his discussion of the history of criminal libel, scholar Jeremy Waldron states that these laws helped \"vindicate public order, not just by preempting violence, but by upholding against attack a shared sense of the basic elements of each person's status, dignity, and reputation as a citizen or member of society in good standing\". A key legal victory for this view came in 1952 when group libel law was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Beauharnais v. Illinois. However, the group libel approach lost ground due to a rise in support for individual rights within civil rights movements during the 60s. Critiques of group defamation laws are not limited to defenders of individual rights. Some legal theorists, such as critical race theorist Richard Delgado, support legal limits on hate speech, but claim that defamation is too narrow a category to fully counter hate speech. Ultimately, Delgado advocates a legal strategy that would establish a specific section of tort law for responding to racist insults, citing the difficulty of receiving redress under the existing legal system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "After WWII, Germany criminalized Volksverhetzung (\"incitement of popular hatred\") to prevent resurgence of Nazism. Hate speech on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity also is banned in Germany. Most European countries have likewise implemented various laws and regulations regarding hate speech, and the European Union's Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA requires member states to criminalize hate crimes and speech (though individual implementation and interpretation of this framework varies by state).",
"title": "Hate speech laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "International human rights laws from the United Nations Human Rights Committee have been protecting freedom of expression, and one of the most fundamental documents is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. Article 19 of the UDHR states that \"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.\"",
"title": "Hate speech laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Even though there are fundamental laws protecting freedom of expression, there are multiple international laws that expand on the UDHR and pose limitations and restrictions, specifically concerning the safety and protection of individuals.",
"title": "Hate speech laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998 expands on the UDHR, stating that restrictions on freedom of expression would be permitted when it threatens national security, incites racial or religious hatred, causes individual harm on health or morals, or threatens the rights and reputations of individuals. The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.",
"title": "Hate speech laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Laws against hate speech can be divided into two types: those intended to preserve public order and those intended to protect human dignity. The laws designed to protect public order require that a higher threshold be violated, so they are not often enforced. For example, a 1992 study found that only one person was prosecuted in Northern Ireland in the preceding 21 years for violating a law against incitement to religious violence. The laws meant to protect human dignity have a much lower threshold for violation, so those in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands tend to be more frequently enforced.",
"title": "Hate speech laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "A few states, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Rwanda Hutu factions, actors in the Yugoslav Wars and Ethiopia have been described as spreading official hate speech or incitement to genocide.",
"title": "State-sanctioned hate speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The rise of the internet and social media has presented a new medium through which hate speech can spread. Hate speech on the internet traces all the way back to its initial years, with a 1983 bulletin board system created by neo-Nazi George Dietz considered the first instance of hate speech online. As the internet evolved over time hate speech continued to spread and create it's footprint; the first hate speech website Stormfront was published in 1996, and hate speech has become one of the central challenges for social media platforms.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The structure and nature of the internet contribute to both the creation and persistence of hate speech online. The widespread use and access to the internet gives hate mongers an easy way to spread their message to wide audiences with little cost and effort. According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 66% of the world population has access to the internet. Additionally, the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet imboldens many to make statements constituting hate speech that they otherwise wouldn't for fear of social or real life repercussions. While some governments and companies attempt to combat this type of behavior by leveraging real name systems, difficulties in verifying identities online, public opposition to such policies, and sites that don't enforce these policies leave large spaces for this behavior to persist.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The fact that the internet crosses national borders makes comprehensive government regulations on online hate speech difficult. Governments who want to regulate hate speech contend with issues around lack of jurisdiction and conflicting viewpoints from other countries. In an early example of this, the case of Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et l'Antisemitisme had a French court hold Yahoo! liable for allowing Nazi memorabilia auctions to be visible to the public. Yahoo! Refused to comply with the ruling and ultimately won relief in a U.S. court which found that the ruling was unenforceable in the U.S. Disagreements like these make national level regulations difficult, and while there are some international efforts and laws that attempt to regulate hate speech and its online presence, as with most as with most international agreements the implementation and interpretation of these treaties varies by country.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Much of the regulation regarding online hate speech is performed voluntarily by individual companies. Many major tech companies have adopted terms of service which outline allowed content on their platform, often banning hate speech. In a notable step for this, on 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review \"[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech\" posted on their services within 24 hours. Techniques employed by these companies to regulate hate speech include user reporting, Artificial Intelligence flagging, and manual review of content by employees. Major search engines like Google Search also tweak their algorithms to try and suppress hateful content from appearing in their results. However, despite these efforts hate speech remains a persistent problem online. According to a 2021 study by the Anti Defamation League 33% of Americans were the target of identity based harassment in the preceding year, a statistic which has not noticeably shifted downwards despite increasing self regulation by companies.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Several activists and scholars have criticized the practice of limiting hate speech. Civil liberties activist Nadine Strossen says that, while efforts to censor hate speech have the goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they are ineffective and may have the opposite effect: disadvantaged and ethnic minorities being charged with violating laws against hate speech. Kim Holmes, Vice President of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a critic of hate speech theory, has argued that it \"assumes bad faith on the part of people regardless of their stated intentions\" and that it \"obliterates the ethical responsibility of the individual\". Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor of Islamic and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham, argues that laws against hate speech constitute viewpoint discrimination (which is prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States) as the legal system punishes some viewpoints but not others. Other scholars, such as Gideon Elford, argue instead that \"insofar as hate speech regulation targets the consequences of speech that are contingently connected with the substance of what is expressed then it is viewpoint discriminatory in only an indirect sense.\" John Bennett argues that restricting hate speech relies on questionable conceptual and empirical foundations and is reminiscent of efforts by totalitarian regimes to control the thoughts of their citizens.",
"title": "Commentary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Miisa Kreandner and Eriz Henze argue that hate speech laws are arbitrary, as they only protect some categories of people but not others. Henze argues the only way to resolve this problem without abolishing hate speech laws would be to extend them to all possible conceivable categories, which Henze argues would amount to totalitarian control over speech.",
"title": "Commentary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Michael Conklin argues that there are benefits to hate speech that are often overlooked. He contends that allowing hate speech provides a more accurate view of the human condition, provides opportunities to change people's minds, and identifies certain people that may need to be avoided in certain circumstances. According to one psychological research study, a high degree of psychopathy is \"a significant predictor\" for involvement in online hate activity, while none of the other 7 potential factors examined were found to have a statistically significant predictive power.",
"title": "Commentary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Political philosopher Jeffrey W. Howard considers the popular framing of hate speech as \"free speech vs. other political values\" as a mischaracterization. He refers to this as the \"balancing model\", and says it seeks to weigh the benefit of free speech against other values such as dignity and equality for historically marginalized groups. Instead, he believes that the crux of debate should be whether or not freedom of expression is inclusive of hate speech. Research indicates that when people support censoring hate speech, they are motivated more by concerns about the effects the speech has on others than they are about its effects on themselves. Women are somewhat more likely than men to support censoring hate speech due to greater perceived harm of hate speech, which some researchers believe may be due to gender differences in empathy towards targets of hate speech.",
"title": "Commentary"
}
]
| Hate speech is a legal term with varied meaning. It has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country. There has been much debate over freedom of speech, hate speech, and hate speech legislation. The laws of some countries describe hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing, or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group, or that disparage or intimidate a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group. The law may identify protected groups based on certain characteristics. In some countries, hate speech is not a legal term. Additionally, in some countries, including the United States, much of what falls under the category of "hate speech" is constitutionally protected. In other countries, a victim of hate speech may seek redress under civil law, criminal law, or both. Hate speech is generally accepted to be one of the prerequisites for mass atrocities such as genocide. Incitement to genocide is an extreme form of hate speech, and has been prosecuted in international courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. | 2001-12-03T21:09:28Z | 2023-12-26T15:01:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech |
14,236 | Henrik Ibsen | Henrik Johan Ibsen (/ˈɪbsən/; Norwegian: [ˈhɛ̀nrɪk ˈɪ̀psn̩]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most performed play in 2006.
Ibsen's early poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. In many critics' estimates The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are "vying with each other as rivals for the top place among Ibsen's works"; Ibsen himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece.
Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition, and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Arthur Miller, Marguerite Yourcenar, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, and Jon Fosse. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904.
Ibsen was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien and grew up as a member of the Ibsen–Paus extended family. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Ibsen's dramas were informed by his background, and he often modelled or named characters after family members. Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian, and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.
Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 in Stockmanngården into an affluent merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien in Bratsberg (Telemark). He was the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen (1797–1877) and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869), and he grew up as a member of the Ibsen–Altenburg–Paus extended family, which consisted of the siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus and their tightly knit families. Ibsen's ancestors were primarily merchants and shipowners in cities such as Skien and Bergen, or members of the "aristocracy of officials" of Upper Telemark, the region's civil servant elite. Henrik Ibsen later wrote that "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", and that he was closely related to "just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings." He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church—membership of which was mandatory—on 28 March and the baptism was confirmed in Christian's Church [no] on 19 June. When Ibsen was born, Skien had for centuries been one of Norway's most important and internationally oriented cities, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.
His parents, though not closely related by blood, had been reared as social first cousins, sometimes described as near-siblings in a social sense. Knud Ibsen's father, ship's captain and merchant Henrich Johan Ibsen (1765–1797), died at sea when his son was newborn in 1797, and his mother Johanne Plesner (1770–1847) married captain Ole Paus (1766–1855) the following year; Knud grew up as a member of the Paus family. His stepfather Ole Paus was a descendant of the "aristocracy of officials" in Upper Telemark; as a child Paus had been taken in by a relative, Skien merchant Christopher Blom, and he had become a ship's captain and shipowner in Skien, acquiring the burghership in 1788. Like Henrich Johan Ibsen before him, Paus became the brother-in-law of one of Norway's wealthiest men, Diderik von Cappelen, whose first wife Maria Plesner was Johanne's sister. In 1799, Ole Paus sold the Ibsen House in Skien's Løvestrædet (Lion's Street), which he had inherited from his wife's first husband, and bought the estate Rising outside Skien from a sister of his brother-in-law von Cappelen. Knud grew up at Rising with most of his many half-siblings, among them the later governor Christian Cornelius Paus and the shipowner Christopher Blom Paus. In the 1801 census the Paus family of Rising had seven servants.
Marichen grew up in the large, stately Altenburggården building in central Skien as the daughter of the wealthy merchant Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus [no] (1763–1848), who was the sister of Knud's stepfather. Altenburg was a shipowner and timber merchant, and owned a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; after his death in 1824 the widow Hedevig, Henrik's grandmother, took over the businesses. During Henrik's childhood the families of Ole and Hedevig Paus were very close: Ole's oldest son, Knud's half-brother Henrik Johan Paus, was raised in Hedevig's home, and the children of the Paus siblings, including Knud and Marichen, spent much of their childhood together. Older Ibsen scholars have claimed that Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' "strange, almost incestuous marriage", and he would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably in his masterpiece Rosmersholm. On the other hand, Jørgen Haave points out that his parents' close relationship was not that unusual among the Skien elite.
In 1825, Henrik's father Knud acquired the burghership of Skien and established an independent business as a timber and luxury goods merchant there, with his younger brother, Christopher Blom Paus, then aged 15, as his apprentice. The two brothers moved into the Stockmanngården building, where they rented a part of the building and lived with a maid. On the first floor the brothers sold foreign wines and a variety of luxury items, while also engaging in wholesale export of timber in cooperation with their first cousin Diderik von Cappelen (1795–1866). On 1 December 1825, Knud married his stepfather's niece Marichen, who then moved in with them. Henrik was born there in 1828. In 1830, Marichen's mother Hedevig left Altenburggården and her properties and business ventures to her son-in-law Knud, and the Ibsen family moved to Marichen's childhood home in 1831. During the 1820s and 1830s, Knud was a wealthy young merchant in Skien, and he was the city's 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.
In his unfinished biography From Skien to Rome, Henrik Ibsen wrote about the Skien of his childhood:
In my childhood, Skien was an extremely joyful and festive town, quite the opposite of what it would later become. Many highly cultured, prosperous families at that time lived partly in the city itself, partly on large farms in the area. Close or more remote kinship connected most of these families amongst themselves, and balls, dinner parties, and musical soirées came one after another in rapid succession both during winters and summers. [...] Visits from strangers were almost a constant occurrence at our spacious farmhouse and especially around Christmastime and the market days, our townhouse was full and the table was set from morning to nightfall.
Haave writes that the sources who knew Henrik in childhood described him as "a boy who was pampered by his father, who enjoyed being creative in solitude, and who provoked peers with his superiority and arrogance." Henrik engaged in model theater, which was particularly popular among boys from bourgeois homes in Europe in the early 1800s. In contrast to his sociable and playful father, Henrik was described as a more introverted personality; Johan Kielland Bergwitz claimed that "it is with the Paus family that Henrik Ibsen has the most pronounced temperament traits in common." One of the Cudrio sisters from the neighboring farm, who knew him in childhood, said, "he was immensely cunning and malicious, and he even beat us. But when he grew up, he became incredibly handsome, yet no one liked him because he was so malicious. No one wanted to be with him."
When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, his father's fortunes took a turn for the worse, and in 1835 the family was forced to sell Altenburggården. The following year they moved to their stately summer house, Venstøp [no], outside of the city. They were still relatively affluent, had servants, and socialised with other members of the Skien elite, e.g. through lavish parties; their closest neighbours on Southern Venstøp were former shipowner and mayor of Skien Ulrich Frederik Cudrio and his family, who also had been forced to sell their townhouse. In 1843, after Henrik left home, the Ibsen family moved to a townhouse at Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen's half-brother and former apprentice Christopher Blom Paus, who had established himself as an independent merchant in Skien in 1836 and who eventually became one of the city's leading shipowners. Knud continued to struggle to maintain his business and had some success in the 1840s, but in the 1850s his business ventures and professional activities came to an end, and he became reliant on support from his successful younger half-brothers.
Ibsen scholar Ellen Rees notes that historical and biographical research into Ibsen’s life in the 21st century has been marked by a "revolution" that has debunked numerous myths previously taken for granted. Older Ibsen historiography has often claimed that Knud Ibsen experienced financial ruin and became an alcoholic tyrant, that the family lost contact with the elite it had belonged to, and that this had a strong influence on Henrik Ibsen's biography and work. Newer Ibsen scholarship, in particular Jørgen Haave's book The Ibsen Family (Familien Ibsen), has refuted such claims, and Haave has pointed out that older biographical works have uncritically repeated numerous unfounded myths about both of Ibsen's parents, and about the playwright's childhood and background in general.
Haave points out that Knud Ibsen's economic problems in the 1830s were mainly the result of the difficult times and something the Ibsen family had in common with most members of the bourgeoisie; Haave further argues that Henrik Ibsen had a happy and comfortable childhood as a member of the upper class, even after the family moved to Venstøp, and that they were able to maintain their lifestyle and patrician identity with the help of their extended family and accumulated cultural capital. Contrary to the incorrect claims that Ibsen had been born in a small or remote town, Haave points out that Skien had been Eastern Norway's leading commercial city for centuries, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.
Rees characterizes Ibsen's family as upper class rather than middle class, and part of "the closest thing Norway had to an aristocracy, albeit one that lost most of its power during his lifetime." Haave points out that virtually all of Ibsen's ancestors had been wealthy burghers and higher government officials, and members of the local and regional elites in the areas they lived, often of continental European ancestry. He argues that "the Ibsen family belonged to an elite that distanced itself strongly from the common farmer population, and considered itself part of an educated European culture" and that "it was this patrician class that formed his cultural identity and upbringing." Haave points to many examples of both Henrik Ibsen and other members of his family having a condescending attitude towards common Norwegian farmers, viewing them as "some sort of primitive indigenous population," and being very conscious of their own identity as members of the sophisticated upper class. Haave points out that Ibsen's most immediate family—Knud, Marichen and Henrik's siblings—disintegrated financially and socially in the 1850s, but that it happened after Henrik had left home, at a time when he was establishing himself as a successful man of theatre, while his extended family, such as his uncles Henrik Johan Paus, Christian Cornelius Paus and Christopher Blom Paus, were firmly established in Skien's elite as lawyers, government officials and wealthy shipowners. Haave argues that the story of the Ibsen family is the story of the slow collapse of a patrician merchant family amid the emergence of a new democratic society in the 19th century, and that Henrik Ibsen, like others of his class, had to find new opportunities to maintain his social position.
Many Ibsen scholars have compared characters and themes in his plays to his family and upbringing; his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society. Ibsen himself confirmed that he both modeled and named characters in his plays after his own family. Works such as Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, and Ghosts include numerous references to Ibsen's relatives, family history, and childhood memories. However, despite Ibsen's use of his family as an inspiration for his plays, Haave criticizes the uncritical use of Ibsen's dramas as biographical sources and the "naive" readings of them as literal representations of his family members, in particular his father.
At fifteen, Ibsen left school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist. At that time he began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was 18, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, whose upbringing Ibsen paid for until the boy was fourteen, though Ibsen never saw the child. Ibsen went to Christiania (later spelled Kristiania and then renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catilina (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen's main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently the Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In Ibsen's youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet and playwright.
Ibsen spent the next several years employed at Det norske Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he published five new—though largely unremarkable—plays. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.
Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre. He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. The couple lived in difficult financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway.
In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He spent the next 27 years in Italy and Germany and only visited Norway a few times during those years.
His next play, Brand (1865), brought him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as did the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.
With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgements into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.
Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll's House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.
Ibsen was already in his fifties when A Doll's House was published. He himself saw his latter plays as a series. At the end of his career, he described them as "that series of dramas which began with A Doll's House and which is now completed with When We Dead Awaken". Furthermore, it was the reception of A Doll's House which brought Ibsen international acclaim.
Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen's society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But his philandering continued right up until his death, and his vices are passed on to their son in the form of syphilis. The mention of venereal disease alone was scandalous, but to show how it could poison a respectable family was considered intolerable.
In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. Contemporary society's belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen chastised not only the conservatism of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a physician in a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water is contaminated by the local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor.
As audiences by now expected, Ibsen's next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society's mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always an iconoclast, Ibsen saw himself as an objective observer of society, "like a lone franc tireur in the outposts", playing a lone hand, as he put it. Ibsen, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, relied upon immediate sources such as newspapers and second-hand report for his contact with intellectual thought. He claimed to be ignorant of books, leaving them to his wife and son, but, as Georg Brandes described, "he seemed to stand in some mysterious correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the day."
The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly one of the most complex, alongside Rosmersholm. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile, and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.
Ibsen displays masterly use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth: that Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, Hjalmar disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.
Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society's moral values and more to do with the problems of individuals. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic or hackneyed, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House are regularly cited as Ibsen's most popular and influential plays, with the title role of Hedda regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in the theatre to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. His works were brought to an English-speaking audience, largely thanks to the efforts of William Archer and Edmund Gosse. These in turn had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates Ibsen in his early autobiographical novel Stephen Hero. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. Modernism was on the rise, not only in the theatre, but across public life..
Ibsen intentionally obscured his influences. However, asked later what he had read when he wrote Catiline, Ibsen replied that he had read only the Danish Norse saga-inspired Romantic tragedian Adam Oehlenschläger and Ludvig Holberg, "the Scandinavian Molière".
At the time when Ibsen was writing, literature was emerging as a formidable force in 19th century society. With the vast increase in literacy towards the end of the century, the possibilities of literature being used for subversion struck horror into the heart of the Establishment. Ibsen's plays, from A Doll's House onwards, caused an uproar—not just in Norway, but throughout Europe, and even across the Atlantic in America. No other artist, apart from Richard Wagner, had such an effect internationally, inspiring almost blasphemous adoration and hysterical abuse.
After the publication of Ghosts, he wrote: "while the storm lasted, I have made many studies and observations and I shall not hesitate to exploit them in my future writings." Indeed, his next play, An Enemy of the People, was initially regarded by the critics to be simply his response to the violent criticism which had greeted Ghosts. Ibsen expected criticism; as he wrote to his publisher: "Ghosts will probably cause alarm in some circles, but it can't be helped. If it did not, there would have been no necessity for me to have written it."
Ibsen didn't just read the critical reaction to his plays, he actively corresponded with critics, publishers, theatre directors, and newspaper editors on the subject. The interpretation of his work, both by critics and directors, concerned him greatly. He often advised directors on which actor or actress would be suitable for a particular role. (An example of this is a letter he wrote to Hans Schroder in November 1884, with detailed instructions for the production of The Wild Duck.)
Ibsen's plays initially reached a far wider audience as read plays rather than in performance. It was 20 years, for instance, before the authorities would allow Ghosts to be performed in Norway. Each new play that Ibsen wrote, from 1879 onwards, had an explosive effect on intellectual circles. This was greatest for A Doll's House and Ghosts, and it did lessen with the later plays, but the translation of Ibsen's works into German, French, and English during the decade following the initial publication of each play—as well as frequent new productions as and when permission was granted—meant that Ibsen remained a topic of lively conversation throughout the latter decades of the 19th century. When A Doll's House was published, it had an explosive effect: it was the centre of every conversation at every social gathering in Christiania. One hostess even wrote on the invitations to her soirée, "You are politely requested not to mention Mr Ibsen's new play".
On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes in March 1900. When, on 22 May, his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen spluttered his last words "On the contrary" ("Tvertimod!"). He died the following day at 2:30 pm.
Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo.
The 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006 was commemorated with an "Ibsen year" in Norway and other countries. In 2006, the homebuilding company Selvaag also opened Peer Gynt Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, in Henrik Ibsen's honour, making it possible to follow the dramatic play Peer Gynt scene by scene. Will Eno's adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, titled Gnit, had its world premiere at the 37th Humana Festival of New American Plays in March 2013.
On 23 May 2006, The Ibsen Museum in Oslo re-opened to the public, with the house, where Ibsen had spent his last eleven years, completely restored with the original interior, colours, and decor.
In a letter to George Brandes shortly before the Paris Commune, Ibsen expressed anarchist views that Brandes later positively related to the Paris Commune. Ibsen wrote that the state "is the curse of the individual.… The state must be abolished." Brandes related that Ibsen "presented to me as political ideals, conditions and ideas whose nature did not seem to me quite clear, but which were unquestionably akin to those that were proclaimed precisely one month later, in an extremely distorted form, by the Parisian commune." And in another letter shortly before the Commune came to an end, Ibsen expressed a disappointment with the Commune, insofar as it did not go far enough in its anarchism in its rejection of the state and private property. Ibsen wrote, "Is it not impudent of the commune in Paris to go and destroy my admirable state theory, or rather no state theory? The idea is now ruined for a long time to come, and I cannot even set it forth in verse with any propriety." However, Ibsen nevertheless expressed an optimism, asserting that his "no state theory" bears "within itself a healthy core" and that some day "it will be practised without any caricature."
Ivo de Figueiredo argues that "today, Ibsen belongs to the world. But it is impossible to understand [Ibsen's] path out there without knowing the Danish cultural sphere from which he sprang, from which he liberated himself and which he ended up shaping. Ibsen developed as a person and artist in a dialogue with Danish theater and literature that was anything but smooth."
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006, the Norwegian government organised the Ibsen Year, which included celebrations around the world. The NRK produced a miniseries on Ibsen's childhood and youth in 2006, An Immortal Man. Several prizes are awarded in the name of Henrik Ibsen, among them the International Ibsen Award, the Norwegian Ibsen Award, and the Ibsen Centennial Commemoration Award.
Every year, since 2008, the annual "Delhi Ibsen Festival", is held in Delhi, India, organized by the Dramatic Art and Design Academy (DADA) in collaboration with The Royal Norwegian Embassy in India. It features plays by Ibsen, performed by artists from various parts of the world in varied languages and styles.
The Ibsen Society of America (ISA) was founded in 1978 at the close of the Ibsen Sesquicentennial Symposium held in New York City to mark the 150th anniversary of Henrik Ibsen's birth. Distinguished Ibsen translator and critic Rolf Fjelde, Professor of Literature at Pratt Institute and the chief organizer of the Symposium, was elected Founding President. In December 1979, the ISA was certified as a non-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York. Its purpose is to foster through lectures, readings, performances, conferences, and publications an understanding of Ibsen's works as they are interpreted as texts and produced on stage and in film and other media. An annual newsletter, Ibsen News and Comment, is distributed to all members.
On 20 March 2013, Google celebrated Henrik Ibsen's 185th Birthday with a doodle.
Ibsen's ancestry has been a much studied subject, due to both his perceived foreignness and the influence of his biography and family on his plays. Ibsen often made references to his family in his plays, sometimes by name, or by modelling characters after them.
The oldest documented member of the Ibsen family was ship's captain Rasmus Ibsen (1632–1703) from Stege, Denmark. His son, ship's captain Peder Ibsen, became a burgher of Bergen in Norway in 1726. Henrik Ibsen had Danish, German, Norwegian, and some distant Scottish ancestry. Most of his ancestors belonged to the merchant class of original Danish and German extraction, and many of his ancestors were ship's captains.
Ibsen's biographer Henrik Jæger famously wrote in 1888 that Ibsen did not have a drop of Norwegian blood in his veins, stating that "the ancestral Ibsen was a Dane". This, however, is not completely accurate; notably through his grandmother Hedevig Paus, Ibsen was descended from one of the very few families of the patrician class of original Norwegian extraction, known since the 15th century. Ibsen's ancestors had mostly lived in Norway for several generations, even though many had foreign ancestry.
The name Ibsen is originally a patronymic, meaning "son of Ib" (Ib is a Danish variant of Jacob). The patronymic became "frozen", i.e. it became a permanent family name, in the 17th century. The phenomenon of patronymics becoming frozen started in the 17th century in bourgeois families in Denmark, and the practice was only widely adopted in Norway from around 1900.
From his marriage with Suzannah Thoresen, Ibsen had one son, lawyer, government minister, and Norwegian Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Sigurd Ibsen married Bergljot Bjørnson, the daughter of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Their son was Tancred Ibsen, who became a film director and was married to Lillebil Ibsen; their only child was diplomat Tancred Ibsen, Jr. His male line will end with the deaths of Tancred Jr.'s two daughters. Sigurd Ibsen's daughter, Irene Ibsen, married Josias Bille, a member of the Danish ancient noble Bille family; their son was Danish actor Joen Bille. Ibsen had an illegitimate child early in his life, not entitled to the family name or inheritance. This line ended with his biological grandchildren.
Ibsen was decorated Knight in 1873, Commander in 1892, and with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav in 1893. He received the Grand Cross of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog, and the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, and was Knight, First Class of the Order of Vasa.
Well known stage directors in Austria and Germany such as Theodor Lobe (1833–1905), Paul Barnay (1884–1960), Max Burckhard (1854–1912), Otto Brahm (1856–1912), Carl Heine (1861–1927), Paul Albert Glaeser-Wilken (1874–1942), Victor Barnowsky (1875–1952), Eugen Robert (1877–1944), Leopold Jessner (1878–1945), Ludwig Barnay (1884–1960), Alfred Rotter (1886–1933), Fritz Rotter (1888–1939), Paul Rose [de] (1900–1973) and Peter Zadek (1926–2009), all directed productions of Ibsen’s work.
In 1995, the asteroid 5696 Ibsen was named in his memory.
In 2011 Håkon Anton Fagerås made two busts in bronze of Ibsen—one for Parco Ibsen in Sorrento, Italy, and one in Skien kommune. In 2012, Håkon Anton Fagerås sculpted a statue in marble of Ibsen for the Ibsen Museum in Oslo.
Plays entirely or partly in verse are marked .
Major translation projects include: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henrik Johan Ibsen (/ˈɪbsən/; Norwegian: [ˈhɛ̀nrɪk ˈɪ̀psn̩]; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as \"the father of realism\" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most performed play in 2006.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Ibsen's early poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. In many critics' estimates The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are \"vying with each other as rivals for the top place among Ibsen's works\"; Ibsen himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition, and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Arthur Miller, Marguerite Yourcenar, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, and Jon Fosse. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ibsen was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien and grew up as a member of the Ibsen–Paus extended family. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Ibsen's dramas were informed by his background, and he often modelled or named characters after family members. Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian, and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 in Stockmanngården into an affluent merchant family in the prosperous port town of Skien in Bratsberg (Telemark). He was the son of the merchant Knud Plesner Ibsen (1797–1877) and Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869), and he grew up as a member of the Ibsen–Altenburg–Paus extended family, which consisted of the siblings Ole and Hedevig Paus and their tightly knit families. Ibsen's ancestors were primarily merchants and shipowners in cities such as Skien and Bergen, or members of the \"aristocracy of officials\" of Upper Telemark, the region's civil servant elite. Henrik Ibsen later wrote that \"my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien\", and that he was closely related to \"just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings.\" He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church—membership of which was mandatory—on 28 March and the baptism was confirmed in Christian's Church [no] on 19 June. When Ibsen was born, Skien had for centuries been one of Norway's most important and internationally oriented cities, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "His parents, though not closely related by blood, had been reared as social first cousins, sometimes described as near-siblings in a social sense. Knud Ibsen's father, ship's captain and merchant Henrich Johan Ibsen (1765–1797), died at sea when his son was newborn in 1797, and his mother Johanne Plesner (1770–1847) married captain Ole Paus (1766–1855) the following year; Knud grew up as a member of the Paus family. His stepfather Ole Paus was a descendant of the \"aristocracy of officials\" in Upper Telemark; as a child Paus had been taken in by a relative, Skien merchant Christopher Blom, and he had become a ship's captain and shipowner in Skien, acquiring the burghership in 1788. Like Henrich Johan Ibsen before him, Paus became the brother-in-law of one of Norway's wealthiest men, Diderik von Cappelen, whose first wife Maria Plesner was Johanne's sister. In 1799, Ole Paus sold the Ibsen House in Skien's Løvestrædet (Lion's Street), which he had inherited from his wife's first husband, and bought the estate Rising outside Skien from a sister of his brother-in-law von Cappelen. Knud grew up at Rising with most of his many half-siblings, among them the later governor Christian Cornelius Paus and the shipowner Christopher Blom Paus. In the 1801 census the Paus family of Rising had seven servants.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Marichen grew up in the large, stately Altenburggården building in central Skien as the daughter of the wealthy merchant Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus [no] (1763–1848), who was the sister of Knud's stepfather. Altenburg was a shipowner and timber merchant, and owned a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; after his death in 1824 the widow Hedevig, Henrik's grandmother, took over the businesses. During Henrik's childhood the families of Ole and Hedevig Paus were very close: Ole's oldest son, Knud's half-brother Henrik Johan Paus, was raised in Hedevig's home, and the children of the Paus siblings, including Knud and Marichen, spent much of their childhood together. Older Ibsen scholars have claimed that Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' \"strange, almost incestuous marriage\", and he would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably in his masterpiece Rosmersholm. On the other hand, Jørgen Haave points out that his parents' close relationship was not that unusual among the Skien elite.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1825, Henrik's father Knud acquired the burghership of Skien and established an independent business as a timber and luxury goods merchant there, with his younger brother, Christopher Blom Paus, then aged 15, as his apprentice. The two brothers moved into the Stockmanngården building, where they rented a part of the building and lived with a maid. On the first floor the brothers sold foreign wines and a variety of luxury items, while also engaging in wholesale export of timber in cooperation with their first cousin Diderik von Cappelen (1795–1866). On 1 December 1825, Knud married his stepfather's niece Marichen, who then moved in with them. Henrik was born there in 1828. In 1830, Marichen's mother Hedevig left Altenburggården and her properties and business ventures to her son-in-law Knud, and the Ibsen family moved to Marichen's childhood home in 1831. During the 1820s and 1830s, Knud was a wealthy young merchant in Skien, and he was the city's 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In his unfinished biography From Skien to Rome, Henrik Ibsen wrote about the Skien of his childhood:",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In my childhood, Skien was an extremely joyful and festive town, quite the opposite of what it would later become. Many highly cultured, prosperous families at that time lived partly in the city itself, partly on large farms in the area. Close or more remote kinship connected most of these families amongst themselves, and balls, dinner parties, and musical soirées came one after another in rapid succession both during winters and summers. [...] Visits from strangers were almost a constant occurrence at our spacious farmhouse and especially around Christmastime and the market days, our townhouse was full and the table was set from morning to nightfall.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Haave writes that the sources who knew Henrik in childhood described him as \"a boy who was pampered by his father, who enjoyed being creative in solitude, and who provoked peers with his superiority and arrogance.\" Henrik engaged in model theater, which was particularly popular among boys from bourgeois homes in Europe in the early 1800s. In contrast to his sociable and playful father, Henrik was described as a more introverted personality; Johan Kielland Bergwitz claimed that \"it is with the Paus family that Henrik Ibsen has the most pronounced temperament traits in common.\" One of the Cudrio sisters from the neighboring farm, who knew him in childhood, said, \"he was immensely cunning and malicious, and he even beat us. But when he grew up, he became incredibly handsome, yet no one liked him because he was so malicious. No one wanted to be with him.\"",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, his father's fortunes took a turn for the worse, and in 1835 the family was forced to sell Altenburggården. The following year they moved to their stately summer house, Venstøp [no], outside of the city. They were still relatively affluent, had servants, and socialised with other members of the Skien elite, e.g. through lavish parties; their closest neighbours on Southern Venstøp were former shipowner and mayor of Skien Ulrich Frederik Cudrio and his family, who also had been forced to sell their townhouse. In 1843, after Henrik left home, the Ibsen family moved to a townhouse at Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen's half-brother and former apprentice Christopher Blom Paus, who had established himself as an independent merchant in Skien in 1836 and who eventually became one of the city's leading shipowners. Knud continued to struggle to maintain his business and had some success in the 1840s, but in the 1850s his business ventures and professional activities came to an end, and he became reliant on support from his successful younger half-brothers.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Ibsen scholar Ellen Rees notes that historical and biographical research into Ibsen’s life in the 21st century has been marked by a \"revolution\" that has debunked numerous myths previously taken for granted. Older Ibsen historiography has often claimed that Knud Ibsen experienced financial ruin and became an alcoholic tyrant, that the family lost contact with the elite it had belonged to, and that this had a strong influence on Henrik Ibsen's biography and work. Newer Ibsen scholarship, in particular Jørgen Haave's book The Ibsen Family (Familien Ibsen), has refuted such claims, and Haave has pointed out that older biographical works have uncritically repeated numerous unfounded myths about both of Ibsen's parents, and about the playwright's childhood and background in general.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Haave points out that Knud Ibsen's economic problems in the 1830s were mainly the result of the difficult times and something the Ibsen family had in common with most members of the bourgeoisie; Haave further argues that Henrik Ibsen had a happy and comfortable childhood as a member of the upper class, even after the family moved to Venstøp, and that they were able to maintain their lifestyle and patrician identity with the help of their extended family and accumulated cultural capital. Contrary to the incorrect claims that Ibsen had been born in a small or remote town, Haave points out that Skien had been Eastern Norway's leading commercial city for centuries, and a centre of seafaring, timber exports, and early industrialization that had made Norway the developed and prosperous part of Denmark–Norway.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Rees characterizes Ibsen's family as upper class rather than middle class, and part of \"the closest thing Norway had to an aristocracy, albeit one that lost most of its power during his lifetime.\" Haave points out that virtually all of Ibsen's ancestors had been wealthy burghers and higher government officials, and members of the local and regional elites in the areas they lived, often of continental European ancestry. He argues that \"the Ibsen family belonged to an elite that distanced itself strongly from the common farmer population, and considered itself part of an educated European culture\" and that \"it was this patrician class that formed his cultural identity and upbringing.\" Haave points to many examples of both Henrik Ibsen and other members of his family having a condescending attitude towards common Norwegian farmers, viewing them as \"some sort of primitive indigenous population,\" and being very conscious of their own identity as members of the sophisticated upper class. Haave points out that Ibsen's most immediate family—Knud, Marichen and Henrik's siblings—disintegrated financially and socially in the 1850s, but that it happened after Henrik had left home, at a time when he was establishing himself as a successful man of theatre, while his extended family, such as his uncles Henrik Johan Paus, Christian Cornelius Paus and Christopher Blom Paus, were firmly established in Skien's elite as lawyers, government officials and wealthy shipowners. Haave argues that the story of the Ibsen family is the story of the slow collapse of a patrician merchant family amid the emergence of a new democratic society in the 19th century, and that Henrik Ibsen, like others of his class, had to find new opportunities to maintain his social position.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Many Ibsen scholars have compared characters and themes in his plays to his family and upbringing; his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society. Ibsen himself confirmed that he both modeled and named characters in his plays after his own family. Works such as Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, and Ghosts include numerous references to Ibsen's relatives, family history, and childhood memories. However, despite Ibsen's use of his family as an inspiration for his plays, Haave criticizes the uncritical use of Ibsen's dramas as biographical sources and the \"naive\" readings of them as literal representations of his family members, in particular his father.",
"title": "Early life and background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "At fifteen, Ibsen left school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist. At that time he began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was 18, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, whose upbringing Ibsen paid for until the boy was fourteen, though Ibsen never saw the child. Ibsen went to Christiania (later spelled Kristiania and then renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catilina (1850), was published under the pseudonym \"Brynjolf Bjarme\", when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen's main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently the Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In Ibsen's youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet and playwright.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ibsen spent the next several years employed at Det norske Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he published five new—though largely unremarkable—plays. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre. He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. The couple lived in difficult financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He spent the next 27 years in Italy and Germany and only visited Norway a few times during those years.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "His next play, Brand (1865), brought him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as did the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgements into the drama, exploring what he termed the \"drama of ideas\". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll's House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Ibsen was already in his fifties when A Doll's House was published. He himself saw his latter plays as a series. At the end of his career, he described them as \"that series of dramas which began with A Doll's House and which is now completed with When We Dead Awaken\". Furthermore, it was the reception of A Doll's House which brought Ibsen international acclaim.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen's society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But his philandering continued right up until his death, and his vices are passed on to their son in the form of syphilis. The mention of venereal disease alone was scandalous, but to show how it could poison a respectable family was considered intolerable.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often \"right\" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. Contemporary society's belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen chastised not only the conservatism of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a physician in a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water is contaminated by the local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "As audiences by now expected, Ibsen's next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society's mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always an iconoclast, Ibsen saw himself as an objective observer of society, \"like a lone franc tireur in the outposts\", playing a lone hand, as he put it. Ibsen, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, relied upon immediate sources such as newspapers and second-hand report for his contact with intellectual thought. He claimed to be ignorant of books, leaving them to his wife and son, but, as Georg Brandes described, \"he seemed to stand in some mysterious correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the day.\"",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly one of the most complex, alongside Rosmersholm. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile, and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the \"Summons of the Ideal\". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary \"invention\", his wife is earning the household income.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Ibsen displays masterly use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth: that Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, Hjalmar disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the \"ideal\" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society's moral values and more to do with the problems of individuals. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic or hackneyed, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House are regularly cited as Ibsen's most popular and influential plays, with the title role of Hedda regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day.",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in the theatre to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. His works were brought to an English-speaking audience, largely thanks to the efforts of William Archer and Edmund Gosse. These in turn had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates Ibsen in his early autobiographical novel Stephen Hero. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. Modernism was on the rise, not only in the theatre, but across public life..",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ibsen intentionally obscured his influences. However, asked later what he had read when he wrote Catiline, Ibsen replied that he had read only the Danish Norse saga-inspired Romantic tragedian Adam Oehlenschläger and Ludvig Holberg, \"the Scandinavian Molière\".",
"title": "Years in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "At the time when Ibsen was writing, literature was emerging as a formidable force in 19th century society. With the vast increase in literacy towards the end of the century, the possibilities of literature being used for subversion struck horror into the heart of the Establishment. Ibsen's plays, from A Doll's House onwards, caused an uproar—not just in Norway, but throughout Europe, and even across the Atlantic in America. No other artist, apart from Richard Wagner, had such an effect internationally, inspiring almost blasphemous adoration and hysterical abuse.",
"title": "Critical reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "After the publication of Ghosts, he wrote: \"while the storm lasted, I have made many studies and observations and I shall not hesitate to exploit them in my future writings.\" Indeed, his next play, An Enemy of the People, was initially regarded by the critics to be simply his response to the violent criticism which had greeted Ghosts. Ibsen expected criticism; as he wrote to his publisher: \"Ghosts will probably cause alarm in some circles, but it can't be helped. If it did not, there would have been no necessity for me to have written it.\"",
"title": "Critical reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Ibsen didn't just read the critical reaction to his plays, he actively corresponded with critics, publishers, theatre directors, and newspaper editors on the subject. The interpretation of his work, both by critics and directors, concerned him greatly. He often advised directors on which actor or actress would be suitable for a particular role. (An example of this is a letter he wrote to Hans Schroder in November 1884, with detailed instructions for the production of The Wild Duck.)",
"title": "Critical reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Ibsen's plays initially reached a far wider audience as read plays rather than in performance. It was 20 years, for instance, before the authorities would allow Ghosts to be performed in Norway. Each new play that Ibsen wrote, from 1879 onwards, had an explosive effect on intellectual circles. This was greatest for A Doll's House and Ghosts, and it did lessen with the later plays, but the translation of Ibsen's works into German, French, and English during the decade following the initial publication of each play—as well as frequent new productions as and when permission was granted—meant that Ibsen remained a topic of lively conversation throughout the latter decades of the 19th century. When A Doll's House was published, it had an explosive effect: it was the centre of every conversation at every social gathering in Christiania. One hostess even wrote on the invitations to her soirée, \"You are politely requested not to mention Mr Ibsen's new play\".",
"title": "Critical reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes in March 1900. When, on 22 May, his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen spluttered his last words \"On the contrary\" (\"Tvertimod!\"). He died the following day at 2:30 pm.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund (\"The Graveyard of Our Savior\") in central Oslo.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006 was commemorated with an \"Ibsen year\" in Norway and other countries. In 2006, the homebuilding company Selvaag also opened Peer Gynt Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, in Henrik Ibsen's honour, making it possible to follow the dramatic play Peer Gynt scene by scene. Will Eno's adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, titled Gnit, had its world premiere at the 37th Humana Festival of New American Plays in March 2013.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 23 May 2006, The Ibsen Museum in Oslo re-opened to the public, with the house, where Ibsen had spent his last eleven years, completely restored with the original interior, colours, and decor.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In a letter to George Brandes shortly before the Paris Commune, Ibsen expressed anarchist views that Brandes later positively related to the Paris Commune. Ibsen wrote that the state \"is the curse of the individual.… The state must be abolished.\" Brandes related that Ibsen \"presented to me as political ideals, conditions and ideas whose nature did not seem to me quite clear, but which were unquestionably akin to those that were proclaimed precisely one month later, in an extremely distorted form, by the Parisian commune.\" And in another letter shortly before the Commune came to an end, Ibsen expressed a disappointment with the Commune, insofar as it did not go far enough in its anarchism in its rejection of the state and private property. Ibsen wrote, \"Is it not impudent of the commune in Paris to go and destroy my admirable state theory, or rather no state theory? The idea is now ruined for a long time to come, and I cannot even set it forth in verse with any propriety.\" However, Ibsen nevertheless expressed an optimism, asserting that his \"no state theory\" bears \"within itself a healthy core\" and that some day \"it will be practised without any caricature.\"",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Ivo de Figueiredo argues that \"today, Ibsen belongs to the world. But it is impossible to understand [Ibsen's] path out there without knowing the Danish cultural sphere from which he sprang, from which he liberated himself and which he ended up shaping. Ibsen developed as a person and artist in a dialogue with Danish theater and literature that was anything but smooth.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006, the Norwegian government organised the Ibsen Year, which included celebrations around the world. The NRK produced a miniseries on Ibsen's childhood and youth in 2006, An Immortal Man. Several prizes are awarded in the name of Henrik Ibsen, among them the International Ibsen Award, the Norwegian Ibsen Award, and the Ibsen Centennial Commemoration Award.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Every year, since 2008, the annual \"Delhi Ibsen Festival\", is held in Delhi, India, organized by the Dramatic Art and Design Academy (DADA) in collaboration with The Royal Norwegian Embassy in India. It features plays by Ibsen, performed by artists from various parts of the world in varied languages and styles.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Ibsen Society of America (ISA) was founded in 1978 at the close of the Ibsen Sesquicentennial Symposium held in New York City to mark the 150th anniversary of Henrik Ibsen's birth. Distinguished Ibsen translator and critic Rolf Fjelde, Professor of Literature at Pratt Institute and the chief organizer of the Symposium, was elected Founding President. In December 1979, the ISA was certified as a non-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York. Its purpose is to foster through lectures, readings, performances, conferences, and publications an understanding of Ibsen's works as they are interpreted as texts and produced on stage and in film and other media. An annual newsletter, Ibsen News and Comment, is distributed to all members.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 20 March 2013, Google celebrated Henrik Ibsen's 185th Birthday with a doodle.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Ibsen's ancestry has been a much studied subject, due to both his perceived foreignness and the influence of his biography and family on his plays. Ibsen often made references to his family in his plays, sometimes by name, or by modelling characters after them.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The oldest documented member of the Ibsen family was ship's captain Rasmus Ibsen (1632–1703) from Stege, Denmark. His son, ship's captain Peder Ibsen, became a burgher of Bergen in Norway in 1726. Henrik Ibsen had Danish, German, Norwegian, and some distant Scottish ancestry. Most of his ancestors belonged to the merchant class of original Danish and German extraction, and many of his ancestors were ship's captains.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Ibsen's biographer Henrik Jæger famously wrote in 1888 that Ibsen did not have a drop of Norwegian blood in his veins, stating that \"the ancestral Ibsen was a Dane\". This, however, is not completely accurate; notably through his grandmother Hedevig Paus, Ibsen was descended from one of the very few families of the patrician class of original Norwegian extraction, known since the 15th century. Ibsen's ancestors had mostly lived in Norway for several generations, even though many had foreign ancestry.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The name Ibsen is originally a patronymic, meaning \"son of Ib\" (Ib is a Danish variant of Jacob). The patronymic became \"frozen\", i.e. it became a permanent family name, in the 17th century. The phenomenon of patronymics becoming frozen started in the 17th century in bourgeois families in Denmark, and the practice was only widely adopted in Norway from around 1900.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "From his marriage with Suzannah Thoresen, Ibsen had one son, lawyer, government minister, and Norwegian Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Sigurd Ibsen married Bergljot Bjørnson, the daughter of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Their son was Tancred Ibsen, who became a film director and was married to Lillebil Ibsen; their only child was diplomat Tancred Ibsen, Jr. His male line will end with the deaths of Tancred Jr.'s two daughters. Sigurd Ibsen's daughter, Irene Ibsen, married Josias Bille, a member of the Danish ancient noble Bille family; their son was Danish actor Joen Bille. Ibsen had an illegitimate child early in his life, not entitled to the family name or inheritance. This line ended with his biological grandchildren.",
"title": "Descendants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "",
"title": "Descendants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Ibsen was decorated Knight in 1873, Commander in 1892, and with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav in 1893. He received the Grand Cross of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog, and the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, and was Knight, First Class of the Order of Vasa.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Well known stage directors in Austria and Germany such as Theodor Lobe (1833–1905), Paul Barnay (1884–1960), Max Burckhard (1854–1912), Otto Brahm (1856–1912), Carl Heine (1861–1927), Paul Albert Glaeser-Wilken (1874–1942), Victor Barnowsky (1875–1952), Eugen Robert (1877–1944), Leopold Jessner (1878–1945), Ludwig Barnay (1884–1960), Alfred Rotter (1886–1933), Fritz Rotter (1888–1939), Paul Rose [de] (1900–1973) and Peter Zadek (1926–2009), all directed productions of Ibsen’s work.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1995, the asteroid 5696 Ibsen was named in his memory.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2011 Håkon Anton Fagerås made two busts in bronze of Ibsen—one for Parco Ibsen in Sorrento, Italy, and one in Skien kommune. In 2012, Håkon Anton Fagerås sculpted a statue in marble of Ibsen for the Ibsen Museum in Oslo.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Plays entirely or partly in verse are marked .",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Major translation projects include:",
"title": "Works"
}
]
| Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most performed play in 2006. Ibsen's early poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt has strong surreal elements. After Peer Gynt Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote in realistic prose. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much that was disquieting to a number of his contemporaries. He had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. In many critics' estimates The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are "vying with each other as rivals for the top place among Ibsen's works"; Ibsen himself regarded Emperor and Galilean as his masterpiece. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition, and is widely regarded as the foremost playwright of the nineteenth century. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Arthur Miller, Marguerite Yourcenar, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, and Jon Fosse. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904. Ibsen was born into the merchant elite of the port town of Skien and grew up as a member of the Ibsen–Paus extended family. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Ibsen's dramas were informed by his background, and he often modelled or named characters after family members. Ibsen wrote his plays in Dano-Norwegian, and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. | 2001-12-04T18:56:34Z | 2023-12-31T12:51:16Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen |
14,240 | Hawaiian language | Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, pronounced [ʔoːˈlɛlo həˈvɐjʔi]) is a Polynesian language and critically endangered language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the US state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840.
In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii established English as the official language in schools. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population. Linguists were unsure if Hawaiian and other endangered languages would survive.
Nevertheless, from around 1949 to the present day, there has been a gradual increase in attention to and promotion of the language. Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo were established in 1984; other immersion schools followed soon after that. The first students to start in immersion preschool have now graduated from college and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. However, the language is still classified as critically endangered by UNESCO.
A creole language, Hawaiian Pidgin (or Hawaii Creole English, HCE), is more commonly spoken in Hawaiʻi than Hawaiian. Some linguists, as well as many locals, argue that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of American English. Born from the increase of immigrants from Japan, China, Puerto Rico, Korea, Portugal, Spain and the Philippines, the pidgin creole language was a necessity in the plantations. Hawaiian and immigrant laborers as well as the white luna, or overseers, found a way to communicate amongst themselves. Pidgin eventually made its way off the plantation and into the greater community, where it is still used to this day.
The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters: five vowels: a e i o u (each with a long pronunciation and a short one) and eight consonants: he ke la mu nu pi we ʻokina (a glottal stop).
The Hawaiian language takes its name from the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, Hawaii (Hawaiʻi in the Hawaiian language). The island name was first written in English in 1778 by British explorer James Cook and his crew members. They wrote it as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee". It is written "Oh-Why-hee" on the first map of Sandwich Islands engraved by Tobias Conrad Lotter [de] in 1781. Explorers Mortimer (1791) and Otto von Kotzebue (1821) used that spelling.
The initial "O" in the name "Oh-Why-hee" is a reflection of the fact that Hawaiian predicates unique identity by using a copula form, ʻo, immediately before a proper noun. Thus, in Hawaiian, the name of the island is expressed by saying ʻO Hawaiʻi, which means "[This] is Hawaiʻi." The Cook expedition also wrote "Otaheite" rather than "Tahiti".
The spelling "why" in the name reflects the [ʍ] pronunciation of wh in 18th-century English (still used in parts of the English-speaking world). Why was pronounced [ʍai]. The spelling "hee" or "ee" in the name represents the sounds [hi], or [i].
Putting the parts together, O-why-(h)ee reflects [o-hwai-i], a reasonable approximation of the native pronunciation, [ʔo həwɐiʔi].
American missionaries bound for Hawaiʻi used the phrases "Owhihe Language" and "Owhyhee language" in Boston prior to their departure in October 1819 and during their five-month voyage to Hawaiʻi. They still used such phrases as late as March 1822. However, by July 1823, they had begun using the phrase "Hawaiian Language".
In Hawaiian, the language is called ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, since adjectives follow nouns.
Hawaiian is a Polynesian member of the Austronesian language family. It is closely related to other Polynesian languages, such as Samoan, Marquesan, Tahitian, Māori, Rapa Nui (the language of Easter Island) and Tongan.
According to Schütz (1994), the Marquesans colonized the archipelago in roughly 300 CE followed by later waves of immigration from the Society Islands and Samoa-Tonga. Their languages, over time, became the Hawaiian language within the Hawaiian Islands. Kimura and Wilson (1983) also state:
Linguists agree that Hawaiian is closely related to Eastern Polynesian, with a particularly strong link in the Southern Marquesas, and a secondary link in Tahiti, which may be explained by voyaging between the Hawaiian and Society Islands.
Jack H. Ward (1962) conducted a study using basic words and short utterances to determine the level of comprehension between different Polynesian languages. The mutual intelligibility of Hawaiian was found to be 41.2% with Marquesan, 37.5% with Tahitian, 25.5% with Samoan and 6.4% with Tongan.
In 1778, British explorer James Cook made Europe's initial, recorded first contact with Hawaiʻi, beginning a new phase in the development of Hawaiian. During the next forty years, the sounds of Spanish (1789), Russian (1804), French (1816), and German (1816) arrived in Hawaiʻi via other explorers and businessmen. Hawaiian began to be written for the first time, largely restricted to isolated names and words, and word lists collected by explorers and travelers.
The early explorers and merchants who first brought European languages to the Hawaiian islands also took on a few native crew members who brought the Hawaiian language into new territory. Hawaiians took these nautical jobs because their traditional way of life changed due to plantations, and although there were not enough of these Hawaiian-speaking explorers to establish any viable speech communities abroad, they still had a noticeable presence. One of them, a boy in his teens known as Obookiah (ʻŌpūkahaʻia), had a major impact on the future of the language. He sailed to New England, where he eventually became a student at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. He inspired New Englanders to support a Christian mission to Hawaiʻi, and provided information on the Hawaiian language to the American missionaries there prior to their departure for Hawaiʻi in 1819. Adelbert von Chamisso too might have consulted with a native speaker of Hawaiian in Berlin, Germany, before publishing his grammar of Hawaiian (Über die Hawaiische Sprache) in 1837.
Like all natural spoken languages, the Hawaiian language was originally an oral language. The native people of the Hawaiian language relayed religion, traditions, history, and views of their world through stories that were handed down from generation to generation. One form of storytelling most commonly associated with the Hawaiian islands is hula. Nathaniel B. Emerson notes that "It kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past".
The islanders' connection with their stories is argued to be one reason why Captain James Cook received a pleasant welcome. Marshall Sahlins has observed that Hawaiian folktales began bearing similar content to those of the Western world in the eighteenth century. He argues this was caused by the timing of Captain Cook's arrival, which was coincidentally when the indigenous Hawaiians were celebrating the Makahiki festival, which is the annual celebration of the harvest in honor of the god Lono. The celebration lasts for the entirety of the rainy season. It is a time of peace with much emphasis on amusements, food, games, and dancing. The islanders' story foretold of the god Lono's return at the time of the Makahiki festival.
In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in Hawaiʻi, and in a few years converted the chiefs to Congregational Protestantism, who in turn converted their subjects. To the missionaries, the thorough Christianization of the kingdom necessitated a complete translation of the Bible to Hawaiian, a previously unwritten language, and therefore the creation of a standard spelling that should be as easy to master as possible. The orthography created by the missionaries was so straightforward that literacy spread very quickly among the adult population; at the same time, the Mission set more and more schools for children.
In 1834, the first Hawaiian-language newspapers were published by missionaries working with locals. The missionaries also played a significant role in publishing a vocabulary (1836) grammar (1854) and dictionary (1865) of Hawaiian. The Hawaiian Bible was fully completed in 1839; by then, the Mission had such a wide-reaching school network that, when in 1840 it handed it over to the Hawaiian government, the Hawaiian Legislature mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14 years of age, including girls, twelve years before any similar compulsory education law was enacted for the first time in any of the United States.
Literacy in Hawaiian was so widespread that in 1842 a law mandated that people born after 1819 had to be literate to be allowed to marry. In his Report to the Legislature for the year 1853 Richard Armstrong, the minister of Public Instruction, bragged that 75% of the adult population could read. Use of the language among the general population might have peaked around 1881. Even so, some people worried, as early as 1854, that the language was "soon destined to extinction."
When Hawaiian King David Kalākaua took a trip around the world, he brought his native language with him. When his wife, Queen Kapiʻolani, and his sister, Princess (later Queen) Liliʻuokalani, took a trip across North America and on to the British Islands, in 1887, Liliʻuokalani's composition "Aloha ʻOe" was already a famous song in the U.S.
The decline of the Hawaiian language was accelerated by the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and dethroned the existing Hawaiian queen. Thereafter, a law was instituted that required English as the main language of school instruction. The law cited is identified as Act 57, sec. 30 of the 1896 Laws of the Republic of Hawaiʻi:
The English Language shall be the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools, provided that where it is desired that another language shall be taught in addition to the English language, such instruction may be authorized by the Department, either by its rules, the curriculum of the school, or by direct order in any particular instance. Any schools that shall not conform to the provisions of this section shall not be recognized by the Department.
This law established English as the medium of instruction for the government-recognized schools both "public and private". While it did not ban or make illegal the Hawaiian language in other contexts, its implementation in the schools had far-reaching effects. Those who had been pushing for English-only schools took this law as licence to extinguish the native language at the early education level. While the law did not make Hawaiian illegal (it was still commonly spoken at the time), many children who spoke Hawaiian at school, including on the playground, were disciplined. This included corporal punishment and going to the home of the offending child to advise them strongly to stop speaking it in their home. Moreover, the law specifically provided for teaching languages "in addition to the English language", reducing Hawaiian to the status of an extra language, subject to approval by the department. Hawaiian was not taught initially in any school, including the all-Hawaiian Kamehameha Schools. This is largely because when these schools were founded, like Kamehameha Schools founded in 1887 (nine years before this law), Hawaiian was being spoken in the home. Once this law was enacted, individuals at these institutions took it upon themselves to enforce a ban on Hawaiian. Beginning in 1900, Mary Kawena Pukui, who was later the co-author of the Hawaiian–English Dictionary, was punished for speaking Hawaiian by being rapped on the forehead, allowed to eat only bread and water for lunch, and denied home visits on holidays. Winona Beamer was expelled from Kamehameha Schools in 1937 for chanting Hawaiian. Due in part to this systemic suppression of the language after the overthrow, Hawaiian is still considered a critically endangered language.
However, informal coercion to drop Hawaiian would not have worked by itself. Just as important was the fact that, in the same period, native Hawaiians were becoming a minority in their own land on account of the growing influx of foreign labourers and their children. Whereas in 1890 pure Hawaiian students made 56% of school enrollment, in 1900 their numbers were down to 32% and, in 1910, to 16.9%. At the same time, Hawaiians were very prone to intermarriage: the number of "Part-Hawaiian" students (i.e., children of mixed White-Hawaiian marriages) grew from 1573 in 1890 to 3718 in 1910. In such mixed households, the low prestige of Hawaiian led to the adoption of English as the family language. Moreover, Hawaiians lived mostly in the cities or scattered across the countryside, in direct contact with other ethnic groups and without any stronghold (with the exception of Niʻihau). Thus, even pure Hawaiian children would converse daily with their schoolmates of diverse mother tongues in English, which was now not just the teachers' language but also the common language needed for everyday communication among friends and neighbours out of school as well. In only a generation English (or rather Pidgin) would become the primary and dominant language of all children, despite the efforts of Hawaiian and immigrant parents to maintain their ancestral languages within the family.
In 1949, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaiʻi commissioned Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert to write a new dictionary of Hawaiian, either revising the Andrews-Parker work or starting from scratch. Pukui and Elbert took a middle course, using what they could from the Andrews dictionary, but making certain improvements and additions that were more significant than a minor revision. The dictionary they produced, in 1957, introduced an era of gradual increase in attention to the language and culture.
Language revitalization and Hawaiian culture has seen a major revival since the Hawaiian renaissance in the 1970s. Forming in 1983, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, meaning "language nest" in Hawaiian, opened its first center in 1984. It was a privately funded Hawaiian preschool program that invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in Hawaiian every day.
Efforts to promote the language have increased in recent decades. Hawaiian-language "immersion" schools are now open to children whose families want to reintroduce the Hawaiian language for future generations. The ʻAha Pūnana Leo's Hawaiian language preschools in Hilo, Hawaii, have received international recognition. The local National Public Radio station features a short segment titled "Hawaiian word of the day" and a Hawaiian language news broadcast. Honolulu television station KGMB ran a weekly Hawaiian language program, ʻĀhaʻi ʻŌlelo Ola, as recently as 2010. Additionally, the Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the largest newspaper in Hawaii, feature a brief article called Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by teachers, students, and community members.
Today, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian, which was under 0.1% of the statewide population in 1997, has risen to 2,000, out of 24,000 total who are fluent in the language, according to the US 2011 census. On six of the seven permanently inhabited islands, Hawaiian has been largely displaced by English, but on Niʻihau, native speakers of Hawaiian have remained fairly isolated and have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively.
Niʻihau is the only area in the world where Hawaiian is the first language and English is a foreign language.
The isolated island of Niʻihau, located off the southwest coast of Kauai, is the one island where Hawaiian (more specifically a local dialect of Hawaiian known as Niihau dialect) is still spoken as the language of daily life. Elbert & Pukui (1979:23) states that "[v]ariations in Hawaiian dialects have not been systematically studied", and that "[t]he dialect of Niʻihau is the most aberrant and the one most in need of study". They recognized that Niʻihauans can speak Hawaiian in substantially different ways. Their statements are based in part on some specific observations made by Newbrand (1951). (See Hawaiian phonological processes)
Friction has developed between those on Niʻihau that speak Hawaiian as a first language, and those who speak Hawaiian as a second language, especially those educated by the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. The university sponsors a Hawaiian Language Lexicon Committee (Kōmike Huaʻōlelo Hou) which coins words for concepts that historically have not existed in the language, like "computer" and "cell phone". These words are generally not incorporated into the Niʻihau dialect, which often coins its own words organically. Some new words are Hawaiianized versions of English words, and some are composed of Hawaiian roots and unrelated to English sounds.
The Hawaiian medium education system is a combination of charter, public, and private schools. K–6 schools operate under coordinated governance of the Department of Education and the charter school, while the pre-K–12 laboratory system is governed by the Department of Education, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, and the charter school. Over 80% of graduates from these laboratory schools attend college, some of which include Ivy-League schools. Hawaiian is now an authorized course in the Department of Education language curriculum, though not all schools offer the language.
There are two kinds of Hawaiian-immersion medium schools: K–12 total Hawaiian-immersion schools, and grades 7–12 partial Hawaiian immersion schools, the later having some classes are taught in English and others are taught in Hawaiian. One of the main focuses of Hawaiian-medium schools is to teach the form and structure of the Hawaiian language by modeling sentences as a "pepeke", meaning squid in Hawaiian. In this case the pepeke is a metaphor that features the body of a squid with the three essential parts: the poʻo (head), the ʻawe (tentacles) and the piko (where the poʻo and ʻawe meet) representing how a sentence is structured. The poʻo represents the predicate, the piko representing the subject and the ʻawe representing the object. Hawaiian immersion schools teach content that both adheres to state standards and stresses Hawaiian culture and values. The existence of immersion schools in Hawaiʻi has developed the opportunity for intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian at home.
The Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language is a college at the University of Hawaii at Hilo dedicated to providing courses and programs entirely in Hawaiian. It educates and provides training for teachers and school administrators of Hawaiian medium schools. It is the only college in the United States of America that offers a master's and doctorate's degree in an Indigenous language. Programs offered at The Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language are known collectively as the "Hilo model" and has been imitated by the Cherokee immersion program and several other Indigenous revitalization programs.
Since 1921, the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa and all of the University of Hawaiʻi Community Colleges also offer Hawaiian language courses to students for credit. The university now also offers free online courses not for credit, along with a few other websites and apps such as Duolingo.
Hawaiians had no written language prior to Western contact, except for petroglyph symbols. The modern Hawaiian alphabet, ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi, is based on the Latin script. Hawaiian words end only in vowels, and every consonant must be followed by a vowel. The Hawaiian alphabetical order has all of the vowels before the consonants, as in the following chart.
This writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries during 1820–1826. It was the first thing they ever printed in Hawaiʻi, on January 7, 1822, and it originally included the consonants B, D, R, T, and V, in addition to the current ones (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), and it had F, G, S, Y and Z for "spelling foreign words". The initial printing also showed the five vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) and seven of the short diphthongs (AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU).
In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant allophones (called "interchangeable letters"), enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-phoneme, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian. For example, instead of spelling one and the same word as pule, bule, pure, and bure (because of interchangeable p/b and l/r), the word is spelled only as pule.
However, hundreds of words were very rapidly borrowed into Hawaiian from English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac. Although these loan words were necessarily Hawaiianized, they often retained some of their "non-Hawaiian letters" in their published forms. For example, Brazil fully Hawaiianized is Palakila, but retaining "foreign letters" it is Barazila. Another example is Gibraltar, written as Kipalaleka or Gibaraleta. While [z] and [ɡ] are not regarded as Hawaiian sounds, [b], [ɹ], and [t] were represented in the original alphabet, so the letters (b, r, and t) for the latter are not truly "non-Hawaiian" or "foreign", even though their post-1826 use in published matter generally marked words of foreign origin.
ʻOkina (ʻoki 'cut' + -na '-ing') is the modern Hawaiian name for the symbol (a letter) that represents the glottal stop. It was formerly known as ʻuʻina ("snap").
For examples of the ʻokina, consider the Hawaiian words Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu (often simply Hawaii and Oahu in English orthography). In Hawaiian, these words are pronounced [hʌˈʋʌi.ʔi] and [oˈʔʌ.hu], and are written with an ʻokina where the glottal stop is pronounced.
Elbert & Pukui's Hawaiian Grammar says "The glottal stop, ‘, is made by closing the glottis or space between the vocal cords, the result being something like the hiatus in English oh-oh."
As early as 1823, the missionaries made some limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used it to distinguish koʻu ('my') from kou ('your'). In 1864, William DeWitt Alexander published a grammar of Hawaiian in which he made it clear that the glottal stop (calling it "guttural break") is definitely a true consonant of the Hawaiian language. He wrote it using an apostrophe. In 1922, the Andrews-Parker dictionary of Hawaiian made limited use of the opening single quote symbol, then called "reversed apostrophe" or "inverse comma", to represent the glottal stop. Subsequent dictionaries and written material associated with the Hawaiian language revitalization have preferred to use this symbol, the ʻokina, to better represent spoken Hawaiian. Nonetheless, excluding the ʻokina may facilitate interface with English-oriented media, or even be preferred stylistically by some Hawaiian speakers, in homage to 19th century written texts. So there is variation today in the use of this symbol.
The ʻokina is written in various ways for electronic uses:
Because many people who want to write the ʻokina are not familiar with these specific characters and/or do not have access to the appropriate fonts and input and display systems, it is sometimes written with more familiar and readily available characters:
A modern Hawaiian name for the macron symbol is kahakō (kaha 'mark' + kō 'long'). It was formerly known as mekona (Hawaiianization of macron). It can be written as a diacritical mark which looks like a hyphen or dash written above a vowel, i.e., ā ē ī ō ū and Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū. It is used to show that the marked vowel is a "double", or "geminate", or "long" vowel, in phonological terms. (See: Vowel length)
As early as 1821, at least one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons (and breves) in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. The missionaries specifically requested their sponsor in Boston to send them some type (fonts) with accented vowel characters, including vowels with macrons, but the sponsor made only one response and sent the wrong font size (pica instead of small pica). Thus, they could not print ā, ē, ī, ō, nor ū (at the right size), even though they wanted to.
Owing to extensive allophony, Hawaiian has more than 13 phones. Although vowel length is phonemic, long vowels are not always pronounced as such, even though under the rules for assigning stress in Hawaiian, a long vowel will always receive stress.
Hawaiian is known for having very few consonant phonemes – eight: /p, k ~ t, ʔ, h, m, n, l, w ~ v/. It is notable that Hawaiian has allophonic variation of [t] with [k], [w] with [v], and (in some dialects) [l] with [n]. The [t]–[k] variation is quite unusual among the world's languages, and is likely a product both of the small number of consonants in Hawaiian, and the recent shift of historical *t to modern [t]–[k], after historical *k had shifted to [ʔ]. In some dialects, /ʔ/ remains as [k] in some words. These variations are largely free, though there are conditioning factors. /l/ tends to [n] especially in words with both /l/ and /n/, such as in the island name Lānaʻi ([laːˈnɐʔi]–[naːˈnɐʔi]), though this is not always the case: ʻeleʻele or ʻeneʻene "black". The [k] allophone is almost universal at the beginnings of words, whereas [t] is most common before the vowel /i/. [v] is also the norm after /i/ and /e/, whereas [w] is usual after /u/ and /o/. After /a/ and initially, however, [w] and [v] are in free variation.
Hawaiian has five short and five long vowels, plus diphthongs.
Hawaiian has five pure vowels. The short vowels are /u, i, o, e, a/, and the long vowels, if they are considered separate phonemes rather than simply sequences of like vowels, are /uː, iː, oː, eː, aː/. When stressed, short /e/ and /a/ have been described as becoming [ɛ] and [ɐ], while when unstressed they are [e] and [ə] . Parker Jones (2017), however, did not find a reduction of /a/ to [ə] in the phonetic analysis of a young speaker from Hilo, Hawaiʻi; so there is at least some variation in how /a/ is realised. /e/ also tends to become [ɛ] next to /l/, /n/, and another [ɛ], as in Pele [pɛlɛ]. Some grammatical particles vary between short and long vowels. These include a and o "of", ma "at", na and no "for". Between a back vowel /o/ or /u/ and a following non-back vowel (/a e i/), there is an epenthetic [w], which is generally not written. Between a front vowel /e/ or /i/ and a following non-front vowel (/a o u/), there is an epenthetic [j] (a y sound), which is never written.
The short-vowel diphthongs are /iu, ou, oi, eu, ei, au, ai, ao, ae/. In all except perhaps /iu/, these are falling diphthongs. However, they are not as tightly bound as the diphthongs of English, and may be considered vowel sequences. (The second vowel in such sequences may receive the stress, but in such cases it is not counted as a diphthong.) In fast speech, /ai/ tends to [ei] and /au/ tends to [ou], conflating these diphthongs with /ei/ and /ou/.
There are only a limited number of vowels which may follow long vowels, and some authors treat these sequences as diphthongs as well: /oːu, eːi, aːu, aːi, aːo, aːe/.
Hawaiian syllable structure is (C)V. All CV syllables occur except for wū; wu occurs only in two words borrowed from English. As shown by Schütz, Hawaiian word-stress is predictable in words of one to four syllables, but not in words of five or more syllables. Hawaiian phonological processes include palatalization and deletion of consonants, as well as raising, diphthongization, deletion, and compensatory lengthening of vowels.
Historically, glottal stop developed from *k. Loss of intervocalic consonant phonemes has resulted in Hawaiian long vowels and diphthongs.
Hawaiian is an analytic language with verb–subject–object word order. While there is no use of inflection for verbs, in Hawaiian, like other Austronesian personal pronouns, declension is found in the differentiation between a- and o-class genitive case personal pronouns in order to indicate inalienable possession in a binary possessive class system. Also like many Austronesian languages, Hawaiian pronouns employ separate words for inclusive and exclusive we (clusivity), and distinguish singular, dual, and plural. The grammatical function of verbs is marked by adjacent particles (short words) and by their relative positions, that indicate tense–aspect–mood.
Some examples of verb phrase patterns:
Nouns can be marked with articles:
ka and ke are singular definite articles. ke is used before words beginning with a-, e-, o- and k-, and with some words beginning ʻ- and p-. ka is used in all other cases. nā is the plural definite article.
To show part of a group, the word kekahi is used. To show a bigger part, mau is inserted to pluralize the subject.
Examples:
Hawaiian has thousands of words for elements of the natural world. According to the Hawaiian Electronic Library, there are thousands of names for different types of wind, rain, parts of the sea, peaks of mountains, and sky formations, demonstrating the importance of the natural world to Hawaiian culture. For example, "Hoʻomalumalu" means "sheltering cloud" and "Hoʻoweliweli" means "threatening cloud".
There is a marked difference between varieties of the Hawaiian language spoken by most native Hawaiian elders and the Hawaiian Language taught in education, sometimes regarded as "University Hawaiian" or "College Hawaiian". "University Hawaiian" is often so different from the language spoken by elders that Native Hawaiian children may feel scared or ashamed to speak Hawaiian at home, limiting the language's domains to academia. Language varieties spoken by elders often includes Pidgin Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, Hawaiian-infused English, or another variety of Hawaiian that is much different from the "University Hawaiian" that was standardized and documented by colonists in the 19th century.
The divide between "University Hawaiian" and varieties spoken by elders has created debate over which variety of Hawaiian should be considered "real" or "authentic", as neither "University Hawaiian" nor other varieties spoken by elders are free from foreign interference. Hawaiian cultural beliefs of divine intervention as the driving force of language formation expedites distrust in what might be seen as the mechanical nature of colonial linguistic paradigms of language and its role in the standardized variety of "University Hawaiian". Hawaiian's authenticity debate could have major implications for revitalization efforts as language attitudes and trends in existing language domains are both UNESCO factors in assessing a language's level of endangerment. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, pronounced [ʔoːˈlɛlo həˈvɐjʔi]) is a Polynesian language and critically endangered language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the US state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii established English as the official language in schools. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population. Linguists were unsure if Hawaiian and other endangered languages would survive.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Nevertheless, from around 1949 to the present day, there has been a gradual increase in attention to and promotion of the language. Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo were established in 1984; other immersion schools followed soon after that. The first students to start in immersion preschool have now graduated from college and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. However, the language is still classified as critically endangered by UNESCO.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A creole language, Hawaiian Pidgin (or Hawaii Creole English, HCE), is more commonly spoken in Hawaiʻi than Hawaiian. Some linguists, as well as many locals, argue that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of American English. Born from the increase of immigrants from Japan, China, Puerto Rico, Korea, Portugal, Spain and the Philippines, the pidgin creole language was a necessity in the plantations. Hawaiian and immigrant laborers as well as the white luna, or overseers, found a way to communicate amongst themselves. Pidgin eventually made its way off the plantation and into the greater community, where it is still used to this day.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters: five vowels: a e i o u (each with a long pronunciation and a short one) and eight consonants: he ke la mu nu pi we ʻokina (a glottal stop).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Hawaiian language takes its name from the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, Hawaii (Hawaiʻi in the Hawaiian language). The island name was first written in English in 1778 by British explorer James Cook and his crew members. They wrote it as \"Owhyhee\" or \"Owhyee\". It is written \"Oh-Why-hee\" on the first map of Sandwich Islands engraved by Tobias Conrad Lotter [de] in 1781. Explorers Mortimer (1791) and Otto von Kotzebue (1821) used that spelling.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The initial \"O\" in the name \"Oh-Why-hee\" is a reflection of the fact that Hawaiian predicates unique identity by using a copula form, ʻo, immediately before a proper noun. Thus, in Hawaiian, the name of the island is expressed by saying ʻO Hawaiʻi, which means \"[This] is Hawaiʻi.\" The Cook expedition also wrote \"Otaheite\" rather than \"Tahiti\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The spelling \"why\" in the name reflects the [ʍ] pronunciation of wh in 18th-century English (still used in parts of the English-speaking world). Why was pronounced [ʍai]. The spelling \"hee\" or \"ee\" in the name represents the sounds [hi], or [i].",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Putting the parts together, O-why-(h)ee reflects [o-hwai-i], a reasonable approximation of the native pronunciation, [ʔo həwɐiʔi].",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "American missionaries bound for Hawaiʻi used the phrases \"Owhihe Language\" and \"Owhyhee language\" in Boston prior to their departure in October 1819 and during their five-month voyage to Hawaiʻi. They still used such phrases as late as March 1822. However, by July 1823, they had begun using the phrase \"Hawaiian Language\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In Hawaiian, the language is called ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, since adjectives follow nouns.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hawaiian is a Polynesian member of the Austronesian language family. It is closely related to other Polynesian languages, such as Samoan, Marquesan, Tahitian, Māori, Rapa Nui (the language of Easter Island) and Tongan.",
"title": "Family and origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "According to Schütz (1994), the Marquesans colonized the archipelago in roughly 300 CE followed by later waves of immigration from the Society Islands and Samoa-Tonga. Their languages, over time, became the Hawaiian language within the Hawaiian Islands. Kimura and Wilson (1983) also state:",
"title": "Family and origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Linguists agree that Hawaiian is closely related to Eastern Polynesian, with a particularly strong link in the Southern Marquesas, and a secondary link in Tahiti, which may be explained by voyaging between the Hawaiian and Society Islands.",
"title": "Family and origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Jack H. Ward (1962) conducted a study using basic words and short utterances to determine the level of comprehension between different Polynesian languages. The mutual intelligibility of Hawaiian was found to be 41.2% with Marquesan, 37.5% with Tahitian, 25.5% with Samoan and 6.4% with Tongan.",
"title": "Family and origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1778, British explorer James Cook made Europe's initial, recorded first contact with Hawaiʻi, beginning a new phase in the development of Hawaiian. During the next forty years, the sounds of Spanish (1789), Russian (1804), French (1816), and German (1816) arrived in Hawaiʻi via other explorers and businessmen. Hawaiian began to be written for the first time, largely restricted to isolated names and words, and word lists collected by explorers and travelers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The early explorers and merchants who first brought European languages to the Hawaiian islands also took on a few native crew members who brought the Hawaiian language into new territory. Hawaiians took these nautical jobs because their traditional way of life changed due to plantations, and although there were not enough of these Hawaiian-speaking explorers to establish any viable speech communities abroad, they still had a noticeable presence. One of them, a boy in his teens known as Obookiah (ʻŌpūkahaʻia), had a major impact on the future of the language. He sailed to New England, where he eventually became a student at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. He inspired New Englanders to support a Christian mission to Hawaiʻi, and provided information on the Hawaiian language to the American missionaries there prior to their departure for Hawaiʻi in 1819. Adelbert von Chamisso too might have consulted with a native speaker of Hawaiian in Berlin, Germany, before publishing his grammar of Hawaiian (Über die Hawaiische Sprache) in 1837.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Like all natural spoken languages, the Hawaiian language was originally an oral language. The native people of the Hawaiian language relayed religion, traditions, history, and views of their world through stories that were handed down from generation to generation. One form of storytelling most commonly associated with the Hawaiian islands is hula. Nathaniel B. Emerson notes that \"It kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The islanders' connection with their stories is argued to be one reason why Captain James Cook received a pleasant welcome. Marshall Sahlins has observed that Hawaiian folktales began bearing similar content to those of the Western world in the eighteenth century. He argues this was caused by the timing of Captain Cook's arrival, which was coincidentally when the indigenous Hawaiians were celebrating the Makahiki festival, which is the annual celebration of the harvest in honor of the god Lono. The celebration lasts for the entirety of the rainy season. It is a time of peace with much emphasis on amusements, food, games, and dancing. The islanders' story foretold of the god Lono's return at the time of the Makahiki festival.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in Hawaiʻi, and in a few years converted the chiefs to Congregational Protestantism, who in turn converted their subjects. To the missionaries, the thorough Christianization of the kingdom necessitated a complete translation of the Bible to Hawaiian, a previously unwritten language, and therefore the creation of a standard spelling that should be as easy to master as possible. The orthography created by the missionaries was so straightforward that literacy spread very quickly among the adult population; at the same time, the Mission set more and more schools for children.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1834, the first Hawaiian-language newspapers were published by missionaries working with locals. The missionaries also played a significant role in publishing a vocabulary (1836) grammar (1854) and dictionary (1865) of Hawaiian. The Hawaiian Bible was fully completed in 1839; by then, the Mission had such a wide-reaching school network that, when in 1840 it handed it over to the Hawaiian government, the Hawaiian Legislature mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14 years of age, including girls, twelve years before any similar compulsory education law was enacted for the first time in any of the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Literacy in Hawaiian was so widespread that in 1842 a law mandated that people born after 1819 had to be literate to be allowed to marry. In his Report to the Legislature for the year 1853 Richard Armstrong, the minister of Public Instruction, bragged that 75% of the adult population could read. Use of the language among the general population might have peaked around 1881. Even so, some people worried, as early as 1854, that the language was \"soon destined to extinction.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "When Hawaiian King David Kalākaua took a trip around the world, he brought his native language with him. When his wife, Queen Kapiʻolani, and his sister, Princess (later Queen) Liliʻuokalani, took a trip across North America and on to the British Islands, in 1887, Liliʻuokalani's composition \"Aloha ʻOe\" was already a famous song in the U.S.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The decline of the Hawaiian language was accelerated by the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and dethroned the existing Hawaiian queen. Thereafter, a law was instituted that required English as the main language of school instruction. The law cited is identified as Act 57, sec. 30 of the 1896 Laws of the Republic of Hawaiʻi:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The English Language shall be the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools, provided that where it is desired that another language shall be taught in addition to the English language, such instruction may be authorized by the Department, either by its rules, the curriculum of the school, or by direct order in any particular instance. Any schools that shall not conform to the provisions of this section shall not be recognized by the Department.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "This law established English as the medium of instruction for the government-recognized schools both \"public and private\". While it did not ban or make illegal the Hawaiian language in other contexts, its implementation in the schools had far-reaching effects. Those who had been pushing for English-only schools took this law as licence to extinguish the native language at the early education level. While the law did not make Hawaiian illegal (it was still commonly spoken at the time), many children who spoke Hawaiian at school, including on the playground, were disciplined. This included corporal punishment and going to the home of the offending child to advise them strongly to stop speaking it in their home. Moreover, the law specifically provided for teaching languages \"in addition to the English language\", reducing Hawaiian to the status of an extra language, subject to approval by the department. Hawaiian was not taught initially in any school, including the all-Hawaiian Kamehameha Schools. This is largely because when these schools were founded, like Kamehameha Schools founded in 1887 (nine years before this law), Hawaiian was being spoken in the home. Once this law was enacted, individuals at these institutions took it upon themselves to enforce a ban on Hawaiian. Beginning in 1900, Mary Kawena Pukui, who was later the co-author of the Hawaiian–English Dictionary, was punished for speaking Hawaiian by being rapped on the forehead, allowed to eat only bread and water for lunch, and denied home visits on holidays. Winona Beamer was expelled from Kamehameha Schools in 1937 for chanting Hawaiian. Due in part to this systemic suppression of the language after the overthrow, Hawaiian is still considered a critically endangered language.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "However, informal coercion to drop Hawaiian would not have worked by itself. Just as important was the fact that, in the same period, native Hawaiians were becoming a minority in their own land on account of the growing influx of foreign labourers and their children. Whereas in 1890 pure Hawaiian students made 56% of school enrollment, in 1900 their numbers were down to 32% and, in 1910, to 16.9%. At the same time, Hawaiians were very prone to intermarriage: the number of \"Part-Hawaiian\" students (i.e., children of mixed White-Hawaiian marriages) grew from 1573 in 1890 to 3718 in 1910. In such mixed households, the low prestige of Hawaiian led to the adoption of English as the family language. Moreover, Hawaiians lived mostly in the cities or scattered across the countryside, in direct contact with other ethnic groups and without any stronghold (with the exception of Niʻihau). Thus, even pure Hawaiian children would converse daily with their schoolmates of diverse mother tongues in English, which was now not just the teachers' language but also the common language needed for everyday communication among friends and neighbours out of school as well. In only a generation English (or rather Pidgin) would become the primary and dominant language of all children, despite the efforts of Hawaiian and immigrant parents to maintain their ancestral languages within the family.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1949, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaiʻi commissioned Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert to write a new dictionary of Hawaiian, either revising the Andrews-Parker work or starting from scratch. Pukui and Elbert took a middle course, using what they could from the Andrews dictionary, but making certain improvements and additions that were more significant than a minor revision. The dictionary they produced, in 1957, introduced an era of gradual increase in attention to the language and culture.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Language revitalization and Hawaiian culture has seen a major revival since the Hawaiian renaissance in the 1970s. Forming in 1983, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, meaning \"language nest\" in Hawaiian, opened its first center in 1984. It was a privately funded Hawaiian preschool program that invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in Hawaiian every day.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Efforts to promote the language have increased in recent decades. Hawaiian-language \"immersion\" schools are now open to children whose families want to reintroduce the Hawaiian language for future generations. The ʻAha Pūnana Leo's Hawaiian language preschools in Hilo, Hawaii, have received international recognition. The local National Public Radio station features a short segment titled \"Hawaiian word of the day\" and a Hawaiian language news broadcast. Honolulu television station KGMB ran a weekly Hawaiian language program, ʻĀhaʻi ʻŌlelo Ola, as recently as 2010. Additionally, the Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the largest newspaper in Hawaii, feature a brief article called Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by teachers, students, and community members.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Today, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian, which was under 0.1% of the statewide population in 1997, has risen to 2,000, out of 24,000 total who are fluent in the language, according to the US 2011 census. On six of the seven permanently inhabited islands, Hawaiian has been largely displaced by English, but on Niʻihau, native speakers of Hawaiian have remained fairly isolated and have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Niʻihau is the only area in the world where Hawaiian is the first language and English is a foreign language.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The isolated island of Niʻihau, located off the southwest coast of Kauai, is the one island where Hawaiian (more specifically a local dialect of Hawaiian known as Niihau dialect) is still spoken as the language of daily life. Elbert & Pukui (1979:23) states that \"[v]ariations in Hawaiian dialects have not been systematically studied\", and that \"[t]he dialect of Niʻihau is the most aberrant and the one most in need of study\". They recognized that Niʻihauans can speak Hawaiian in substantially different ways. Their statements are based in part on some specific observations made by Newbrand (1951). (See Hawaiian phonological processes)",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Friction has developed between those on Niʻihau that speak Hawaiian as a first language, and those who speak Hawaiian as a second language, especially those educated by the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. The university sponsors a Hawaiian Language Lexicon Committee (Kōmike Huaʻōlelo Hou) which coins words for concepts that historically have not existed in the language, like \"computer\" and \"cell phone\". These words are generally not incorporated into the Niʻihau dialect, which often coins its own words organically. Some new words are Hawaiianized versions of English words, and some are composed of Hawaiian roots and unrelated to English sounds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Hawaiian medium education system is a combination of charter, public, and private schools. K–6 schools operate under coordinated governance of the Department of Education and the charter school, while the pre-K–12 laboratory system is governed by the Department of Education, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, and the charter school. Over 80% of graduates from these laboratory schools attend college, some of which include Ivy-League schools. Hawaiian is now an authorized course in the Department of Education language curriculum, though not all schools offer the language.",
"title": "Hawaiian in schools"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "There are two kinds of Hawaiian-immersion medium schools: K–12 total Hawaiian-immersion schools, and grades 7–12 partial Hawaiian immersion schools, the later having some classes are taught in English and others are taught in Hawaiian. One of the main focuses of Hawaiian-medium schools is to teach the form and structure of the Hawaiian language by modeling sentences as a \"pepeke\", meaning squid in Hawaiian. In this case the pepeke is a metaphor that features the body of a squid with the three essential parts: the poʻo (head), the ʻawe (tentacles) and the piko (where the poʻo and ʻawe meet) representing how a sentence is structured. The poʻo represents the predicate, the piko representing the subject and the ʻawe representing the object. Hawaiian immersion schools teach content that both adheres to state standards and stresses Hawaiian culture and values. The existence of immersion schools in Hawaiʻi has developed the opportunity for intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian at home.",
"title": "Hawaiian in schools"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language is a college at the University of Hawaii at Hilo dedicated to providing courses and programs entirely in Hawaiian. It educates and provides training for teachers and school administrators of Hawaiian medium schools. It is the only college in the United States of America that offers a master's and doctorate's degree in an Indigenous language. Programs offered at The Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language are known collectively as the \"Hilo model\" and has been imitated by the Cherokee immersion program and several other Indigenous revitalization programs.",
"title": "Hawaiian in schools"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Since 1921, the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa and all of the University of Hawaiʻi Community Colleges also offer Hawaiian language courses to students for credit. The university now also offers free online courses not for credit, along with a few other websites and apps such as Duolingo.",
"title": "Hawaiian in schools"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Hawaiians had no written language prior to Western contact, except for petroglyph symbols. The modern Hawaiian alphabet, ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi, is based on the Latin script. Hawaiian words end only in vowels, and every consonant must be followed by a vowel. The Hawaiian alphabetical order has all of the vowels before the consonants, as in the following chart.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "This writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries during 1820–1826. It was the first thing they ever printed in Hawaiʻi, on January 7, 1822, and it originally included the consonants B, D, R, T, and V, in addition to the current ones (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), and it had F, G, S, Y and Z for \"spelling foreign words\". The initial printing also showed the five vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) and seven of the short diphthongs (AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU).",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant allophones (called \"interchangeable letters\"), enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-phoneme, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian. For example, instead of spelling one and the same word as pule, bule, pure, and bure (because of interchangeable p/b and l/r), the word is spelled only as pule.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "However, hundreds of words were very rapidly borrowed into Hawaiian from English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac. Although these loan words were necessarily Hawaiianized, they often retained some of their \"non-Hawaiian letters\" in their published forms. For example, Brazil fully Hawaiianized is Palakila, but retaining \"foreign letters\" it is Barazila. Another example is Gibraltar, written as Kipalaleka or Gibaraleta. While [z] and [ɡ] are not regarded as Hawaiian sounds, [b], [ɹ], and [t] were represented in the original alphabet, so the letters (b, r, and t) for the latter are not truly \"non-Hawaiian\" or \"foreign\", even though their post-1826 use in published matter generally marked words of foreign origin.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "ʻOkina (ʻoki 'cut' + -na '-ing') is the modern Hawaiian name for the symbol (a letter) that represents the glottal stop. It was formerly known as ʻuʻina (\"snap\").",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "For examples of the ʻokina, consider the Hawaiian words Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu (often simply Hawaii and Oahu in English orthography). In Hawaiian, these words are pronounced [hʌˈʋʌi.ʔi] and [oˈʔʌ.hu], and are written with an ʻokina where the glottal stop is pronounced.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Elbert & Pukui's Hawaiian Grammar says \"The glottal stop, ‘, is made by closing the glottis or space between the vocal cords, the result being something like the hiatus in English oh-oh.\"",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "As early as 1823, the missionaries made some limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used it to distinguish koʻu ('my') from kou ('your'). In 1864, William DeWitt Alexander published a grammar of Hawaiian in which he made it clear that the glottal stop (calling it \"guttural break\") is definitely a true consonant of the Hawaiian language. He wrote it using an apostrophe. In 1922, the Andrews-Parker dictionary of Hawaiian made limited use of the opening single quote symbol, then called \"reversed apostrophe\" or \"inverse comma\", to represent the glottal stop. Subsequent dictionaries and written material associated with the Hawaiian language revitalization have preferred to use this symbol, the ʻokina, to better represent spoken Hawaiian. Nonetheless, excluding the ʻokina may facilitate interface with English-oriented media, or even be preferred stylistically by some Hawaiian speakers, in homage to 19th century written texts. So there is variation today in the use of this symbol.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The ʻokina is written in various ways for electronic uses:",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Because many people who want to write the ʻokina are not familiar with these specific characters and/or do not have access to the appropriate fonts and input and display systems, it is sometimes written with more familiar and readily available characters:",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A modern Hawaiian name for the macron symbol is kahakō (kaha 'mark' + kō 'long'). It was formerly known as mekona (Hawaiianization of macron). It can be written as a diacritical mark which looks like a hyphen or dash written above a vowel, i.e., ā ē ī ō ū and Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū. It is used to show that the marked vowel is a \"double\", or \"geminate\", or \"long\" vowel, in phonological terms. (See: Vowel length)",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "As early as 1821, at least one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons (and breves) in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. The missionaries specifically requested their sponsor in Boston to send them some type (fonts) with accented vowel characters, including vowels with macrons, but the sponsor made only one response and sent the wrong font size (pica instead of small pica). Thus, they could not print ā, ē, ī, ō, nor ū (at the right size), even though they wanted to.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Owing to extensive allophony, Hawaiian has more than 13 phones. Although vowel length is phonemic, long vowels are not always pronounced as such, even though under the rules for assigning stress in Hawaiian, a long vowel will always receive stress.",
"title": "Orthography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Hawaiian is known for having very few consonant phonemes – eight: /p, k ~ t, ʔ, h, m, n, l, w ~ v/. It is notable that Hawaiian has allophonic variation of [t] with [k], [w] with [v], and (in some dialects) [l] with [n]. The [t]–[k] variation is quite unusual among the world's languages, and is likely a product both of the small number of consonants in Hawaiian, and the recent shift of historical *t to modern [t]–[k], after historical *k had shifted to [ʔ]. In some dialects, /ʔ/ remains as [k] in some words. These variations are largely free, though there are conditioning factors. /l/ tends to [n] especially in words with both /l/ and /n/, such as in the island name Lānaʻi ([laːˈnɐʔi]–[naːˈnɐʔi]), though this is not always the case: ʻeleʻele or ʻeneʻene \"black\". The [k] allophone is almost universal at the beginnings of words, whereas [t] is most common before the vowel /i/. [v] is also the norm after /i/ and /e/, whereas [w] is usual after /u/ and /o/. After /a/ and initially, however, [w] and [v] are in free variation.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Hawaiian has five short and five long vowels, plus diphthongs.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Hawaiian has five pure vowels. The short vowels are /u, i, o, e, a/, and the long vowels, if they are considered separate phonemes rather than simply sequences of like vowels, are /uː, iː, oː, eː, aː/. When stressed, short /e/ and /a/ have been described as becoming [ɛ] and [ɐ], while when unstressed they are [e] and [ə] . Parker Jones (2017), however, did not find a reduction of /a/ to [ə] in the phonetic analysis of a young speaker from Hilo, Hawaiʻi; so there is at least some variation in how /a/ is realised. /e/ also tends to become [ɛ] next to /l/, /n/, and another [ɛ], as in Pele [pɛlɛ]. Some grammatical particles vary between short and long vowels. These include a and o \"of\", ma \"at\", na and no \"for\". Between a back vowel /o/ or /u/ and a following non-back vowel (/a e i/), there is an epenthetic [w], which is generally not written. Between a front vowel /e/ or /i/ and a following non-front vowel (/a o u/), there is an epenthetic [j] (a y sound), which is never written.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The short-vowel diphthongs are /iu, ou, oi, eu, ei, au, ai, ao, ae/. In all except perhaps /iu/, these are falling diphthongs. However, they are not as tightly bound as the diphthongs of English, and may be considered vowel sequences. (The second vowel in such sequences may receive the stress, but in such cases it is not counted as a diphthong.) In fast speech, /ai/ tends to [ei] and /au/ tends to [ou], conflating these diphthongs with /ei/ and /ou/.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "There are only a limited number of vowels which may follow long vowels, and some authors treat these sequences as diphthongs as well: /oːu, eːi, aːu, aːi, aːo, aːe/.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Hawaiian syllable structure is (C)V. All CV syllables occur except for wū; wu occurs only in two words borrowed from English. As shown by Schütz, Hawaiian word-stress is predictable in words of one to four syllables, but not in words of five or more syllables. Hawaiian phonological processes include palatalization and deletion of consonants, as well as raising, diphthongization, deletion, and compensatory lengthening of vowels.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Historically, glottal stop developed from *k. Loss of intervocalic consonant phonemes has resulted in Hawaiian long vowels and diphthongs.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Hawaiian is an analytic language with verb–subject–object word order. While there is no use of inflection for verbs, in Hawaiian, like other Austronesian personal pronouns, declension is found in the differentiation between a- and o-class genitive case personal pronouns in order to indicate inalienable possession in a binary possessive class system. Also like many Austronesian languages, Hawaiian pronouns employ separate words for inclusive and exclusive we (clusivity), and distinguish singular, dual, and plural. The grammatical function of verbs is marked by adjacent particles (short words) and by their relative positions, that indicate tense–aspect–mood.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Some examples of verb phrase patterns:",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Nouns can be marked with articles:",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "ka and ke are singular definite articles. ke is used before words beginning with a-, e-, o- and k-, and with some words beginning ʻ- and p-. ka is used in all other cases. nā is the plural definite article.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "To show part of a group, the word kekahi is used. To show a bigger part, mau is inserted to pluralize the subject.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Examples:",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Hawaiian has thousands of words for elements of the natural world. According to the Hawaiian Electronic Library, there are thousands of names for different types of wind, rain, parts of the sea, peaks of mountains, and sky formations, demonstrating the importance of the natural world to Hawaiian culture. For example, \"Hoʻomalumalu\" means \"sheltering cloud\" and \"Hoʻoweliweli\" means \"threatening cloud\".",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "There is a marked difference between varieties of the Hawaiian language spoken by most native Hawaiian elders and the Hawaiian Language taught in education, sometimes regarded as \"University Hawaiian\" or \"College Hawaiian\". \"University Hawaiian\" is often so different from the language spoken by elders that Native Hawaiian children may feel scared or ashamed to speak Hawaiian at home, limiting the language's domains to academia. Language varieties spoken by elders often includes Pidgin Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, Hawaiian-infused English, or another variety of Hawaiian that is much different from the \"University Hawaiian\" that was standardized and documented by colonists in the 19th century.",
"title": "Varieties and debates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The divide between \"University Hawaiian\" and varieties spoken by elders has created debate over which variety of Hawaiian should be considered \"real\" or \"authentic\", as neither \"University Hawaiian\" nor other varieties spoken by elders are free from foreign interference. Hawaiian cultural beliefs of divine intervention as the driving force of language formation expedites distrust in what might be seen as the mechanical nature of colonial linguistic paradigms of language and its role in the standardized variety of \"University Hawaiian\". Hawaiian's authenticity debate could have major implications for revitalization efforts as language attitudes and trends in existing language domains are both UNESCO factors in assessing a language's level of endangerment.",
"title": "Varieties and debates"
}
]
| Hawaiian is a Polynesian language and critically endangered language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the US state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840. In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii established English as the official language in schools. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population. Linguists were unsure if Hawaiian and other endangered languages would survive. Nevertheless, from around 1949 to the present day, there has been a gradual increase in attention to and promotion of the language. Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo were established in 1984; other immersion schools followed soon after that. The first students to start in immersion preschool have now graduated from college and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. However, the language is still classified as critically endangered by UNESCO. A creole language, Hawaiian Pidgin, is more commonly spoken in Hawaiʻi than Hawaiian. Some linguists, as well as many locals, argue that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of American English. Born from the increase of immigrants from Japan, China, Puerto Rico, Korea, Portugal, Spain and the Philippines, the pidgin creole language was a necessity in the plantations. Hawaiian and immigrant laborers as well as the white luna, or overseers, found a way to communicate amongst themselves. Pidgin eventually made its way off the plantation and into the greater community, where it is still used to this day. The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters: five vowels: a e i o u and eight consonants: he ke la mu nu pi we ʻokina. | 2001-12-05T17:38:13Z | 2023-12-20T23:18:44Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language |
14,245 | Second Polish Republic | The Second Polish Republic, at the time officially known as the Republic of Poland, was a country in Central Europe that existed between 7 October 1918 and 28 September 1939. The state was established in the final stage of World War I. The Second Republic ceased to exist in 1939, after Poland was invaded by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, marking the beginning of the European theatre of the Second World War. The Polish government-in-exile was established in Paris and later London after the fall of France in 1940.
When, after several regional conflicts, most importantly the victorious Polish-Soviet war, the borders of the state were finalised in 1922, Poland's neighbours were Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union. It had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline known as the Polish Corridor on either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia. In 1938, the Second Republic was the sixth largest country in Europe. According to the 1921 census, the number of inhabitants was 27.2 million. By 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, this had grown to an estimated 35.1 million. Almost a third of the population came from minority groups: 13.9% Ruthenians; 10% Ashkenazi Jews; 3.1% Belarusians; 2.3% Germans and 3.4% Czechs and Lithuanians. At the same time, a significant number of ethnic Poles lived outside the country's borders.
The Second Republic maintained moderate economic development. The cultural hubs of interwar Poland – Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Wilno, and Lwów – became major European cities and the sites of internationally acclaimed universities and other institutions of higher education. Although Polish Jews were some of the biggest supporters of Second Republic leader Józef Piłsudski, even after he returned to politics and consolidated power in 1926, in the 1930s, the Republic begun to openly discriminate against its Jewish (and to a lesser extent its Ukrainian) citizens, restricting Jewish entry into professions and placing limitations on Jewish businesses.
The official name of the state was the Republic of Poland. In the Polish language, it was referred to as Rzeczpospolita Polska (abbr. RP), with the term Rzeczpospolita being a traditional name for the republic when referring to various Polish states, including the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (considered to be the First Polish Republic, Pierwsza Rzeczpospolita), and later, the current Third Polish Republic. In other regionally-used official languages, the state was referred to as: Republik Polen in German, Польська Республіка (transcription: Polʹsʹka Respublika) in Ukrainian, Польская Рэспубліка (transcription: Poĺskaja Respublika) in Belarusian, and Lenkijos Respublika, in Lithuanian.
Between 14 November 1918 and 13 March 1919, the state was referred to in Polish as Republika Polska, instead of Rzeczpospolita Polska. Both terms mean the Republic; however, republika is a general term, while Rzeczpospolita traditionally refers exclusively to Polish states. Additionally, between 8 November 1918 and 16 August 1919, the Journal of Laws of the State of Poland referred to the country as the State of Poland (Polish: Państwo Polskie).
Following the end of the Second World War, and the establishment of the later states of the Polish People's Republic and the Third Polish Republic, the historical state is referred to as the Second Polish Republic. In the Polish language, the country is traditionally referred to as II Rzeczpospolita (Druga Rzeczpospolita), which means the Second Republic.
After more than a century of partitions between the Austrian, the Prussian, and the Russian imperial powers, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign state at the end of the First World War in Europe in 1917–1918. The victorious Allies of the First World War confirmed the rebirth of Poland in the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919. It was one of the great stories of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Poland solidified its independence in a series of border wars fought by the newly formed Polish Army from 1918 to 1921. The extent of the eastern half of the interwar territory of Poland was settled diplomatically in 1922 and internationally recognised by the League of Nations.
Over the course of the First World War (1914-1918), the German Empire gradually dominated the Eastern Front as the Imperial Russian Army fell back. German and Austro-Hungarian armies seized the Russian-ruled part of what became Poland. In a failed attempt to resolve the Polish question as quickly as possible, Berlin set up the puppet Kingdom of Poland on 14 January 1917, with a governing Provisional Council of State and (from 15 October 1917) a Regency Council (Rada Regencyjna Królestwa Polskiego). The Council administered the country under German auspices (see also Mitteleuropa), pending the election of a king. More than a month before Germany surrendered on 11 November 1918 and the war ended, the Regency Council had dissolved the Provisional Council of State and announced its intention to restore Polish independence (7 October 1918). With the notable exception of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), most Polish political parties supported this move. On 23 October the Regency Council appointed a new government under Józef Świeżyński and began conscription into the Polish Army.
In 1918–1919, over 100 workers' councils sprang up on Polish territories; on 5 November 1918, in Lublin, the first Soviet of Delegates was established. On 6 November socialists proclaimed the Republic of Tarnobrzeg at Tarnobrzeg in Austrian Galicia. The same day the Socialist, Ignacy Daszyński, set up a Provisional People's Government of the Republic of Poland (Tymczasowy Rząd Ludowy Republiki Polskiej) in Lublin. On Sunday, 10 November at 7 a.m., Józef Piłsudski, newly freed from 16 months in a German prison in Magdeburg, returned by train to Warsaw. Piłsudski, together with Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was greeted at Warsaw's railway station by Regent Zdzisław Lubomirski and by Colonel Adam Koc. Next day, due to his popularity and support from most political parties, the Regency Council appointed Piłsudski as Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. On 14 November, the Council dissolved itself and transferred all its authority to Piłsudski as Chief of State (Naczelnik Państwa). After consultation with Piłsudski, Daszyński's government dissolved itself and a new government formed under Jędrzej Moraczewski. In 1918, the Kingdom of Italy became the first country in Europe to recognise Poland's renewed sovereignty.
Centres of government that formed at that time in Galicia (formerly Austrian-ruled southern Poland) included the National Council of the Principality of Cieszyn (established in November 1918), the Republic of Zakopane and the Polish Liquidation Committee (28 October). Soon afterward, the Polish–Ukrainian War broke out in Lwów (1 November 1918) between forces of the Military Committee of Ukrainians and the Polish irregular units made up of students known as the Lwów Eaglets, who were later supported by the Polish Army (see Battle of Lwów (1918), Battle of Przemyśl (1918)). Meanwhile, in western Poland, another war of national liberation began under the banner of the Greater Poland uprising (1918–1919). In January 1919, Czechoslovak forces attacked Polish units in the area of Trans-Olza (see Polish–Czechoslovak War). Soon afterwards, the Polish–Lithuanian War (ca 1919–1920) began, and, in August 1919, Polish-speaking residents of Upper Silesia initiated a series of three Silesian Uprisings. The most critical military conflict of that period, however, the Polish–Soviet War (1919-1921), ended in a decisive Polish victory.
The Second Polish Republic was a parliamentary democracy from 1919 (see Small Constitution of 1919) to 1926, with the President having limited powers. The Parliament elected him, and he could appoint the Prime Minister as well as the government with the Sejm's (lower house's) approval, but he could only dissolve the Sejm with the Senate's consent. Moreover, his power to pass decrees was limited by the requirement that the Prime Minister and the appropriate other Minister had to verify his decrees with their signatures. Poland was one of the first countries in the world to recognise women's suffrage. Women in Poland were granted the right to vote on 28 November 1918 by a decree of General Józef Piłsudski.
The major political parties at this time were the Polish Socialist Party, National Democrats, various Peasant Parties, Christian Democrats, and political groups of ethnic minorities (German: German Social Democratic Party of Poland, Jewish: General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, United Jewish Socialist Workers Party, and Ukrainian: Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance). Frequently changing governments (see 1919 Polish legislative election, 1922 Polish legislative election) and other negative publicity the politicians received (such as accusations of corruption or the 1919 Polish coup attempt), made them increasingly unpopular. Major politicians at this time, in addition to General Piłsudski, included peasant activist Wincenty Witos (Prime Minister three times) and right-wing leader Roman Dmowski. Ethnic minorities were represented in the Sejm; e.g. in 1928 – 1930 there was the Ukrainian-Belarusian Club, with 26 Ukrainian and 4 Belarusian members.
After the Polish – Soviet war, Marshal Piłsudski led an intentionally modest life, writing historical books for a living. After he took power through a military coup in May 1926, he emphasised that he wanted to heal Polish society and politics of excessive partisan politics. His regime, accordingly, was called Sanacja in Polish. The 1928 parliamentary elections were still considered free and fair, although the pro-Piłsudski Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government won them. The following three parliamentary elections (in 1930, 1935 and 1938) were manipulated, with opposition activists sent to Bereza Kartuska prison (see also Brest trials). As a result, the pro-government party Camp of National Unity won huge majorities in them. Piłsudski died just after an authoritarian constitution was approved in the spring of 1935. During the last four years of the Second Polish Republic, the major politicians included President Ignacy Mościcki, Foreign Minister Józef Beck and the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The country was divided into 104 electoral districts, and those politicians who were forced to leave Poland founded Front Morges in 1936. The government that ruled the Second Polish Republic in its final years is frequently referred to as Piłsudski's colonels.
Interwar Poland had a large army of 950,000 soldiers on active duty: in 37 infantry divisions, 11 cavalry brigades, and two armored brigades, plus artillery units. Another 700,000 men served in the reserves. At the outbreak of the war, the Polish Army was able to put in the field almost one million soldiers, 4,300 guns, around 1,000 armored vehicles including in between 200 and 300 tanks (the majority of the armored vehicles were outclassed tankettes) and 745 aircraft (however, only around 450 of them were bombers and fighters available to fight as of September 1, 1939).
The training of the Polish Army was thorough. The non-commissioned officers were a competent body of men with expert knowledge and high ideals. The officers, both senior and junior, constantly refreshed their training in the field and in the lecture hall, where modern technical achievement and the lessons of contemporary wars were demonstrated and discussed. The equipment of the Polish Army was less developed technically than that of Nazi Germany and its rearmament was slowed down by confidence in Western European military support and by budget difficulties.
The Polish command system at the level of the entire Polish military and the armies was obsolete. The generals in command of the armies had to ask permission from the high command. The Polish military attempted to organize fronts made of armies' groups only when it was already too late during the Polish Defensive War in 1939.
After regaining its independence, Poland was faced with major economic difficulties. In addition to the devastation brought by the First World War, the exploitation of the Polish economy by the German and Russian occupying powers, and the sabotage performed by retreating armies, the new republic was faced with the task of economically unifying disparate economic regions, which had previously been part of different countries and different empires. Within the borders of the Republic were the remnants of three different economic systems, with five different currencies (the German mark, the Imperial Russian rouble, the Austrian krone, the Polish marka and the Ostrubel) and with little or no direct infrastructural links. The situation was so bad that neighbouring industrial centres, as well as major cities, lacked direct railway links because they had been parts of different jurisdictions and different empires. For example, there was no direct railway connection between Warsaw and Kraków until 1934. This situation was described by Melchior Wańkowicz in his book Sztafeta.
In addition to this was the massive destruction left after both the First World War and the Polish–Soviet War. There was also a great economic disparity between the eastern (commonly called Poland B) and western (called Poland A) parts of the country, with the western half, especially areas that had belonged to Prussia and the German Empire, being much more developed and prosperous. Frequent border closures and a customs war with Germany also had negative economic impacts on Poland. In 1924, Prime Minister Władysław Grabski, who was also the Economic Minister, introduced the złoty as a single common currency for Poland (replacing the marka), which remained a stable currency. The currency helped Poland to control the massive hyperinflation. It was the only country in Europe able to do this without foreign loans or aid. The average annual growth rate (GDP per capita) was 5.24% in 1920–29 and 0.34% in 1929–38.
Hostile relations with neighbours were a major problem for the economy of interbellum Poland. In the year 1937, foreign trade with all neighbours amounted to only 21% of Poland's total. Trade with Germany, Poland's most important neighbour, accounted for 14.3% of Polish exchange. Foreign trade with the Soviet Union (0.8%) was virtually nonexistent. Czechoslovakia accounted for 3.9%, Latvia for 0.3%, and Romania for 0.8%. By mid-1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Greater Germany was responsible for as much as 23% of Polish foreign trade.
Piłsudski's regime followed the conservative free-market economic tradition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its existence. Poland had one of the lowest taxation rates in Europe, with 9.3% of taxes as a distribution of national income. Piłsudski's regime was also heavily dependent on foreign investments and economies, with 45.4% of Polish equity capital controlled by foreign corporations. After the Great Depression, the Polish economy crumbled and failed to recover until Ignacy Mościcki's government introduced economic reforms with more government interventions with an increase in tax revenues and public spending after Piłsudski's death. These interventionist policies saw Poland's economy recover from the recession.
The basis of Poland's gradual recovery after the Great Depression was the mass economic development plans of the new government (see Four Year Plan) under economist Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, which oversaw the building of three key infrastructural elements. The first was the establishment of the Gdynia seaport, which allowed Poland to completely bypass Gdańsk (which was under heavy German pressure to boycott Polish coal exports). The second was construction of the 500-kilometre rail connection between Upper Silesia and Gdynia, called the Polish Coal Trunk-Line, which served freight trains with coal. The third was the creation of a central industrial district named COP – Centralny Okręg Przemysłowy (English: Central Industrial Region). Unfortunately, these developments were interrupted and largely destroyed by the German and Soviet invasion and the start of the Second World War. Other achievements of interbellum Poland included Stalowa Wola (a brand new city, built in a forest around a steel mill), Mościce (now a district of Tarnów, with a large nitrate factory), and the creation of a central bank called the Bank of Poland. There were several trade fairs, with the most popular being Poznań International Fair, Lwów's Targi Wschodnie, and Wilno's Targi Północne. Polish Radio had ten stations (see Radio stations in interwar Poland), with the eleventh one planned to be opened in the autumn of 1939. Furthermore, in 1935, Polish engineers began working on TV services. By early 1939, experts of the Polish Radio built four TV sets. The first movie broadcast by experimental Polish TV was Barbara Radziwiłłówna, and by 1940, a regular TV service was scheduled to begin operation.
Interbellum Poland was also a country with numerous social problems. Unemployment was high, and poverty in the countryside was widespread, which resulted in several cases of social unrest, such as the 1923 Kraków riot, and 1937 peasant strike in Poland. There were conflicts with national minorities, such as the Pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia (1930), relations with Polish neighbours were sometimes complicated (see Soviet raid on Stołpce, Polish–Czechoslovak border conflicts, and the 1938 Polish ultimatum to Lithuania). On top of this, there were natural disasters, such as the 1934 flood in Poland.
Interbellum Poland was unofficially divided into two parts – better developed "Poland A" in the west, and underdeveloped "Poland B" in the east. Polish industry was concentrated in the west, mostly in Polish Upper Silesia, and the adjacent Lesser Poland's province of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, where the bulk of coal mines and steel plants was located. Furthermore, heavy industry plants were located in Częstochowa (Huta Częstochowa, founded in 1896), Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski (Huta Ostrowiec, founded in 1837–1839), Stalowa Wola (brand new industrial city, which was built from scratch in 1937 – 1938), Chrzanów (Fablok, founded in 1919), Jaworzno, Trzebinia (oil refinery, opened in 1895), Łódź (the seat of Polish textile industry), Poznań (H. Cegielski – Poznań), Kraków and Warsaw (Ursus Factory). Further east, in Kresy, industrial centres included two major cities of the region – Lwów and Wilno (Elektrit).
Besides coal mining, Poland also had deposits of oil in Borysław, Drohobycz, Jasło and Gorlice (see Polmin), potassium salt (TESP), and basalt (Janowa Dolina). Apart from already-existing industrial areas, in the mid-1930s an ambitious, state-sponsored project called the Central Industrial Region was started under Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski. One of the characteristic features of the Polish economy in the interbellum was the gradual nationalisation of major plants. This was the case for the Ursus Factory (see Państwowe Zakłady Inżynieryjne) and several steelworks, such as Huta Pokój in Ruda Śląska – Nowy Bytom, Huta Królewska in Chorzów – Królewska Huta, Huta Laura in Siemianowice Śląskie, as well as Scheibler and Grohman Works in Łódź.
According to the 1939 Statistical Yearbook of Poland, the total length of the railways in Poland (as of 31 December 1937) was 20,118 km (12,501 mi). Rail density was 5.2 km (3.2 mi) per 100 km (39 sq mi). Railways were very dense in the western part of the country, while in the east, especially Polesie, rail was non-existent in some counties. During the interbellum period, the Polish Government constructed several new lines, mainly in the central part of the country (see also Polish State Railroads Summer 1939). Construction of the extensive Warszawa Główna railway station was never finished due to the war, while Polish railways were famous for their punctuality (see Luxtorpeda, Strzała Bałtyku, Latający Wilnianin).
In the interbellum, the road network of Poland was dense, but the quality of the roads was very poor – only 7% of all roads were paved and ready for automobile use, and none of the major cities were connected with each other by a good-quality highway. In 1939 the Poles built only one highway: 28 km of straight concrete road connecting the villages of Warlubie and Osiek (mid-northern Poland). It was designed by Italian engineer Piero Puricelli.
In the mid-1930s, Poland had 340,000 km (211,266 mi) of roads, but only 58,000 had a hard surface (gravel, cobblestone or sett), and 2,500 were modern, with an asphalt or concrete surface. In different parts of the country, there were sections of paved roads, which suddenly ended, and were followed by dirt roads. The poor condition of the roads was the result of both long-lasting foreign dominance and inadequate funding. On 29 January 1931, the Polish Parliament created the State Road Fund, the purpose of which was to collect money for the construction and conservation of roads. The government drafted a 10-year plan, with road priorities: a highway from Wilno, through Warsaw and Kraków, to Zakopane (called Marshal Piłsudski Highway), asphalt highways from Warsaw to Poznań and Łódź, as well as a Warsaw ring road. However, the plan turned out to be too ambitious, with insufficient money in the national budget to pay for it. In January 1938, the Polish Road Congress estimated that Poland would need to spend three times as much money on roads to keep up with Western Europe.
In 1939, before the outbreak of the war, LOT Polish Airlines, which was established in 1929, had its hub at Warsaw Okęcie Airport. At that time, LOT maintained several services, both domestic and international. Warsaw had regular domestic connections with Gdynia-Rumia, Danzig-Langfuhr, Katowice-Muchowiec, Kraków-Rakowice-Czyżyny, Lwów-Skniłów, Poznań-Ławica, and Wilno-Porubanek. Furthermore, in cooperation with Air France, LARES, Lufthansa, and Malert, international connections were maintained with Athens, Beirut, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Helsinki, Kaunas, London, Paris, Prague, Riga, Rome, Tallinn, and Zagreb.
Statistically, the majority of citizens lived in the countryside (75% in 1921). Farmers made up 65% of the population. In 1929, agricultural production made up 65% of Poland's GNP. After 123 years of partitions, regions of the country were very unevenly developed. The lands of the former German Empire were the most advanced; in Greater Poland, Upper Silesia and Pomerelia, farming and crops were on a Western European level. The situation was much worse in parts of Congress Poland, the Eastern Borderlands, and what was formerly Galicia, where agriculture was quite backward and primitive, with a large number of small farms, unable to succeed in either the domestic or international market. Another problem was the overpopulation of the countryside, which resulted in chronic unemployment. Living conditions were so bad in several eastern regions, such as the counties inhabited by the Hutsul minority, that there was permanent starvation. Farmers rebelled against the government (see: 1937 peasant strike in Poland), and the situation began to change in the late 1930s, due to the construction of several factories for the Central Industrial Region, which gave employment to thousands of rural and small town residents.
Beginning in June 1925, there was a customs' war, with the revanchist Weimar Republic imposing a trade embargo against Poland for nearly a decade; it involved tariffs and broad economic restrictions. After 1933 the trade war ended. The new agreements regulated and promoted trade. Germany became Poland's largest trading partner, followed by Britain. In October 1938, Germany granted a credit of 60,000,000 RM to Poland (120,000,000 zloty, or £4,800,000) which was never realised, due to the outbreak of war. Germany would deliver factory equipment and machinery in return for Polish timber and agricultural produce. This new trade was to be in addition to the existing German-Polish trade agreements.
In 1919, the Polish government introduced compulsory education for all children aged 7 to 14, in an effort to limit illiteracy, which was widespread, especially in the former Russian Partition and the Austrian Partition of eastern Poland. In 1921, one-third of citizens of Poland remained illiterate (38% in the countryside). The process was slow, but by 1931 the illiteracy level had dropped to 23% overall (27% in the countryside) and further down to 18% in 1937. By 1939, over 90% of children attended school. In 1932, Janusz Jędrzejewicz, the Minister for Religion and Education, carried out a major reform which introduced two main levels of education: common school (szkoła powszechna), with three levels – 4 grades + 2 grades + 1 grade; and middle school (szkoła średnia), with two levels – 4 grades of comprehensive middle school and 2 grades of specified high school (classical, humanistic, natural and mathematical). A graduate of middle school received a small matura, while a graduate of high school received a big matura, which enabled them to seek university-level education.
Before 1918, Poland had three universities: Jagiellonian University, the University of Warsaw and Lwów University. The Catholic University of Lublin was established in 1918; Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, in 1919; and finally, in 1922, after the annexation of the Republic of Central Lithuania, Wilno University became the Republic's sixth university. There were also three technical colleges: the Warsaw University of Technology, Lwów Polytechnic and the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, established in 1919. Warsaw University of Life Sciences was an agricultural institute. By 1939, there were around 50,000 students enrolled in further education. 28% of students at universities were women, which was the second highest share in Europe.
Polish science in the interbellum was renowned for its mathematicians gathered around the Lwów School of Mathematics, the Kraków School of Mathematics, as well as the Warsaw School of Mathematics. There were world-class philosophers in the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and philosophy. Florian Znaniecki founded Polish sociological studies. Rudolf Weigl invented a vaccine against typhus. Bronisław Malinowski counted among the most important anthropologists of the 20th century.
In Polish literature, the 1920s were marked by the domination of poetry. Polish poets were divided into two groups – the Skamanderites (Jan Lechoń, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz) and the Futurists (Anatol Stern, Bruno Jasieński, Aleksander Wat, Julian Przyboś). Apart from well-established novelists (Stefan Żeromski, Władysław Reymont), new names appeared in the interbellum – Zofia Nałkowska, Maria Dąbrowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jan Parandowski, Bruno Schultz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz. Among other notable artists there were sculptor Xawery Dunikowski, painters Julian Fałat, Wojciech Kossak and Jacek Malczewski, composers Karol Szymanowski, Feliks Nowowiejski, and Artur Rubinstein, singer Jan Kiepura.
Theatre was immensely popular in the interbellum, with three main centres in the cities of Warsaw, Wilno and Lwów. Altogether, there were 103 theatres in Poland and a number of other theatrical institutions (including 100 folk theatres). In 1936, different shows were seen by 5 million people, and main figures of Polish theatre of the time were Juliusz Osterwa, Stefan Jaracz, and Leon Schiller. Also, before the outbreak of the war, there were approximately one million radios (see Radio stations in interwar Poland).
The administrative division of the Second Republic was based on a three-tier system, referring to the administrative division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On the lowest rung were the gminy, local town and village governments akin to districts or parishes. These were then grouped together into powiaty (akin to counties), which, in turn, were grouped as województwa (voivodeships, akin to provinces). This administrative system passed into the modern Third Polish Republic.
Historically, Poland was almost always a multiethnic country. This was especially true for the Second Republic, when independence was once again achieved in the wake of the First World War and the subsequent Polish–Soviet War, the latter war being officially ended by the Peace of Riga. The census of 1921 shows 30.8% of the population consisted of ethnic minorities, compared with a share of 1.6% (solely identifying with a non-Polish ethnic group) or 3.8% (including those identifying with both the Polish ethnicity and with another ethnic group) in 2011. The first spontaneous flight of about 500,000 Poles from the Soviet Union occurred during the reconstitution of sovereign Poland. In the second wave, between November 1919 and June 1924, some 1,200,000 people left the territory of the USSR for Poland. It is estimated that some 460,000 of them spoke Polish as the first language. According to the 1931 Polish Census: 68.9% of the population was Polish, 13.9% were Ukrainian, around 9% Jewish, 3.1% Belarusian, 2.3% German and 2.8% other, including Lithuanian, Czech, Armenian, Russian, and Romani. The situation of minorities was a complex subject and changed during the period.
Poland was also a nation of many religions. In 1921, 16,057,229 Poles (approx. 62.5%) were Roman (Latin) Catholics, 3,031,057 citizens of Poland (approx. 11.8%) were Eastern Rite Catholics (mostly Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Armenian Rite Catholics), 2,815,817 (approx. 10.95%) were Orthodox, 2,771,949 (approx. 10.8%) were Jewish, and 940,232 (approx. 3.7%) were Protestants (mostly Lutheran).
By 1931, Poland had the second largest Jewish population in the world, with one-fifth of all the world's Jews residing within its borders (approx. 3,136,000). The urban population of interbellum Poland was rising steadily; in 1921, only 24% of Poles lived in the cities, in the late 1930s, that proportion grew to 30%. In more than a decade, the population of Warsaw grew by 200,000, Łódź by 150,000, and Poznań – by 100,000. This was due not only to internal migration, but also to an extremely high birth rate.
From the 1920s, the Polish government excluded Jews from receiving government bank loans, public sector employment, and obtaining business licenses. From the 1930s, measures were taken against Jewish shops, Jewish export firms, Shechita as well as limitations being placed on Jewish admission to the medical and legal professions, Jews in business associations and the enrollment of Jews into universities. The political movement National Democracy (Endecja, from the abbreviation "ND") often organised anti-Jewish business boycotts. Following the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the Endecja intensified their efforts, which triggered violence in extreme cases in smaller towns across the country. In 1937, the National Democracy movement passed resolutions that "its main aim and duty must be to remove the Jews from all spheres of social, economic, and cultural life in Poland". The government in response organised the Camp of National Unity (OZON), which in 1938 took control of the Polish Sejm and subsequently drafted anti-Semitic legislation similar to the Anti-Jewish laws in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. OZON advocated mass emigration of Jews from Poland, numerus clausus (see also Ghetto benches), and other limitations on Jewish rights. According to William W. Hagen, by 1939, prior to the war, Polish Jews were threatened with conditions similar to those in Nazi Germany.
The pre-war government also restricted the rights of people who declared Ukrainian nationality, belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church and inhabited the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic. Ukrainian was restricted in every field possible, especially in governmental institutions, and the term "Ruthenian" was enforced in an attempt to ban the use of the term "Ukrainian". Ukrainians were categorised as uneducated second-class peasants or third world people, and rarely settled outside the Eastern Borderland region due to the prevailing Ukrainophobia and restrictions imposed. Numerous attempts at restoring the Ukrainian state were suppressed and any existent violence or terrorism initiated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was emphasised to create the image of a "brutal Eastern savage".
The Second Polish Republic was mainly flat with an average elevation of 233 m (764 ft) above sea level, except for the southernmost Carpathian Mountains (after the Second World War and its border changes, the average elevation of Poland decreased to 173 m (568 ft)). Only 13% of territory, along the southern border, was higher than 300 m (980 ft). The highest elevation in the country was Mount Rysy, which rises 2,499 m (8,199 ft) in the Tatra Range of the Carpathians, approximately 95 km (59 mi) south of Kraków. Between October 1938 and September 1939, the highest elevation was Lodowy Szczyt (known in Slovak as Ľadový štít), which rises 2,627 m (8,619 ft) above sea level. The largest lake was Lake Narach.
The country's total area, after the annexation of Trans-Olza, was 389,720 km (150,470 sq mi). It extended 903 km (561 mi) from north to south and 894 km (556 mi) from east to west. On 1 January 1938, total length of boundaries was 5,529 km (3,436 mi), including: 140 km (87 mi) of coastline (out of which 71 km (44 mi) were made by the Hel Peninsula), the 1,412 km (877 mi) with Soviet Union, 948 kilometers with Czechoslovakia (until 1938), 1,912 km (1,188 mi) with Germany (together with East Prussia), and 1,081 km (672 mi) with other countries (Lithuania, Romania, Latvia, Danzig). The warmest yearly average temperature was in Kraków among major cities of the Second Polish Republic, at 9.1 °C (48.4 °F) in 1938; and the coldest in Wilno (7.6 °C or 45.7 °F in 1938). Extreme geographical points of Poland included Przeświata River in Somino to the north (located in the Braslaw county of the Wilno Voivodeship); Manczin River to the south (located in the Kosów county of the Stanisławów Voivodeship); Spasibiorki near railway to Połock to the east (located in the Dzisna county of the Wilno Voivodeship); and Mukocinek near Warta River and Meszyn Lake to the west (located in the Międzychód county of the Poznań Voivodeship).
Almost 75% of the territory of interbellum Poland was drained northward into the Baltic Sea by the Vistula (total area of drainage basin of the Vistula within boundaries of the Second Polish Republic was 180,300 km (69,600 sq mi), the Niemen (51,600 km or 19,900 sq mi), the Oder (46,700 km or 18,000 sq mi) and the Daugava (10,400 km or 4,000 sq mi). The remaining part of the country was drained southward, into the Black Sea, by the rivers that drain into the Dnieper (Pripyat, Horyn and Styr, all together 61,500 km or 23,700 sq mi) as well as Dniester (41,400 km or 16,000 sq mi)
The beginning of the Second World War in September 1939 ended the sovereign Second Polish Republic. The German invasion of Poland began on 1 September 1939, one week after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. On that day, Germany and Slovakia attacked Poland, and on 17 September the Soviets attacked eastern Poland. Warsaw fell to the Nazis on 28 September after a twenty-day siege. Open organised Polish resistance ended on 6 October 1939 after the Battle of Kock, with Germany and the Soviet Union occupying most of the country. Lithuania annexed the area of Wilno, and Slovakia seized areas along Poland's southern border – including Górna Orawa and Tatranská Javorina - which Poland had annexed from Czechoslovakia in October 1938. Poland did not surrender to the invaders, but continued fighting under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile and of the Polish Underground State. After the signing of the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation on 28 September 1939, Polish areas occupied by Nazi Germany either became directly incorporated into Nazi Germany, or became part of the General Government. The Soviet Union, following Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus (22 October 1939), annexed eastern Poland partly to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and partly to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (November 1939).
Polish war plans (Plan West and Plan East) failed as soon as Germany invaded in 1939. The Polish losses in combat against Germans (killed and missing in action) amounted to ca. 70,000 men. Some 420,000 of them were taken prisoners. Losses against the Red Army (which invaded Poland on 17 September) added up to 6,000 to 7,000 of casualties and MIA, 250,000 were taken prisoners. Although the Polish Army – considering the inactivity of the Allies – was in an unfavourable position – it managed to inflict serious losses to the enemies: 20,000 German soldiers were killed or MIA, 674 tanks and 319 armored vehicles destroyed or badly damaged, 230 aircraft shot down; the Red Army lost (killed and MIA) about 2,500 soldiers, 150 combat vehicles and 20 aircraft. The Soviet invasion of Poland, and lack of promised aid from the Western Allies, contributed to the Polish forces defeat by 6 October 1939.
A popular myth is that Polish cavalry armed with lances charged German tanks during the September 1939 campaign. This often repeated account, first reported by Italian journalists as German propaganda, concerned an action by the Polish 18th Lancer Regiment near Chojnice. This arose from misreporting of a single clash on 1 September 1939 near Krojanty, when two squadrons of the Polish 18th Lancers armed with sabers surprised and wiped out a German infantry formation with a mounted saber charge. Shortly after midnight the 2nd (Motorized) Division was compelled to withdraw by Polish cavalry, before the Poles were caught in the open by German armored cars. The story arose because some German armored cars appeared and gunned down 20 troopers as the cavalry escaped. Even this failed to persuade everyone to reexamine their beliefs—there were some who thought Polish cavalry had been improperly employed in 1939.
Between 1945 and 1990, the Polish government-in-exile operated in London, presenting itself as the only legal and legitimate representative of the Polish nation and challenging the legitimicy of the communist government in Warsaw 1990, the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, handed the presidential insignia to the newly elected President, Lech Wałęsa, signifying continuity between the Second and Third republics. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Second Polish Republic, at the time officially known as the Republic of Poland, was a country in Central Europe that existed between 7 October 1918 and 28 September 1939. The state was established in the final stage of World War I. The Second Republic ceased to exist in 1939, after Poland was invaded by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, marking the beginning of the European theatre of the Second World War. The Polish government-in-exile was established in Paris and later London after the fall of France in 1940.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "When, after several regional conflicts, most importantly the victorious Polish-Soviet war, the borders of the state were finalised in 1922, Poland's neighbours were Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union. It had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline known as the Polish Corridor on either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia. In 1938, the Second Republic was the sixth largest country in Europe. According to the 1921 census, the number of inhabitants was 27.2 million. By 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, this had grown to an estimated 35.1 million. Almost a third of the population came from minority groups: 13.9% Ruthenians; 10% Ashkenazi Jews; 3.1% Belarusians; 2.3% Germans and 3.4% Czechs and Lithuanians. At the same time, a significant number of ethnic Poles lived outside the country's borders.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Second Republic maintained moderate economic development. The cultural hubs of interwar Poland – Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Wilno, and Lwów – became major European cities and the sites of internationally acclaimed universities and other institutions of higher education. Although Polish Jews were some of the biggest supporters of Second Republic leader Józef Piłsudski, even after he returned to politics and consolidated power in 1926, in the 1930s, the Republic begun to openly discriminate against its Jewish (and to a lesser extent its Ukrainian) citizens, restricting Jewish entry into professions and placing limitations on Jewish businesses.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The official name of the state was the Republic of Poland. In the Polish language, it was referred to as Rzeczpospolita Polska (abbr. RP), with the term Rzeczpospolita being a traditional name for the republic when referring to various Polish states, including the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (considered to be the First Polish Republic, Pierwsza Rzeczpospolita), and later, the current Third Polish Republic. In other regionally-used official languages, the state was referred to as: Republik Polen in German, Польська Республіка (transcription: Polʹsʹka Respublika) in Ukrainian, Польская Рэспубліка (transcription: Poĺskaja Respublika) in Belarusian, and Lenkijos Respublika, in Lithuanian.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Between 14 November 1918 and 13 March 1919, the state was referred to in Polish as Republika Polska, instead of Rzeczpospolita Polska. Both terms mean the Republic; however, republika is a general term, while Rzeczpospolita traditionally refers exclusively to Polish states. Additionally, between 8 November 1918 and 16 August 1919, the Journal of Laws of the State of Poland referred to the country as the State of Poland (Polish: Państwo Polskie).",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Following the end of the Second World War, and the establishment of the later states of the Polish People's Republic and the Third Polish Republic, the historical state is referred to as the Second Polish Republic. In the Polish language, the country is traditionally referred to as II Rzeczpospolita (Druga Rzeczpospolita), which means the Second Republic.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After more than a century of partitions between the Austrian, the Prussian, and the Russian imperial powers, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign state at the end of the First World War in Europe in 1917–1918. The victorious Allies of the First World War confirmed the rebirth of Poland in the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919. It was one of the great stories of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Poland solidified its independence in a series of border wars fought by the newly formed Polish Army from 1918 to 1921. The extent of the eastern half of the interwar territory of Poland was settled diplomatically in 1922 and internationally recognised by the League of Nations.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Over the course of the First World War (1914-1918), the German Empire gradually dominated the Eastern Front as the Imperial Russian Army fell back. German and Austro-Hungarian armies seized the Russian-ruled part of what became Poland. In a failed attempt to resolve the Polish question as quickly as possible, Berlin set up the puppet Kingdom of Poland on 14 January 1917, with a governing Provisional Council of State and (from 15 October 1917) a Regency Council (Rada Regencyjna Królestwa Polskiego). The Council administered the country under German auspices (see also Mitteleuropa), pending the election of a king. More than a month before Germany surrendered on 11 November 1918 and the war ended, the Regency Council had dissolved the Provisional Council of State and announced its intention to restore Polish independence (7 October 1918). With the notable exception of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), most Polish political parties supported this move. On 23 October the Regency Council appointed a new government under Józef Świeżyński and began conscription into the Polish Army.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1918–1919, over 100 workers' councils sprang up on Polish territories; on 5 November 1918, in Lublin, the first Soviet of Delegates was established. On 6 November socialists proclaimed the Republic of Tarnobrzeg at Tarnobrzeg in Austrian Galicia. The same day the Socialist, Ignacy Daszyński, set up a Provisional People's Government of the Republic of Poland (Tymczasowy Rząd Ludowy Republiki Polskiej) in Lublin. On Sunday, 10 November at 7 a.m., Józef Piłsudski, newly freed from 16 months in a German prison in Magdeburg, returned by train to Warsaw. Piłsudski, together with Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was greeted at Warsaw's railway station by Regent Zdzisław Lubomirski and by Colonel Adam Koc. Next day, due to his popularity and support from most political parties, the Regency Council appointed Piłsudski as Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. On 14 November, the Council dissolved itself and transferred all its authority to Piłsudski as Chief of State (Naczelnik Państwa). After consultation with Piłsudski, Daszyński's government dissolved itself and a new government formed under Jędrzej Moraczewski. In 1918, the Kingdom of Italy became the first country in Europe to recognise Poland's renewed sovereignty.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Centres of government that formed at that time in Galicia (formerly Austrian-ruled southern Poland) included the National Council of the Principality of Cieszyn (established in November 1918), the Republic of Zakopane and the Polish Liquidation Committee (28 October). Soon afterward, the Polish–Ukrainian War broke out in Lwów (1 November 1918) between forces of the Military Committee of Ukrainians and the Polish irregular units made up of students known as the Lwów Eaglets, who were later supported by the Polish Army (see Battle of Lwów (1918), Battle of Przemyśl (1918)). Meanwhile, in western Poland, another war of national liberation began under the banner of the Greater Poland uprising (1918–1919). In January 1919, Czechoslovak forces attacked Polish units in the area of Trans-Olza (see Polish–Czechoslovak War). Soon afterwards, the Polish–Lithuanian War (ca 1919–1920) began, and, in August 1919, Polish-speaking residents of Upper Silesia initiated a series of three Silesian Uprisings. The most critical military conflict of that period, however, the Polish–Soviet War (1919-1921), ended in a decisive Polish victory.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Second Polish Republic was a parliamentary democracy from 1919 (see Small Constitution of 1919) to 1926, with the President having limited powers. The Parliament elected him, and he could appoint the Prime Minister as well as the government with the Sejm's (lower house's) approval, but he could only dissolve the Sejm with the Senate's consent. Moreover, his power to pass decrees was limited by the requirement that the Prime Minister and the appropriate other Minister had to verify his decrees with their signatures. Poland was one of the first countries in the world to recognise women's suffrage. Women in Poland were granted the right to vote on 28 November 1918 by a decree of General Józef Piłsudski.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The major political parties at this time were the Polish Socialist Party, National Democrats, various Peasant Parties, Christian Democrats, and political groups of ethnic minorities (German: German Social Democratic Party of Poland, Jewish: General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, United Jewish Socialist Workers Party, and Ukrainian: Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance). Frequently changing governments (see 1919 Polish legislative election, 1922 Polish legislative election) and other negative publicity the politicians received (such as accusations of corruption or the 1919 Polish coup attempt), made them increasingly unpopular. Major politicians at this time, in addition to General Piłsudski, included peasant activist Wincenty Witos (Prime Minister three times) and right-wing leader Roman Dmowski. Ethnic minorities were represented in the Sejm; e.g. in 1928 – 1930 there was the Ukrainian-Belarusian Club, with 26 Ukrainian and 4 Belarusian members.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After the Polish – Soviet war, Marshal Piłsudski led an intentionally modest life, writing historical books for a living. After he took power through a military coup in May 1926, he emphasised that he wanted to heal Polish society and politics of excessive partisan politics. His regime, accordingly, was called Sanacja in Polish. The 1928 parliamentary elections were still considered free and fair, although the pro-Piłsudski Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government won them. The following three parliamentary elections (in 1930, 1935 and 1938) were manipulated, with opposition activists sent to Bereza Kartuska prison (see also Brest trials). As a result, the pro-government party Camp of National Unity won huge majorities in them. Piłsudski died just after an authoritarian constitution was approved in the spring of 1935. During the last four years of the Second Polish Republic, the major politicians included President Ignacy Mościcki, Foreign Minister Józef Beck and the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The country was divided into 104 electoral districts, and those politicians who were forced to leave Poland founded Front Morges in 1936. The government that ruled the Second Polish Republic in its final years is frequently referred to as Piłsudski's colonels.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Interwar Poland had a large army of 950,000 soldiers on active duty: in 37 infantry divisions, 11 cavalry brigades, and two armored brigades, plus artillery units. Another 700,000 men served in the reserves. At the outbreak of the war, the Polish Army was able to put in the field almost one million soldiers, 4,300 guns, around 1,000 armored vehicles including in between 200 and 300 tanks (the majority of the armored vehicles were outclassed tankettes) and 745 aircraft (however, only around 450 of them were bombers and fighters available to fight as of September 1, 1939).",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The training of the Polish Army was thorough. The non-commissioned officers were a competent body of men with expert knowledge and high ideals. The officers, both senior and junior, constantly refreshed their training in the field and in the lecture hall, where modern technical achievement and the lessons of contemporary wars were demonstrated and discussed. The equipment of the Polish Army was less developed technically than that of Nazi Germany and its rearmament was slowed down by confidence in Western European military support and by budget difficulties.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Polish command system at the level of the entire Polish military and the armies was obsolete. The generals in command of the armies had to ask permission from the high command. The Polish military attempted to organize fronts made of armies' groups only when it was already too late during the Polish Defensive War in 1939.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After regaining its independence, Poland was faced with major economic difficulties. In addition to the devastation brought by the First World War, the exploitation of the Polish economy by the German and Russian occupying powers, and the sabotage performed by retreating armies, the new republic was faced with the task of economically unifying disparate economic regions, which had previously been part of different countries and different empires. Within the borders of the Republic were the remnants of three different economic systems, with five different currencies (the German mark, the Imperial Russian rouble, the Austrian krone, the Polish marka and the Ostrubel) and with little or no direct infrastructural links. The situation was so bad that neighbouring industrial centres, as well as major cities, lacked direct railway links because they had been parts of different jurisdictions and different empires. For example, there was no direct railway connection between Warsaw and Kraków until 1934. This situation was described by Melchior Wańkowicz in his book Sztafeta.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In addition to this was the massive destruction left after both the First World War and the Polish–Soviet War. There was also a great economic disparity between the eastern (commonly called Poland B) and western (called Poland A) parts of the country, with the western half, especially areas that had belonged to Prussia and the German Empire, being much more developed and prosperous. Frequent border closures and a customs war with Germany also had negative economic impacts on Poland. In 1924, Prime Minister Władysław Grabski, who was also the Economic Minister, introduced the złoty as a single common currency for Poland (replacing the marka), which remained a stable currency. The currency helped Poland to control the massive hyperinflation. It was the only country in Europe able to do this without foreign loans or aid. The average annual growth rate (GDP per capita) was 5.24% in 1920–29 and 0.34% in 1929–38.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Hostile relations with neighbours were a major problem for the economy of interbellum Poland. In the year 1937, foreign trade with all neighbours amounted to only 21% of Poland's total. Trade with Germany, Poland's most important neighbour, accounted for 14.3% of Polish exchange. Foreign trade with the Soviet Union (0.8%) was virtually nonexistent. Czechoslovakia accounted for 3.9%, Latvia for 0.3%, and Romania for 0.8%. By mid-1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Greater Germany was responsible for as much as 23% of Polish foreign trade.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Piłsudski's regime followed the conservative free-market economic tradition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its existence. Poland had one of the lowest taxation rates in Europe, with 9.3% of taxes as a distribution of national income. Piłsudski's regime was also heavily dependent on foreign investments and economies, with 45.4% of Polish equity capital controlled by foreign corporations. After the Great Depression, the Polish economy crumbled and failed to recover until Ignacy Mościcki's government introduced economic reforms with more government interventions with an increase in tax revenues and public spending after Piłsudski's death. These interventionist policies saw Poland's economy recover from the recession.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The basis of Poland's gradual recovery after the Great Depression was the mass economic development plans of the new government (see Four Year Plan) under economist Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, which oversaw the building of three key infrastructural elements. The first was the establishment of the Gdynia seaport, which allowed Poland to completely bypass Gdańsk (which was under heavy German pressure to boycott Polish coal exports). The second was construction of the 500-kilometre rail connection between Upper Silesia and Gdynia, called the Polish Coal Trunk-Line, which served freight trains with coal. The third was the creation of a central industrial district named COP – Centralny Okręg Przemysłowy (English: Central Industrial Region). Unfortunately, these developments were interrupted and largely destroyed by the German and Soviet invasion and the start of the Second World War. Other achievements of interbellum Poland included Stalowa Wola (a brand new city, built in a forest around a steel mill), Mościce (now a district of Tarnów, with a large nitrate factory), and the creation of a central bank called the Bank of Poland. There were several trade fairs, with the most popular being Poznań International Fair, Lwów's Targi Wschodnie, and Wilno's Targi Północne. Polish Radio had ten stations (see Radio stations in interwar Poland), with the eleventh one planned to be opened in the autumn of 1939. Furthermore, in 1935, Polish engineers began working on TV services. By early 1939, experts of the Polish Radio built four TV sets. The first movie broadcast by experimental Polish TV was Barbara Radziwiłłówna, and by 1940, a regular TV service was scheduled to begin operation.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Interbellum Poland was also a country with numerous social problems. Unemployment was high, and poverty in the countryside was widespread, which resulted in several cases of social unrest, such as the 1923 Kraków riot, and 1937 peasant strike in Poland. There were conflicts with national minorities, such as the Pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia (1930), relations with Polish neighbours were sometimes complicated (see Soviet raid on Stołpce, Polish–Czechoslovak border conflicts, and the 1938 Polish ultimatum to Lithuania). On top of this, there were natural disasters, such as the 1934 flood in Poland.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Interbellum Poland was unofficially divided into two parts – better developed \"Poland A\" in the west, and underdeveloped \"Poland B\" in the east. Polish industry was concentrated in the west, mostly in Polish Upper Silesia, and the adjacent Lesser Poland's province of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, where the bulk of coal mines and steel plants was located. Furthermore, heavy industry plants were located in Częstochowa (Huta Częstochowa, founded in 1896), Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski (Huta Ostrowiec, founded in 1837–1839), Stalowa Wola (brand new industrial city, which was built from scratch in 1937 – 1938), Chrzanów (Fablok, founded in 1919), Jaworzno, Trzebinia (oil refinery, opened in 1895), Łódź (the seat of Polish textile industry), Poznań (H. Cegielski – Poznań), Kraków and Warsaw (Ursus Factory). Further east, in Kresy, industrial centres included two major cities of the region – Lwów and Wilno (Elektrit).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Besides coal mining, Poland also had deposits of oil in Borysław, Drohobycz, Jasło and Gorlice (see Polmin), potassium salt (TESP), and basalt (Janowa Dolina). Apart from already-existing industrial areas, in the mid-1930s an ambitious, state-sponsored project called the Central Industrial Region was started under Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski. One of the characteristic features of the Polish economy in the interbellum was the gradual nationalisation of major plants. This was the case for the Ursus Factory (see Państwowe Zakłady Inżynieryjne) and several steelworks, such as Huta Pokój in Ruda Śląska – Nowy Bytom, Huta Królewska in Chorzów – Królewska Huta, Huta Laura in Siemianowice Śląskie, as well as Scheibler and Grohman Works in Łódź.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to the 1939 Statistical Yearbook of Poland, the total length of the railways in Poland (as of 31 December 1937) was 20,118 km (12,501 mi). Rail density was 5.2 km (3.2 mi) per 100 km (39 sq mi). Railways were very dense in the western part of the country, while in the east, especially Polesie, rail was non-existent in some counties. During the interbellum period, the Polish Government constructed several new lines, mainly in the central part of the country (see also Polish State Railroads Summer 1939). Construction of the extensive Warszawa Główna railway station was never finished due to the war, while Polish railways were famous for their punctuality (see Luxtorpeda, Strzała Bałtyku, Latający Wilnianin).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the interbellum, the road network of Poland was dense, but the quality of the roads was very poor – only 7% of all roads were paved and ready for automobile use, and none of the major cities were connected with each other by a good-quality highway. In 1939 the Poles built only one highway: 28 km of straight concrete road connecting the villages of Warlubie and Osiek (mid-northern Poland). It was designed by Italian engineer Piero Puricelli.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the mid-1930s, Poland had 340,000 km (211,266 mi) of roads, but only 58,000 had a hard surface (gravel, cobblestone or sett), and 2,500 were modern, with an asphalt or concrete surface. In different parts of the country, there were sections of paved roads, which suddenly ended, and were followed by dirt roads. The poor condition of the roads was the result of both long-lasting foreign dominance and inadequate funding. On 29 January 1931, the Polish Parliament created the State Road Fund, the purpose of which was to collect money for the construction and conservation of roads. The government drafted a 10-year plan, with road priorities: a highway from Wilno, through Warsaw and Kraków, to Zakopane (called Marshal Piłsudski Highway), asphalt highways from Warsaw to Poznań and Łódź, as well as a Warsaw ring road. However, the plan turned out to be too ambitious, with insufficient money in the national budget to pay for it. In January 1938, the Polish Road Congress estimated that Poland would need to spend three times as much money on roads to keep up with Western Europe.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1939, before the outbreak of the war, LOT Polish Airlines, which was established in 1929, had its hub at Warsaw Okęcie Airport. At that time, LOT maintained several services, both domestic and international. Warsaw had regular domestic connections with Gdynia-Rumia, Danzig-Langfuhr, Katowice-Muchowiec, Kraków-Rakowice-Czyżyny, Lwów-Skniłów, Poznań-Ławica, and Wilno-Porubanek. Furthermore, in cooperation with Air France, LARES, Lufthansa, and Malert, international connections were maintained with Athens, Beirut, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Helsinki, Kaunas, London, Paris, Prague, Riga, Rome, Tallinn, and Zagreb.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Statistically, the majority of citizens lived in the countryside (75% in 1921). Farmers made up 65% of the population. In 1929, agricultural production made up 65% of Poland's GNP. After 123 years of partitions, regions of the country were very unevenly developed. The lands of the former German Empire were the most advanced; in Greater Poland, Upper Silesia and Pomerelia, farming and crops were on a Western European level. The situation was much worse in parts of Congress Poland, the Eastern Borderlands, and what was formerly Galicia, where agriculture was quite backward and primitive, with a large number of small farms, unable to succeed in either the domestic or international market. Another problem was the overpopulation of the countryside, which resulted in chronic unemployment. Living conditions were so bad in several eastern regions, such as the counties inhabited by the Hutsul minority, that there was permanent starvation. Farmers rebelled against the government (see: 1937 peasant strike in Poland), and the situation began to change in the late 1930s, due to the construction of several factories for the Central Industrial Region, which gave employment to thousands of rural and small town residents.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Beginning in June 1925, there was a customs' war, with the revanchist Weimar Republic imposing a trade embargo against Poland for nearly a decade; it involved tariffs and broad economic restrictions. After 1933 the trade war ended. The new agreements regulated and promoted trade. Germany became Poland's largest trading partner, followed by Britain. In October 1938, Germany granted a credit of 60,000,000 RM to Poland (120,000,000 zloty, or £4,800,000) which was never realised, due to the outbreak of war. Germany would deliver factory equipment and machinery in return for Polish timber and agricultural produce. This new trade was to be in addition to the existing German-Polish trade agreements.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1919, the Polish government introduced compulsory education for all children aged 7 to 14, in an effort to limit illiteracy, which was widespread, especially in the former Russian Partition and the Austrian Partition of eastern Poland. In 1921, one-third of citizens of Poland remained illiterate (38% in the countryside). The process was slow, but by 1931 the illiteracy level had dropped to 23% overall (27% in the countryside) and further down to 18% in 1937. By 1939, over 90% of children attended school. In 1932, Janusz Jędrzejewicz, the Minister for Religion and Education, carried out a major reform which introduced two main levels of education: common school (szkoła powszechna), with three levels – 4 grades + 2 grades + 1 grade; and middle school (szkoła średnia), with two levels – 4 grades of comprehensive middle school and 2 grades of specified high school (classical, humanistic, natural and mathematical). A graduate of middle school received a small matura, while a graduate of high school received a big matura, which enabled them to seek university-level education.",
"title": "Education and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Before 1918, Poland had three universities: Jagiellonian University, the University of Warsaw and Lwów University. The Catholic University of Lublin was established in 1918; Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, in 1919; and finally, in 1922, after the annexation of the Republic of Central Lithuania, Wilno University became the Republic's sixth university. There were also three technical colleges: the Warsaw University of Technology, Lwów Polytechnic and the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, established in 1919. Warsaw University of Life Sciences was an agricultural institute. By 1939, there were around 50,000 students enrolled in further education. 28% of students at universities were women, which was the second highest share in Europe.",
"title": "Education and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Polish science in the interbellum was renowned for its mathematicians gathered around the Lwów School of Mathematics, the Kraków School of Mathematics, as well as the Warsaw School of Mathematics. There were world-class philosophers in the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and philosophy. Florian Znaniecki founded Polish sociological studies. Rudolf Weigl invented a vaccine against typhus. Bronisław Malinowski counted among the most important anthropologists of the 20th century.",
"title": "Education and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In Polish literature, the 1920s were marked by the domination of poetry. Polish poets were divided into two groups – the Skamanderites (Jan Lechoń, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz) and the Futurists (Anatol Stern, Bruno Jasieński, Aleksander Wat, Julian Przyboś). Apart from well-established novelists (Stefan Żeromski, Władysław Reymont), new names appeared in the interbellum – Zofia Nałkowska, Maria Dąbrowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jan Parandowski, Bruno Schultz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz. Among other notable artists there were sculptor Xawery Dunikowski, painters Julian Fałat, Wojciech Kossak and Jacek Malczewski, composers Karol Szymanowski, Feliks Nowowiejski, and Artur Rubinstein, singer Jan Kiepura.",
"title": "Education and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Theatre was immensely popular in the interbellum, with three main centres in the cities of Warsaw, Wilno and Lwów. Altogether, there were 103 theatres in Poland and a number of other theatrical institutions (including 100 folk theatres). In 1936, different shows were seen by 5 million people, and main figures of Polish theatre of the time were Juliusz Osterwa, Stefan Jaracz, and Leon Schiller. Also, before the outbreak of the war, there were approximately one million radios (see Radio stations in interwar Poland).",
"title": "Education and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The administrative division of the Second Republic was based on a three-tier system, referring to the administrative division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On the lowest rung were the gminy, local town and village governments akin to districts or parishes. These were then grouped together into powiaty (akin to counties), which, in turn, were grouped as województwa (voivodeships, akin to provinces). This administrative system passed into the modern Third Polish Republic.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Historically, Poland was almost always a multiethnic country. This was especially true for the Second Republic, when independence was once again achieved in the wake of the First World War and the subsequent Polish–Soviet War, the latter war being officially ended by the Peace of Riga. The census of 1921 shows 30.8% of the population consisted of ethnic minorities, compared with a share of 1.6% (solely identifying with a non-Polish ethnic group) or 3.8% (including those identifying with both the Polish ethnicity and with another ethnic group) in 2011. The first spontaneous flight of about 500,000 Poles from the Soviet Union occurred during the reconstitution of sovereign Poland. In the second wave, between November 1919 and June 1924, some 1,200,000 people left the territory of the USSR for Poland. It is estimated that some 460,000 of them spoke Polish as the first language. According to the 1931 Polish Census: 68.9% of the population was Polish, 13.9% were Ukrainian, around 9% Jewish, 3.1% Belarusian, 2.3% German and 2.8% other, including Lithuanian, Czech, Armenian, Russian, and Romani. The situation of minorities was a complex subject and changed during the period.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Poland was also a nation of many religions. In 1921, 16,057,229 Poles (approx. 62.5%) were Roman (Latin) Catholics, 3,031,057 citizens of Poland (approx. 11.8%) were Eastern Rite Catholics (mostly Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Armenian Rite Catholics), 2,815,817 (approx. 10.95%) were Orthodox, 2,771,949 (approx. 10.8%) were Jewish, and 940,232 (approx. 3.7%) were Protestants (mostly Lutheran).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "By 1931, Poland had the second largest Jewish population in the world, with one-fifth of all the world's Jews residing within its borders (approx. 3,136,000). The urban population of interbellum Poland was rising steadily; in 1921, only 24% of Poles lived in the cities, in the late 1930s, that proportion grew to 30%. In more than a decade, the population of Warsaw grew by 200,000, Łódź by 150,000, and Poznań – by 100,000. This was due not only to internal migration, but also to an extremely high birth rate.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "From the 1920s, the Polish government excluded Jews from receiving government bank loans, public sector employment, and obtaining business licenses. From the 1930s, measures were taken against Jewish shops, Jewish export firms, Shechita as well as limitations being placed on Jewish admission to the medical and legal professions, Jews in business associations and the enrollment of Jews into universities. The political movement National Democracy (Endecja, from the abbreviation \"ND\") often organised anti-Jewish business boycotts. Following the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the Endecja intensified their efforts, which triggered violence in extreme cases in smaller towns across the country. In 1937, the National Democracy movement passed resolutions that \"its main aim and duty must be to remove the Jews from all spheres of social, economic, and cultural life in Poland\". The government in response organised the Camp of National Unity (OZON), which in 1938 took control of the Polish Sejm and subsequently drafted anti-Semitic legislation similar to the Anti-Jewish laws in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. OZON advocated mass emigration of Jews from Poland, numerus clausus (see also Ghetto benches), and other limitations on Jewish rights. According to William W. Hagen, by 1939, prior to the war, Polish Jews were threatened with conditions similar to those in Nazi Germany.",
"title": "Status of ethnic minorities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The pre-war government also restricted the rights of people who declared Ukrainian nationality, belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church and inhabited the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic. Ukrainian was restricted in every field possible, especially in governmental institutions, and the term \"Ruthenian\" was enforced in an attempt to ban the use of the term \"Ukrainian\". Ukrainians were categorised as uneducated second-class peasants or third world people, and rarely settled outside the Eastern Borderland region due to the prevailing Ukrainophobia and restrictions imposed. Numerous attempts at restoring the Ukrainian state were suppressed and any existent violence or terrorism initiated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was emphasised to create the image of a \"brutal Eastern savage\".",
"title": "Status of ethnic minorities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Second Polish Republic was mainly flat with an average elevation of 233 m (764 ft) above sea level, except for the southernmost Carpathian Mountains (after the Second World War and its border changes, the average elevation of Poland decreased to 173 m (568 ft)). Only 13% of territory, along the southern border, was higher than 300 m (980 ft). The highest elevation in the country was Mount Rysy, which rises 2,499 m (8,199 ft) in the Tatra Range of the Carpathians, approximately 95 km (59 mi) south of Kraków. Between October 1938 and September 1939, the highest elevation was Lodowy Szczyt (known in Slovak as Ľadový štít), which rises 2,627 m (8,619 ft) above sea level. The largest lake was Lake Narach.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The country's total area, after the annexation of Trans-Olza, was 389,720 km (150,470 sq mi). It extended 903 km (561 mi) from north to south and 894 km (556 mi) from east to west. On 1 January 1938, total length of boundaries was 5,529 km (3,436 mi), including: 140 km (87 mi) of coastline (out of which 71 km (44 mi) were made by the Hel Peninsula), the 1,412 km (877 mi) with Soviet Union, 948 kilometers with Czechoslovakia (until 1938), 1,912 km (1,188 mi) with Germany (together with East Prussia), and 1,081 km (672 mi) with other countries (Lithuania, Romania, Latvia, Danzig). The warmest yearly average temperature was in Kraków among major cities of the Second Polish Republic, at 9.1 °C (48.4 °F) in 1938; and the coldest in Wilno (7.6 °C or 45.7 °F in 1938). Extreme geographical points of Poland included Przeświata River in Somino to the north (located in the Braslaw county of the Wilno Voivodeship); Manczin River to the south (located in the Kosów county of the Stanisławów Voivodeship); Spasibiorki near railway to Połock to the east (located in the Dzisna county of the Wilno Voivodeship); and Mukocinek near Warta River and Meszyn Lake to the west (located in the Międzychód county of the Poznań Voivodeship).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Almost 75% of the territory of interbellum Poland was drained northward into the Baltic Sea by the Vistula (total area of drainage basin of the Vistula within boundaries of the Second Polish Republic was 180,300 km (69,600 sq mi), the Niemen (51,600 km or 19,900 sq mi), the Oder (46,700 km or 18,000 sq mi) and the Daugava (10,400 km or 4,000 sq mi). The remaining part of the country was drained southward, into the Black Sea, by the rivers that drain into the Dnieper (Pripyat, Horyn and Styr, all together 61,500 km or 23,700 sq mi) as well as Dniester (41,400 km or 16,000 sq mi)",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The beginning of the Second World War in September 1939 ended the sovereign Second Polish Republic. The German invasion of Poland began on 1 September 1939, one week after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. On that day, Germany and Slovakia attacked Poland, and on 17 September the Soviets attacked eastern Poland. Warsaw fell to the Nazis on 28 September after a twenty-day siege. Open organised Polish resistance ended on 6 October 1939 after the Battle of Kock, with Germany and the Soviet Union occupying most of the country. Lithuania annexed the area of Wilno, and Slovakia seized areas along Poland's southern border – including Górna Orawa and Tatranská Javorina - which Poland had annexed from Czechoslovakia in October 1938. Poland did not surrender to the invaders, but continued fighting under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile and of the Polish Underground State. After the signing of the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation on 28 September 1939, Polish areas occupied by Nazi Germany either became directly incorporated into Nazi Germany, or became part of the General Government. The Soviet Union, following Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus (22 October 1939), annexed eastern Poland partly to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and partly to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (November 1939).",
"title": "Invasion of Poland in 1939"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Polish war plans (Plan West and Plan East) failed as soon as Germany invaded in 1939. The Polish losses in combat against Germans (killed and missing in action) amounted to ca. 70,000 men. Some 420,000 of them were taken prisoners. Losses against the Red Army (which invaded Poland on 17 September) added up to 6,000 to 7,000 of casualties and MIA, 250,000 were taken prisoners. Although the Polish Army – considering the inactivity of the Allies – was in an unfavourable position – it managed to inflict serious losses to the enemies: 20,000 German soldiers were killed or MIA, 674 tanks and 319 armored vehicles destroyed or badly damaged, 230 aircraft shot down; the Red Army lost (killed and MIA) about 2,500 soldiers, 150 combat vehicles and 20 aircraft. The Soviet invasion of Poland, and lack of promised aid from the Western Allies, contributed to the Polish forces defeat by 6 October 1939.",
"title": "Invasion of Poland in 1939"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "A popular myth is that Polish cavalry armed with lances charged German tanks during the September 1939 campaign. This often repeated account, first reported by Italian journalists as German propaganda, concerned an action by the Polish 18th Lancer Regiment near Chojnice. This arose from misreporting of a single clash on 1 September 1939 near Krojanty, when two squadrons of the Polish 18th Lancers armed with sabers surprised and wiped out a German infantry formation with a mounted saber charge. Shortly after midnight the 2nd (Motorized) Division was compelled to withdraw by Polish cavalry, before the Poles were caught in the open by German armored cars. The story arose because some German armored cars appeared and gunned down 20 troopers as the cavalry escaped. Even this failed to persuade everyone to reexamine their beliefs—there were some who thought Polish cavalry had been improperly employed in 1939.",
"title": "Invasion of Poland in 1939"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Between 1945 and 1990, the Polish government-in-exile operated in London, presenting itself as the only legal and legitimate representative of the Polish nation and challenging the legitimicy of the communist government in Warsaw 1990, the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, handed the presidential insignia to the newly elected President, Lech Wałęsa, signifying continuity between the Second and Third republics.",
"title": "Invasion of Poland in 1939"
}
]
| The Second Polish Republic, at the time officially known as the Republic of Poland, was a country in Central Europe that existed between 7 October 1918 and 28 September 1939. The state was established in the final stage of World War I. The Second Republic ceased to exist in 1939, after Poland was invaded by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, marking the beginning of the European theatre of the Second World War. The Polish government-in-exile was established in Paris and later London after the fall of France in 1940. When, after several regional conflicts, most importantly the victorious Polish-Soviet war, the borders of the state were finalised in 1922, Poland's neighbours were Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union. It had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline known as the Polish Corridor on either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia. In 1938, the Second Republic was the sixth largest country in Europe. According to the 1921 census, the number of inhabitants was 27.2 million. By 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, this had grown to an estimated 35.1 million. Almost a third of the population came from minority groups: 13.9% Ruthenians; 10% Ashkenazi Jews; 3.1% Belarusians; 2.3% Germans and 3.4% Czechs and Lithuanians. At the same time, a significant number of ethnic Poles lived outside the country's borders. The Second Republic maintained moderate economic development. The cultural hubs of interwar Poland – Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Wilno, and Lwów – became major European cities and the sites of internationally acclaimed universities and other institutions of higher education. Although Polish Jews were some of the biggest supporters of Second Republic leader Józef Piłsudski, even after he returned to politics and consolidated power in 1926, in the 1930s, the Republic begun to openly discriminate against its Jewish citizens, restricting Jewish entry into professions and placing limitations on Jewish businesses. | 2001-12-05T21:13:16Z | 2023-12-27T04:55:56Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Polish_Republic |
14,246 | Hedwig | Hedwig may refer to: | [
{
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"text": "Hedwig may refer to:",
"title": ""
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| Hedwig may refer to: | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-09-03T01:44:06Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig |
14,251 | HMS Resolution | Several ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Resolution. However, the first English warship to bear the name Resolution was actually the first rate Prince Royal (built in 1610 and rebuilt in 1641), which was renamed Resolution in 1650 following the inauguration of the Commonwealth, and continued to bear that name until 1660, when the name Prince Royal was restored. The name Resolution was bestowed on the first of the vessels listed below:
Ships named Resolution of the Royal Navy have earned the following battle honours: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Several ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Resolution. However, the first English warship to bear the name Resolution was actually the first rate Prince Royal (built in 1610 and rebuilt in 1641), which was renamed Resolution in 1650 following the inauguration of the Commonwealth, and continued to bear that name until 1660, when the name Prince Royal was restored. The name Resolution was bestowed on the first of the vessels listed below:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Ships named Resolution of the Royal Navy have earned the following battle honours:",
"title": "Battle honours"
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]
| Several ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Resolution. However, the first English warship to bear the name Resolution was actually the first rate Prince Royal, which was renamed Resolution in 1650 following the inauguration of the Commonwealth, and continued to bear that name until 1660, when the name Prince Royal was restored. The name Resolution was bestowed on the first of the vessels listed below: English ship Resolution (1654), a 50-gun third-rate frigate launched 1654 as Tredagh; renamed Resolution 1660; destroyed after grounding by a Dutch fireship in the St James's Day Battle 4 August 1666.
HMS Resolution (1667), a 70-gun third-rate ship of the line launched 1667; rebuilt 1698; foundered in 1703.
HMS Resolution (1705), a 70-gun third rate launched 1705; run ashore to avoid capture 1707.
HMS Resolution (1708), a 70-gun third rate launched 1708; wrecked 1711.
HMS Resolution (1758), a 74-gun third rate launched 1758; run aground and lost 1759 at the Battle of Quiberon Bay.
HMS Resolution (1770), a 74-gun third rate launched 1770; broken up 1813.
HMS Resolution (1771), the vessel of Captain James Cook in his explorations.
HMS Resolution (1779), a cutter purchased 1779; went missing in the North Sea June 1797, presumed to have foundered.
HMS Resolution (1892), a Royal Sovereign-class battleship in service from 1893 to 1914.
HMS Resolution (09), a Revenge-class battleship in service from 1915 to 1944.
HMS Resolution (S22), lead ship of the Resolution-class ballistic missile submarines in service from 1966 to 1994. | 2023-07-22T06:59:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Resolution |
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14,254 | Helen Keller | Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
She was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968. During this time, she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss.
Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities, for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson, and this was also adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954 it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".
Keller was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971. She was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.
Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896), and Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as "Kate". Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, that Helen's paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.
Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army. The family were part of the slaveholding elite before the war, but lost status later. Her mother was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.
Keller's paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that "there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his".
At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain". Contemporary doctors believe it might have been meningitis, caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus), or possibly Haemophilus influenzae. (This could have caused the same symptoms, but is a less likely cause due to its 97% juvenile mortality rate at that time.) The illness left Keller both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog".
At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the family cook, and understood the girl's signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.
In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan developed as Keller's governess and later her companion.
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller remembered how she soon began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures: "I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed. I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation."
The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment:
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
Helen Keller was viewed as isolated but was very in touch with the outside world. She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch. She was delayed at picking up language, but that did not stop her from having a voice.
In May 1888, Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1893, Keller, along with Sullivan, attended William Wade House and Finishing School. In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to "hear" people's speech using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. She became proficient at using braille and using fingerspelling to communicate. Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.
Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 – March 21, 1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. "While in her thirties Helen had a love affair, became secretly engaged, and defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved." He was the fingerspelling socialist "Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her private secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill." At the time, her father had died and Sullivan was recovering in Lake Placid and Puerto Rico. Keller had moved with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama.
Anne Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding her hand, after falling into a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis. Keller and Thomson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after Thomson's death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.
The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
—Helen Keller, 1911
On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building. Details of her talk were provided in the weekly Dunn County News on January 22, 1916:
A message of optimism, of hope, of good cheer, and of loving service was brought to Menomonie Saturday—a message that will linger long with those fortunate enough to have received it. This message came with the visit of Helen Keller and her teacher, Mrs. John Macy, and both had a hand in imparting it Saturday evening to a splendid audience that filled The Memorial. The wonderful girl who has so brilliantly triumphed over the triple afflictions of blindness, dumbness and deafness, gave a talk with her own lips on "Happiness", and it will be remembered always as a piece of inspired teaching by those who heard it.
Keller became a world-famous speaker and author. She was an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health, and nutrition. In 1916, she sent money to the NAACP, as she was ashamed of the Southern un-Christian treatment of "colored people".
In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered political radicals allied with leftist politics.
Keller, who believed that the poor were "ground down by industrial oppression", wanted children born into poor families to have the same opportunities to succeed that she had enjoyed. She wrote, "I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. I have learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone."
In 1909 Keller became a member of the Socialist Party; she actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women's right to vote and the effects of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention. She had speech therapy to have her voice understood better by the public. When the Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested until her work was finally published.
She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before reading Progress and Poverty by Henry George, Helen Keller was already a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step in the right direction. She later wrote of finding "in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature".
Keller claimed that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development". Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:
At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.
In 1912, Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, known as the Wobblies), saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW, Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:
I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the former a "life of shame" that women used to support themselves, which contributed to their contracting syphilis. Untreated, it was a leading cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts for instigating her support of socialism.
Keller supported eugenics which had become popular with new understandings (as well as misapprehensions) of principles of biological inheritance. In 1915, she wrote in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities, saying that their lives were not worthwhile and they would likely become criminals. Keller also expressed concerns about human overpopulation.
From 1946 to 1957 Keller visited 35 countries. In 1948 she went to New Zealand and visited deaf schools in Christchurch and Auckland. She met Deaf Society of Canterbury Life Member Patty Still in Christchurch.
Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles.
One of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was The Frost King (1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.
At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It recounts the story of her life up to age 21 and was written during her time in college.
In an article Keller wrote in 1907, she brought to public attention the fact that many cases of childhood blindness could be prevented by washing the eyes of every newborn baby with a disinfectant solution. At the time, only a fraction of doctors and midwives were doing this. Thanks to Keller's advocacy, this commonsense public health measure was swiftly and widely adopted.
Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a series of essays on socialism, was published in 1913.
When Keller was young, Anne Sullivan introduced her to Phillips Brooks, who introduced her to Christianity, Keller famously saying: "I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!"
Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and then in 1994 extensively revised and re-issued under the title Light in My Darkness. It advocates the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Christian theologian and mystic who gave a spiritual interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and who claimed that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had already taken place.
Keller described the core of her belief in these words:
But in Swedenborg's teaching it [Divine Providence] is shown to be the government of God's Love and Wisdom and the creation of uses. Since His Life cannot be less in one being than another, or His Love manifested less fully in one thing than another, His Providence must needs be universal ... He has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he is faithful to his ideals of right living.
The Helen Keller Archives in New York are owned by the American Foundation for the Blind. Archival material of Helen Keller stored in New York was lost when the Twin Towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks.
Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.
On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair.
Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.
Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She and her companion Anne Sullivan appeared in a silent film, Deliverance (1919), which told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style.
She was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress Katharine Cornell. She was also profiled in The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by Hearst Entertainment.
The Miracle Worker is a cycle of dramatic works ultimately derived from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The common title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Sullivan as a "miracle worker". Its first realization was the 1957 Playhouse 90 teleplay of that title by William Gibson, starring Patty McCormack as Helen and Teresa Wright as Sullivan. He adapted it for a Broadway production in 1959 and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It was remade for television in 1979 and 2000."
An anime movie called The Story of Helen Keller: Angel of Love and Light was made in 1981.
In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. This film, a semi-sequel to The Miracle Worker, recounts her college years and her early adult life. None of the early movies hint at the social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for social equality.
The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's story, from her childhood to her graduation.
A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by the Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.
On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped widespread attention. Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, it is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.
Video footage showing Helen Keller speaking also exists.
A biography of Helen Keller was written by the German Jewish author Hildegard Johanna Kaeser.
A 10-by-7-foot (3.0 by 2.1 m) painting titled The Advocate: Tribute to Helen Keller was created by three artists from Kerala, India as a tribute to Helen Keller. The Painting was created in association with a non-profit organization Art d'Hope Foundation, artists groups Palette People and XakBoX Design & Art Studio. This painting was created for a fundraising event to help blind students in India and was inaugurated by M. G. Rajamanikyam, IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Keller day (June 27, 2016). The painting depicts the major events of Helen Keller's life and is one of the biggest paintings done based on Helen Keller's life.
In 2020, the documentary essay Her Socialist Smile by John Gianvito evolves around Keller's first public talk in 1913 before a general audience, when she started speaking out on behalf of progressive causes.
In 1999, Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th century.
In 1999, Keller was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its state quarter. The Alabama state quarter is the only circulating U.S. coin to feature braille.
The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, is dedicated to her.
Streets are named after Helen Keller in Zürich, Switzerland; in the US; in Getafe, Spain; in Vienna, Austria; in Lod, Israel; in Lisbon, Portugal; and in Caen, France.
A preschool for the deaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally named after Helen Keller by its founder, K. K. Srinivasan.
In 1973, Helen Keller was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
A stamp was issued in 1980 by the United States Postal Service depicting Keller and Sullivan, to mark the centennial of Keller's birth. That year her birth was also recognized by a presidential proclamation from U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Pennsylvania annually commemorates her June 27 birthday as Helen Keller Day.
On October 7, 2009, the State of Alabama donated a bronze statue of Keller to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a replacement for its 1908 statue of education reformer Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "She was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968. During this time, she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities, for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson, and this was also adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954 it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual \"Helen Keller Day\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Keller was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971. She was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896), and Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as \"Kate\". Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, that Helen's paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army. The family were part of the slaveholding elite before the war, but lost status later. Her mother was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Keller's paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that \"there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his\".",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as \"an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain\". Contemporary doctors believe it might have been meningitis, caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus), or possibly Haemophilus influenzae. (This could have caused the same symptoms, but is a less likely cause due to its 97% juvenile mortality rate at that time.) The illness left Keller both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, \"at sea in a dense fog\".",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the family cook, and understood the girl's signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan developed as Keller's governess and later her companion.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as \"my soul's birthday\". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with \"d-o-l-l\" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for \"mug\", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller remembered how she soon began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures: \"I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed. I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation.\"",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of \"water\". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment:",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Helen Keller was viewed as isolated but was very in touch with the outside world. She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch. She was delayed at picking up language, but that did not stop her from having a voice.",
"title": "Early childhood and illness"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In May 1888, Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1893, Keller, along with Sullivan, attended William Wade House and Finishing School. In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.",
"title": "Formal education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to \"hear\" people's speech using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. She became proficient at using braille and using fingerspelling to communicate. Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.",
"title": "Formal education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 – March 21, 1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.",
"title": "Companions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. \"While in her thirties Helen had a love affair, became secretly engaged, and defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved.\" He was the fingerspelling socialist \"Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her private secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill.\" At the time, her father had died and Sullivan was recovering in Lake Placid and Puerto Rico. Keller had moved with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama.",
"title": "Companions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Anne Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding her hand, after falling into a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis. Keller and Thomson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after Thomson's death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.",
"title": "Companions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "—Helen Keller, 1911",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building. Details of her talk were provided in the weekly Dunn County News on January 22, 1916:",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A message of optimism, of hope, of good cheer, and of loving service was brought to Menomonie Saturday—a message that will linger long with those fortunate enough to have received it. This message came with the visit of Helen Keller and her teacher, Mrs. John Macy, and both had a hand in imparting it Saturday evening to a splendid audience that filled The Memorial. The wonderful girl who has so brilliantly triumphed over the triple afflictions of blindness, dumbness and deafness, gave a talk with her own lips on \"Happiness\", and it will be remembered always as a piece of inspired teaching by those who heard it.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Keller became a world-famous speaker and author. She was an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health, and nutrition. In 1916, she sent money to the NAACP, as she was ashamed of the Southern un-Christian treatment of \"colored people\".",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered political radicals allied with leftist politics.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Keller, who believed that the poor were \"ground down by industrial oppression\", wanted children born into poor families to have the same opportunities to succeed that she had enjoyed. She wrote, \"I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. I have learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone.\"",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1909 Keller became a member of the Socialist Party; she actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women's right to vote and the effects of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention. She had speech therapy to have her voice understood better by the public. When the Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested until her work was finally published.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before reading Progress and Poverty by Henry George, Helen Keller was already a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step in the right direction. She later wrote of finding \"in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature\".",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Keller claimed that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her \"mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development\". Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1912, Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, known as the Wobblies), saying that parliamentary socialism was \"sinking in the political bog\". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW, Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the former a \"life of shame\" that women used to support themselves, which contributed to their contracting syphilis. Untreated, it was a leading cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts for instigating her support of socialism.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Keller supported eugenics which had become popular with new understandings (as well as misapprehensions) of principles of biological inheritance. In 1915, she wrote in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities, saying that their lives were not worthwhile and they would likely become criminals. Keller also expressed concerns about human overpopulation.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "From 1946 to 1957 Keller visited 35 countries. In 1948 she went to New Zealand and visited deaf schools in Christchurch and Auckland. She met Deaf Society of Canterbury Life Member Patty Still in Christchurch.",
"title": "Career, writing and political activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "One of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was The Frost King (1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It recounts the story of her life up to age 21 and was written during her time in college.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In an article Keller wrote in 1907, she brought to public attention the fact that many cases of childhood blindness could be prevented by washing the eyes of every newborn baby with a disinfectant solution. At the time, only a fraction of doctors and midwives were doing this. Thanks to Keller's advocacy, this commonsense public health measure was swiftly and widely adopted.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a series of essays on socialism, was published in 1913.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "When Keller was young, Anne Sullivan introduced her to Phillips Brooks, who introduced her to Christianity, Keller famously saying: \"I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and then in 1994 extensively revised and re-issued under the title Light in My Darkness. It advocates the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Christian theologian and mystic who gave a spiritual interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and who claimed that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had already taken place.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Keller described the core of her belief in these words:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "But in Swedenborg's teaching it [Divine Providence] is shown to be the government of God's Love and Wisdom and the creation of uses. Since His Life cannot be less in one being than another, or His Love manifested less fully in one thing than another, His Providence must needs be universal ... He has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he is faithful to his ideals of right living.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Helen Keller Archives in New York are owned by the American Foundation for the Blind. Archival material of Helen Keller stored in New York was lost when the Twin Towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.",
"title": "Later life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair.",
"title": "Later life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.",
"title": "Later life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She and her companion Anne Sullivan appeared in a silent film, Deliverance (1919), which told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "She was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress Katharine Cornell. She was also profiled in The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by Hearst Entertainment.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Miracle Worker is a cycle of dramatic works ultimately derived from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The common title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Sullivan as a \"miracle worker\". Its first realization was the 1957 Playhouse 90 teleplay of that title by William Gibson, starring Patty McCormack as Helen and Teresa Wright as Sullivan. He adapted it for a Broadway production in 1959 and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It was remade for television in 1979 and 2000.\"",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "An anime movie called The Story of Helen Keller: Angel of Love and Light was made in 1981.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. This film, a semi-sequel to The Miracle Worker, recounts her college years and her early adult life. None of the early movies hint at the social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for social equality.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's story, from her childhood to her graduation.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by the Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped widespread attention. Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, it is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Video footage showing Helen Keller speaking also exists.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "A biography of Helen Keller was written by the German Jewish author Hildegard Johanna Kaeser.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "A 10-by-7-foot (3.0 by 2.1 m) painting titled The Advocate: Tribute to Helen Keller was created by three artists from Kerala, India as a tribute to Helen Keller. The Painting was created in association with a non-profit organization Art d'Hope Foundation, artists groups Palette People and XakBoX Design & Art Studio. This painting was created for a fundraising event to help blind students in India and was inaugurated by M. G. Rajamanikyam, IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Keller day (June 27, 2016). The painting depicts the major events of Helen Keller's life and is one of the biggest paintings done based on Helen Keller's life.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 2020, the documentary essay Her Socialist Smile by John Gianvito evolves around Keller's first public talk in 1913 before a general audience, when she started speaking out on behalf of progressive causes.",
"title": "Portrayals"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 1999, Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th century.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 1999, Keller was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its state quarter. The Alabama state quarter is the only circulating U.S. coin to feature braille.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, is dedicated to her.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Streets are named after Helen Keller in Zürich, Switzerland; in the US; in Getafe, Spain; in Vienna, Austria; in Lod, Israel; in Lisbon, Portugal; and in Caen, France.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "A preschool for the deaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally named after Helen Keller by its founder, K. K. Srinivasan.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1973, Helen Keller was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "A stamp was issued in 1980 by the United States Postal Service depicting Keller and Sullivan, to mark the centennial of Keller's birth. That year her birth was also recognized by a presidential proclamation from U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Pennsylvania annually commemorates her June 27 birthday as Helen Keller Day.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "On October 7, 2009, the State of Alabama donated a bronze statue of Keller to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a replacement for its 1908 statue of education reformer Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry.",
"title": "Posthumous honors"
}
]
| Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968. During this time, she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss. Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities, for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson, and this was also adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954 it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day". Keller was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971. She was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015. | 2001-12-07T02:41:37Z | 2023-12-06T19:27:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller |
14,257 | Haddocks' Eyes | "Haddocks' Eyes" is the nickname of the name of a song sung by The White Knight from Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, chapter VIII.
"Haddocks' Eyes" is an example used to elaborate on the symbolic status of the concept of "name": a name as identification marker may be assigned to anything, including another name, thus introducing different levels of symbolization. It has been discussed in several works on logic and philosophy.
The White Knight explains to Alice a confusing nomenclature for the song.
"You are sad," the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a song to comfort you." "Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. "It's long," said the Knight, "but very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else—" "Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. "Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'." "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'." "Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself. "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways And Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!" "Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On A Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
To summarize:
The complicated terminology distinguishing between 'the song, what the song is called, the name of the song, and what the name of the song is called' both uses and mentions the use–mention distinction.
The White Knight sings the song to a tune he claims as his own invention, but which Alice recognises as "I give thee all, I can no more". By the time Alice heard it, she was already tired of poetry.
The song parodies the plot, but not the style or metre, of "Resolution and Independence" by William Wordsworth.
I'll tell thee everything I can: There's little to relate. I saw an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate. "Who are you, aged man?" I said, "And how is it you live?" And his answer trickled through my head, Like water through a sieve. He said "I look for butterflies That sleep among the wheat: I make them into mutton-pies, And sell them in the street. I sell them unto men," he said, "Who sail on stormy seas; And that's the way I get my bread – A trifle, if you please." But I was thinking of a plan To dye one's whiskers green, And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen. So, having no reply to give To what the old man said, I cried "Come, tell me how you live!" And thumped him on the head. His accents mild took up the tale: He said "I go my ways, And when I find a mountain-rill, I set it in a blaze; And thence they make a stuff they call Rowlands' Macassar-Oil – Yet twopence-halfpenny is all They give me for my toil." But I was thinking of a way To feed oneself on batter, And so go on from day to day Getting a little fatter. I shook him well from side to side, Until his face was blue: "Come, tell me how you live," I cried, "And what it is you do!" He said "I hunt for haddocks' eyes Among the heather bright, And work them into waistcoat-buttons In the silent night. And these I do not sell for gold Or coin of silvery shine, But for a copper halfpenny, And that will purchase nine. "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, Or set limed twigs for crabs: I sometimes search the grassy knolls For wheels of Hansom-cabs. And that's the way" (he gave a wink) "By which I get my wealth-- And very gladly will I drink Your Honour's noble health." I heard him then, for I had just Completed my design To keep the Menai bridge from rust By boiling it in wine. I thanked him much for telling me The way he got his wealth, But chiefly for his wish that he Might drink my noble health. And now, if e'er by chance I put My fingers into glue, Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe, Or if I drop upon my toe A very heavy weight, I weep, for it reminds me so Of that old man I used to know-- Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow Whose hair was whiter than the snow, Whose face was very like a crow, With eyes, like cinders, all aglow, Who seemed distracted with his woe, Who rocked his body to and fro, And muttered mumblingly and low, As if his mouth were full of dough, Who snorted like a buffalo-- That summer evening long ago, A-sitting on a gate.
Like "Jabberwocky," another poem published in Through the Looking Glass, "Haddocks’ Eyes" appears to have been revised over the course of many years. In 1856, Carroll published the following poem anonymously under the name Upon the Lonely Moor. It bears an obvious resemblance to "Haddocks' Eyes."
I met an aged, aged man Upon the lonely moor: I knew I was a gentleman, And he was but a boor. So I stopped and roughly questioned him, "Come, tell me how you live!" But his words impressed my ear no more Than if it were a sieve. He said, "I look for soap-bubbles, That lie among the wheat, And bake them into mutton-pies, And sell them in the street. I sell them unto men," he said, "Who sail on stormy seas; And that's the way I get my bread – A trifle, if you please." But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again. I did not hear a word he said, But kicked that old man calm, And said, "Come, tell me how you live!" And pinched him in the arm. His accents mild took up the tale: He said, "I go my ways, And when I find a mountain-rill, I set it in a blaze. And thence they make a stuff they call Rowland's Macassar Oil; But fourpence-halfpenny is all They give me for my toil." But I was thinking of a plan To paint one's gaiters green, So much the color of the grass That they could ne'er be seen. I gave his ear a sudden box, And questioned him again, And tweaked his grey and reverend locks, And put him into pain. He said, "I hunt for haddock's eyes Among the heather bright, And work them into waistcoat-buttons In the silent night. And these I do not sell for gold, Or coin or silver-mine, But for a copper-halfpenny, And that will purchase nine. "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, Or set limed twigs for crabs; I sometimes search the flowery knolls For wheels of hansom cabs. And that's the way" (he gave a wink) "I get my living here, And very gladly will I drink Your Honour's health in beer." I heard him then, for I had just Completed my design To keep the Menai bridge from rust By boiling it in wine. I duly thanked him, ere I went, For all his stories queer, But chiefly for his kind intent To drink my health in beer. And now if e'er by chance I put My fingers into glue, Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe; Or if a statement I aver Of which I am not sure, I think of that strange wanderer Upon the lonely moor. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "\"Haddocks' Eyes\" is the nickname of the name of a song sung by The White Knight from Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, chapter VIII.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "\"Haddocks' Eyes\" is an example used to elaborate on the symbolic status of the concept of \"name\": a name as identification marker may be assigned to anything, including another name, thus introducing different levels of symbolization. It has been discussed in several works on logic and philosophy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The White Knight explains to Alice a confusing nomenclature for the song.",
"title": "Naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "\"You are sad,\" the Knight said in an anxious tone: \"let me sing you a song to comfort you.\" \"Is it very long?\" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. \"It's long,\" said the Knight, \"but very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else—\" \"Or else what?\" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. \"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'.\" \"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?\" Alice said, trying to feel interested. \"No, you don't understand,\" the Knight said, looking a little vexed. \"That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'.\" \"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?\" Alice corrected herself. \"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways And Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!\" \"Well, what is the song, then?\" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. \"I was coming to that,\" the Knight said. \"The song really is 'A-sitting On A Gate': and the tune's my own invention.\"",
"title": "Naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "To summarize:",
"title": "Naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The complicated terminology distinguishing between 'the song, what the song is called, the name of the song, and what the name of the song is called' both uses and mentions the use–mention distinction.",
"title": "Naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The White Knight sings the song to a tune he claims as his own invention, but which Alice recognises as \"I give thee all, I can no more\". By the time Alice heard it, she was already tired of poetry.",
"title": "The song"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The song parodies the plot, but not the style or metre, of \"Resolution and Independence\" by William Wordsworth.",
"title": "The song"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "I'll tell thee everything I can: There's little to relate. I saw an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate. \"Who are you, aged man?\" I said, \"And how is it you live?\" And his answer trickled through my head, Like water through a sieve. He said \"I look for butterflies That sleep among the wheat: I make them into mutton-pies, And sell them in the street. I sell them unto men,\" he said, \"Who sail on stormy seas; And that's the way I get my bread – A trifle, if you please.\" But I was thinking of a plan To dye one's whiskers green, And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen. So, having no reply to give To what the old man said, I cried \"Come, tell me how you live!\" And thumped him on the head. His accents mild took up the tale: He said \"I go my ways, And when I find a mountain-rill, I set it in a blaze; And thence they make a stuff they call Rowlands' Macassar-Oil – Yet twopence-halfpenny is all They give me for my toil.\" But I was thinking of a way To feed oneself on batter, And so go on from day to day Getting a little fatter. I shook him well from side to side, Until his face was blue: \"Come, tell me how you live,\" I cried, \"And what it is you do!\" He said \"I hunt for haddocks' eyes Among the heather bright, And work them into waistcoat-buttons In the silent night. And these I do not sell for gold Or coin of silvery shine, But for a copper halfpenny, And that will purchase nine. \"I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, Or set limed twigs for crabs: I sometimes search the grassy knolls For wheels of Hansom-cabs. And that's the way\" (he gave a wink) \"By which I get my wealth-- And very gladly will I drink Your Honour's noble health.\" I heard him then, for I had just Completed my design To keep the Menai bridge from rust By boiling it in wine. I thanked him much for telling me The way he got his wealth, But chiefly for his wish that he Might drink my noble health. And now, if e'er by chance I put My fingers into glue, Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe, Or if I drop upon my toe A very heavy weight, I weep, for it reminds me so Of that old man I used to know-- Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow Whose hair was whiter than the snow, Whose face was very like a crow, With eyes, like cinders, all aglow, Who seemed distracted with his woe, Who rocked his body to and fro, And muttered mumblingly and low, As if his mouth were full of dough, Who snorted like a buffalo-- That summer evening long ago, A-sitting on a gate.",
"title": "The song"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Like \"Jabberwocky,\" another poem published in Through the Looking Glass, \"Haddocks’ Eyes\" appears to have been revised over the course of many years. In 1856, Carroll published the following poem anonymously under the name Upon the Lonely Moor. It bears an obvious resemblance to \"Haddocks' Eyes.\"",
"title": "Upon the Lonely Moor"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "I met an aged, aged man Upon the lonely moor: I knew I was a gentleman, And he was but a boor. So I stopped and roughly questioned him, \"Come, tell me how you live!\" But his words impressed my ear no more Than if it were a sieve. He said, \"I look for soap-bubbles, That lie among the wheat, And bake them into mutton-pies, And sell them in the street. I sell them unto men,\" he said, \"Who sail on stormy seas; And that's the way I get my bread – A trifle, if you please.\" But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again. I did not hear a word he said, But kicked that old man calm, And said, \"Come, tell me how you live!\" And pinched him in the arm. His accents mild took up the tale: He said, \"I go my ways, And when I find a mountain-rill, I set it in a blaze. And thence they make a stuff they call Rowland's Macassar Oil; But fourpence-halfpenny is all They give me for my toil.\" But I was thinking of a plan To paint one's gaiters green, So much the color of the grass That they could ne'er be seen. I gave his ear a sudden box, And questioned him again, And tweaked his grey and reverend locks, And put him into pain. He said, \"I hunt for haddock's eyes Among the heather bright, And work them into waistcoat-buttons In the silent night. And these I do not sell for gold, Or coin or silver-mine, But for a copper-halfpenny, And that will purchase nine. \"I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, Or set limed twigs for crabs; I sometimes search the flowery knolls For wheels of hansom cabs. And that's the way\" (he gave a wink) \"I get my living here, And very gladly will I drink Your Honour's health in beer.\" I heard him then, for I had just Completed my design To keep the Menai bridge from rust By boiling it in wine. I duly thanked him, ere I went, For all his stories queer, But chiefly for his kind intent To drink my health in beer. And now if e'er by chance I put My fingers into glue, Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe; Or if a statement I aver Of which I am not sure, I think of that strange wanderer Upon the lonely moor.",
"title": "Upon the Lonely Moor"
}
]
| "Haddocks' Eyes" is the nickname of the name of a song sung by The White Knight from Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, chapter VIII. "Haddocks' Eyes" is an example used to elaborate on the symbolic status of the concept of "name": a name as identification marker may be assigned to anything, including another name, thus introducing different levels of symbolization. It has been discussed in several works on logic and philosophy. | 2001-12-08T01:00:38Z | 2023-12-17T13:53:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks%27_Eyes |
14,260 | Hoosier | Hoosier /ˈhuːʒər/ is the official demonym for the people of the U.S. state of Indiana. The origin of the term remains a matter of debate, but "Hoosier" was in general use by the 1840s, having been popularized by Richmond resident John Finley's 1833 poem "The Hoosier's Nest". Indiana adopted the nickname "The Hoosier State" more than 150 years ago.
"Hoosier" is used in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses and organizations. "Hoosiers" is also the name of the Indiana University athletic teams. As there is no accepted embodiment of a Hoosier, the IU schools are represented through their letters and colors alone. In addition to universal acceptance by residents of Indiana, the term is also the official demonym according to the U.S. Government Publishing Office.
In addition to "The Hoosier's Nest," the term also appeared in the Indianapolis Journal's "Carrier's Address" on January 1, 1833. There are many suggestions for the derivation of the word but none is universally accepted. In 1833 the Pittsburgh Statesman said the term had been in use for "some time past" and suggested it originated from census workers calling "Who's here?". Also in 1833, former Indiana Governor James B. Ray began publishing a newspaper titled The Hoosier.
In 1900, Meredith Nicholson wrote The Hoosiers, an early attempt to study the etymology of the word as applied to Indiana residents. Jacob Piatt Dunn, longtime secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, published The Word Hoosier, a similar attempt, in 1907. Both chronicled some of the popular and satirical etymologies circulating at the time and focused much of their attention on the use of the word in the Upland South to refer to woodsmen, yokels, and rough people. Dunn traced the word back to the Cumbrian hoozer, meaning anything unusually large, derived from the Old English hoo (as at Sutton Hoo), meaning "high" and "hill". The importance of immigrants from northern England and southern Scotland was reflected in numerous placenames including the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, and the Cumberland Gap. Nicholson defended the people of Indiana against such an association, while Dunn concluded that the early settlers had adopted the nickname self-mockingly and that it had lost its negative associations by the time of Finley's poem.
Johnathan Clark Smith subsequently showed that Nicholson and Dunn's earliest sources within Indiana were mistaken. A letter by James Curtis cited by Dunn and others as the earliest known use of the term was actually written in 1846, not 1826. Similarly, the use of the term in an 1859 newspaper item quoting an 1827 diary entry by Sandford Cox was more likely an editorial comment and not from the original diary. Smith's earliest sources led him to argue that the word originated as a term along the Ohio River for flatboatmen from Indiana and did not acquire its pejorative meanings until 1836, after Finley's poem.
William Piersen, a history professor at Fisk University, argued for a connection to the Methodist minister Rev. Harry Hosier (c. 1750–May 1806), who evangelized the American frontier at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the Second Great Awakening. "Black Harry" had been born a slave in North Carolina and sold north to Baltimore, Maryland, before gaining his freedom and beginning his ministry around the end of the American Revolution. He was a close associate and personal friend of Bishop Francis Asbury, the "Father of the American Methodist Church". Benjamin Rush said of him that "making allowances for his illiteracy, he was the greatest orator in America". His sermons called on Methodists to reject slavery and to champion the common working man. Piersen proposed that Methodist communities inspired by his example took or were given a variant spelling of his name (possibly influenced by the "yokel" slang) during the decades after his ministry.
According to Washington County newspaper reports of the time, Abraham Stover was Colonel of the Indiana Militia. He was a colorful figure in early Washington County history. Along with his son-in-law, John B. Brough, he was considered one of the two strongest men in Washington County. He was always being challenged to prove his might, and seems to have won several fights over men half his age. After whipping six or eight men in a fist fight in Louisville, Kentucky, he cracked his fists and said, "Ain't I a husher", which was changed in the news to "Hoosier", and thus originated the name of Hoosier in connection with Indiana men.
Jorge Santander Serrano, a PhD student from Indiana University, has also suggested that Hoosier might come from the French words for 'redness', rougeur, or 'red-faced', rougeaud. According to this hypothesis, the early pejorative use of the word Hoosier may have a link to the color red ("rouge" in French) which is associated with indigenous peoples, pejoratively called "red men" or "red-skins", and also with poor white people by calling them "red-necks".
Humorous folk etymologies for the term "hoosier" have a long history, as recounted by Dunn in The Word Hoosier.
One account traces the word to the necessary caution of approaching houses on the frontier. In order to avoid being shot, a traveler would call out from afar to let themselves be known. The inhabitants of the cabin would then reply "Who's here?" which – in the Appalachian English of the early settlers – slurred into "Who'sh 'ere?" and thence into "Hoosier?" A variant of this account had the Indiana pioneers calling out "Who'sh 'ere?" as a general greeting and warning when hearing someone in the bushes and tall grass, to avoid shooting a relative or friend in error.
The poet James Whitcomb Riley facetiously suggested that the fierce brawling that took place in Indiana involved enough biting that the expression "Whose ear?" became notable. This arose from or inspired the story of two 19th-century French immigrants brawling in a tavern in the foothills of southern Indiana. One was cut and a third Frenchman walked in to see an ear on the dirt floor of the tavern, prompting him to slur out "Whosh ear?"
Two related stories trace the origin of the term to gangs of workers from Indiana under the direction of a Mr. Hoosier.
The account related by Dunn is that a Louisville contractor named Samuel Hoosier preferred to hire workers from communities on the Indiana side of the Ohio River like New Albany rather than Kentuckians. During the excavation of the first canal around the Falls of the Ohio from 1826 to 1833, his employees became known as "Hoosier's men" and then simply "Hoosiers". The usage spread from these hard-working laborers to all of the Indiana boatmen in the area and then spread north with the settlement of the state. The story was told to Dunn in 1901 by a man who had heard it from a Hoosier relative while traveling in southern Tennessee. Dunn could not find any family of the given name in any directory in the region or anyone else in southern Tennessee who had heard the story and accounted himself dubious. This version was subsequently retold by Gov. Evan Bayh and Sen. Vance Hartke, who introduced the story into the Congressional Record in 1975, and matches the timing and location of Smith's subsequent research. However, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been unable to find any record of a Hoosier or Hosier in surviving canal company records.
The word "hoosier" has been used in Greater St. Louis as a pejorative for an unintelligent or uncultured person. The word is also encountered in sea shanties. In the book Shanties from the Seven Seas by Stan Hugill, in reference to its former use to denote cotton-stowers, who would move bales of cotton to and from the holds of ships and force them in tightly by means of jackscrews.
A Hoosier cabinet, often shortened to "hoosier", is a type of free-standing kitchen cabinet popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. Almost all of these cabinets were produced by companies located in Indiana and the name derives from the largest of them, the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. of New Castle, Indiana. Other Indiana businesses include Hoosier Racing Tire and the Hoosier Bat Company, manufacturer of wooden baseball bats.
The RCA Dome, former home of the Indianapolis Colts, was known as the "Hoosier Dome" before RCA purchased the naming rights in 1994. The RCA Dome was replaced by Lucas Oil Stadium in 2008. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hoosier /ˈhuːʒər/ is the official demonym for the people of the U.S. state of Indiana. The origin of the term remains a matter of debate, but \"Hoosier\" was in general use by the 1840s, having been popularized by Richmond resident John Finley's 1833 poem \"The Hoosier's Nest\". Indiana adopted the nickname \"The Hoosier State\" more than 150 years ago.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "\"Hoosier\" is used in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses and organizations. \"Hoosiers\" is also the name of the Indiana University athletic teams. As there is no accepted embodiment of a Hoosier, the IU schools are represented through their letters and colors alone. In addition to universal acceptance by residents of Indiana, the term is also the official demonym according to the U.S. Government Publishing Office.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In addition to \"The Hoosier's Nest,\" the term also appeared in the Indianapolis Journal's \"Carrier's Address\" on January 1, 1833. There are many suggestions for the derivation of the word but none is universally accepted. In 1833 the Pittsburgh Statesman said the term had been in use for \"some time past\" and suggested it originated from census workers calling \"Who's here?\". Also in 1833, former Indiana Governor James B. Ray began publishing a newspaper titled The Hoosier.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1900, Meredith Nicholson wrote The Hoosiers, an early attempt to study the etymology of the word as applied to Indiana residents. Jacob Piatt Dunn, longtime secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, published The Word Hoosier, a similar attempt, in 1907. Both chronicled some of the popular and satirical etymologies circulating at the time and focused much of their attention on the use of the word in the Upland South to refer to woodsmen, yokels, and rough people. Dunn traced the word back to the Cumbrian hoozer, meaning anything unusually large, derived from the Old English hoo (as at Sutton Hoo), meaning \"high\" and \"hill\". The importance of immigrants from northern England and southern Scotland was reflected in numerous placenames including the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, and the Cumberland Gap. Nicholson defended the people of Indiana against such an association, while Dunn concluded that the early settlers had adopted the nickname self-mockingly and that it had lost its negative associations by the time of Finley's poem.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Johnathan Clark Smith subsequently showed that Nicholson and Dunn's earliest sources within Indiana were mistaken. A letter by James Curtis cited by Dunn and others as the earliest known use of the term was actually written in 1846, not 1826. Similarly, the use of the term in an 1859 newspaper item quoting an 1827 diary entry by Sandford Cox was more likely an editorial comment and not from the original diary. Smith's earliest sources led him to argue that the word originated as a term along the Ohio River for flatboatmen from Indiana and did not acquire its pejorative meanings until 1836, after Finley's poem.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "William Piersen, a history professor at Fisk University, argued for a connection to the Methodist minister Rev. Harry Hosier (c. 1750–May 1806), who evangelized the American frontier at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the Second Great Awakening. \"Black Harry\" had been born a slave in North Carolina and sold north to Baltimore, Maryland, before gaining his freedom and beginning his ministry around the end of the American Revolution. He was a close associate and personal friend of Bishop Francis Asbury, the \"Father of the American Methodist Church\". Benjamin Rush said of him that \"making allowances for his illiteracy, he was the greatest orator in America\". His sermons called on Methodists to reject slavery and to champion the common working man. Piersen proposed that Methodist communities inspired by his example took or were given a variant spelling of his name (possibly influenced by the \"yokel\" slang) during the decades after his ministry.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to Washington County newspaper reports of the time, Abraham Stover was Colonel of the Indiana Militia. He was a colorful figure in early Washington County history. Along with his son-in-law, John B. Brough, he was considered one of the two strongest men in Washington County. He was always being challenged to prove his might, and seems to have won several fights over men half his age. After whipping six or eight men in a fist fight in Louisville, Kentucky, he cracked his fists and said, \"Ain't I a husher\", which was changed in the news to \"Hoosier\", and thus originated the name of Hoosier in connection with Indiana men.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jorge Santander Serrano, a PhD student from Indiana University, has also suggested that Hoosier might come from the French words for 'redness', rougeur, or 'red-faced', rougeaud. According to this hypothesis, the early pejorative use of the word Hoosier may have a link to the color red (\"rouge\" in French) which is associated with indigenous peoples, pejoratively called \"red men\" or \"red-skins\", and also with poor white people by calling them \"red-necks\".",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Humorous folk etymologies for the term \"hoosier\" have a long history, as recounted by Dunn in The Word Hoosier.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "One account traces the word to the necessary caution of approaching houses on the frontier. In order to avoid being shot, a traveler would call out from afar to let themselves be known. The inhabitants of the cabin would then reply \"Who's here?\" which – in the Appalachian English of the early settlers – slurred into \"Who'sh 'ere?\" and thence into \"Hoosier?\" A variant of this account had the Indiana pioneers calling out \"Who'sh 'ere?\" as a general greeting and warning when hearing someone in the bushes and tall grass, to avoid shooting a relative or friend in error.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The poet James Whitcomb Riley facetiously suggested that the fierce brawling that took place in Indiana involved enough biting that the expression \"Whose ear?\" became notable. This arose from or inspired the story of two 19th-century French immigrants brawling in a tavern in the foothills of southern Indiana. One was cut and a third Frenchman walked in to see an ear on the dirt floor of the tavern, prompting him to slur out \"Whosh ear?\"",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Two related stories trace the origin of the term to gangs of workers from Indiana under the direction of a Mr. Hoosier.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The account related by Dunn is that a Louisville contractor named Samuel Hoosier preferred to hire workers from communities on the Indiana side of the Ohio River like New Albany rather than Kentuckians. During the excavation of the first canal around the Falls of the Ohio from 1826 to 1833, his employees became known as \"Hoosier's men\" and then simply \"Hoosiers\". The usage spread from these hard-working laborers to all of the Indiana boatmen in the area and then spread north with the settlement of the state. The story was told to Dunn in 1901 by a man who had heard it from a Hoosier relative while traveling in southern Tennessee. Dunn could not find any family of the given name in any directory in the region or anyone else in southern Tennessee who had heard the story and accounted himself dubious. This version was subsequently retold by Gov. Evan Bayh and Sen. Vance Hartke, who introduced the story into the Congressional Record in 1975, and matches the timing and location of Smith's subsequent research. However, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been unable to find any record of a Hoosier or Hosier in surviving canal company records.",
"title": "Origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The word \"hoosier\" has been used in Greater St. Louis as a pejorative for an unintelligent or uncultured person. The word is also encountered in sea shanties. In the book Shanties from the Seven Seas by Stan Hugill, in reference to its former use to denote cotton-stowers, who would move bales of cotton to and from the holds of ships and force them in tightly by means of jackscrews.",
"title": "Other uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A Hoosier cabinet, often shortened to \"hoosier\", is a type of free-standing kitchen cabinet popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. Almost all of these cabinets were produced by companies located in Indiana and the name derives from the largest of them, the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. of New Castle, Indiana. Other Indiana businesses include Hoosier Racing Tire and the Hoosier Bat Company, manufacturer of wooden baseball bats.",
"title": "Other uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The RCA Dome, former home of the Indianapolis Colts, was known as the \"Hoosier Dome\" before RCA purchased the naming rights in 1994. The RCA Dome was replaced by Lucas Oil Stadium in 2008.",
"title": "Other uses"
}
]
| Hoosier is the official demonym for the people of the U.S. state of Indiana. The origin of the term remains a matter of debate, but "Hoosier" was in general use by the 1840s, having been popularized by Richmond resident John Finley's 1833 poem "The Hoosier's Nest". Indiana adopted the nickname "The Hoosier State" more than 150 years ago. "Hoosier" is used in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses and organizations. "Hoosiers" is also the name of the Indiana University athletic teams. As there is no accepted embodiment of a Hoosier, the IU schools are represented through their letters and colors alone. In addition to universal acceptance by residents of Indiana, the term is also the official demonym according to the U.S. Government Publishing Office. | 2001-12-09T17:50:48Z | 2023-09-30T18:07:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosier |
14,263 | Horner's method | In mathematics and computer science, Horner's method (or Horner's scheme) is an algorithm for polynomial evaluation. Although named after William George Horner, this method is much older, as it has been attributed to Joseph-Louis Lagrange by Horner himself, and can be traced back many hundreds of years to Chinese and Persian mathematicians. After the introduction of computers, this algorithm became fundamental for computing efficiently with polynomials.
The algorithm is based on Horner's rule, in which a polynomial is written in nested form: a 0 + a 1 x + a 2 x 2 + a 3 x 3 + ⋯ + a n x n = a 0 + x ( a 1 + x ( a 2 + x ( a 3 + ⋯ + x ( a n − 1 + x a n ) ⋯ ) ) ) . {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}a_{0}&+a_{1}x+a_{2}x^{2}+a_{3}x^{3}+\cdots +a_{n}x^{n}\\&=a_{0}+x{\bigg (}a_{1}+x{\Big (}a_{2}+x{\big (}a_{3}+\cdots +x(a_{n-1}+x\,a_{n})\cdots {\big )}{\Big )}{\bigg )}.\end{aligned}}}
This allows the evaluation of a polynomial of degree n with only n {\displaystyle n} multiplications and n {\displaystyle n} additions. This is optimal, since there are polynomials of degree n that cannot be evaluated with fewer arithmetic operations.
Alternatively, Horner's method also refers to a method for approximating the roots of polynomials, described by Horner in 1819. It is a variant of the Newton–Raphson method made more efficient for hand calculation by the application of Horner's rule. It was widely used until computers came into general use around 1970.
Given the polynomial
where a 0 , … , a n {\displaystyle a_{0},\ldots ,a_{n}} are constant coefficients, the problem is to evaluate the polynomial at a specific value x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} of x . {\displaystyle x.}
For this, a new sequence of constants is defined recursively as follows:
Then b 0 {\displaystyle b_{0}} is the value of p ( x 0 ) {\displaystyle p(x_{0})} .
To see why this works, the polynomial can be written in the form
Thus, by iteratively substituting the b i {\displaystyle b_{i}} into the expression,
Now, it can be proven that;
This expression constitutes Horner's practical application, as it offers a very quick way of determining the outcome of;
with b 0 {\displaystyle b_{0}} (which is equal to p ( x 0 ) {\displaystyle p(x_{0})} ) being the division's remainder, as is demonstrated by the examples below. If x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} is a root of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} , then b 0 = 0 {\displaystyle b_{0}=0} (meaning the remainder is 0 {\displaystyle 0} ), which means you can factor p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} as x − x 0 {\displaystyle x-x_{0}} .
To finding the consecutive b {\displaystyle b} -values, you start with determining b n {\displaystyle b_{n}} , which is simply equal to a n {\displaystyle a_{n}} . Then you then work recursively using the formula;
till you arrive at b 0 {\displaystyle b_{0}} .
Evaluate f ( x ) = 2 x 3 − 6 x 2 + 2 x − 1 {\displaystyle f(x)=2x^{3}-6x^{2}+2x-1} for x = 3 {\displaystyle x=3} .
We use synthetic division as follows:
The entries in the third row are the sum of those in the first two. Each entry in the second row is the product of the x-value (3 in this example) with the third-row entry immediately to the left. The entries in the first row are the coefficients of the polynomial to be evaluated. Then the remainder of f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} on division by x − 3 {\displaystyle x-3} is 5.
But by the polynomial remainder theorem, we know that the remainder is f ( 3 ) {\displaystyle f(3)} . Thus, f ( 3 ) = 5 {\displaystyle f(3)=5} .
In this example, if a 3 = 2 , a 2 = − 6 , a 1 = 2 , a 0 = − 1 {\displaystyle a_{3}=2,a_{2}=-6,a_{1}=2,a_{0}=-1} we can see that b 3 = 2 , b 2 = 0 , b 1 = 2 , b 0 = 5 {\displaystyle b_{3}=2,b_{2}=0,b_{1}=2,b_{0}=5} , the entries in the third row. So, synthetic division is based on Horner's method.
As a consequence of the polynomial remainder theorem, the entries in the third row are the coefficients of the second-degree polynomial, the quotient of f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} on division by x − 3 {\displaystyle x-3} . The remainder is 5. This makes Horner's method useful for polynomial long division.
Divide x 3 − 6 x 2 + 11 x − 6 {\displaystyle x^{3}-6x^{2}+11x-6} by x − 2 {\displaystyle x-2} :
The quotient is x 2 − 4 x + 3 {\displaystyle x^{2}-4x+3} .
Let f 1 ( x ) = 4 x 4 − 6 x 3 + 3 x − 5 {\displaystyle f_{1}(x)=4x^{4}-6x^{3}+3x-5} and f 2 ( x ) = 2 x − 1 {\displaystyle f_{2}(x)=2x-1} . Divide f 1 ( x ) {\displaystyle f_{1}(x)} by f 2 ( x ) {\displaystyle f_{2}\,(x)} using Horner's method.
The third row is the sum of the first two rows, divided by 2. Each entry in the second row is the product of 1 with the third-row entry to the left. The answer is
Evaluation using the monomial form of a degree n {\displaystyle n} polynomial requires at most n {\displaystyle n} additions and ( n 2 + n ) / 2 {\displaystyle (n^{2}+n)/2} multiplications, if powers are calculated by repeated multiplication and each monomial is evaluated individually. The cost can be reduced to n {\displaystyle n} additions and 2 n − 1 {\displaystyle 2n-1} multiplications by evaluating the powers of x {\displaystyle x} by iteration.
If numerical data are represented in terms of digits (or bits), then the naive algorithm also entails storing approximately 2 n {\displaystyle 2n} times the number of bits of x {\displaystyle x} : the evaluated polynomial has approximate magnitude x n {\displaystyle x^{n}} , and one must also store x n {\displaystyle x^{n}} itself. By contrast, Horner's method requires only n {\displaystyle n} additions and n {\displaystyle n} multiplications, and its storage requirements are only n {\displaystyle n} times the number of bits of x {\displaystyle x} . Alternatively, Horner's method can be computed with n {\displaystyle n} fused multiply–adds. Horner's method can also be extended to evaluate the first k {\displaystyle k} derivatives of the polynomial with k n {\displaystyle kn} additions and multiplications.
Horner's method is optimal, in the sense that any algorithm to evaluate an arbitrary polynomial must use at least as many operations. Alexander Ostrowski proved in 1954 that the number of additions required is minimal. Victor Pan proved in 1966 that the number of multiplications is minimal. However, when x {\displaystyle x} is a matrix, Horner's method is not optimal.
This assumes that the polynomial is evaluated in monomial form and no preconditioning of the representation is allowed, which makes sense if the polynomial is evaluated only once. However, if preconditioning is allowed and the polynomial is to be evaluated many times, then faster algorithms are possible. They involve a transformation of the representation of the polynomial. In general, a degree- n {\displaystyle n} polynomial can be evaluated using only ⌊n/2⌋+2 multiplications and n {\displaystyle n} additions.
A disadvantage of Horner's rule is that all of the operations are sequentially dependent, so it is not possible to take advantage of instruction level parallelism on modern computers. In most applications where the efficiency of polynomial evaluation matters, many low-order polynomials are evaluated simultaneously (for each pixel or polygon in computer graphics, or for each grid square in a numerical simulation), so it is not necessary to find parallelism within a single polynomial evaluation.
If, however, one is evaluating a single polynomial of very high order, it may be useful to break it up as follows:
More generally, the summation can be broken into k parts:
where the inner summations may be evaluated using separate parallel instances of Horner's method. This requires slightly more operations than the basic Horner's method, but allows k-way SIMD execution of most of them. Modern compilers generally evaluate polynomials this way when advantageous, although for floating-point calculations this requires enabling (unsafe) reassociative math.
Horner's method is a fast, code-efficient method for multiplication and division of binary numbers on a microcontroller with no hardware multiplier. One of the binary numbers to be multiplied is represented as a trivial polynomial, where (using the above notation) a i = 1 {\displaystyle a_{i}=1} , and x = 2 {\displaystyle x=2} . Then, x (or x to some power) is repeatedly factored out. In this binary numeral system (base 2), x = 2 {\displaystyle x=2} , so powers of 2 are repeatedly factored out.
For example, to find the product of two numbers (0.15625) and m:
To find the product of two binary numbers d and m:
In general, for a binary number with bit values ( d 3 d 2 d 1 d 0 {\displaystyle d_{3}d_{2}d_{1}d_{0}} ) the product is
At this stage in the algorithm, it is required that terms with zero-valued coefficients are dropped, so that only binary coefficients equal to one are counted, thus the problem of multiplication or division by zero is not an issue, despite this implication in the factored equation:
The denominators all equal one (or the term is absent), so this reduces to
or equivalently (as consistent with the "method" described above)
In binary (base-2) math, multiplication by a power of 2 is merely a register shift operation. Thus, multiplying by 2 is calculated in base-2 by an arithmetic shift. The factor (2) is a right arithmetic shift, a (0) results in no operation (since 2 = 1 is the multiplicative identity element), and a (2) results in a left arithmetic shift. The multiplication product can now be quickly calculated using only arithmetic shift operations, addition and subtraction.
The method is particularly fast on processors supporting a single-instruction shift-and-addition-accumulate. Compared to a C floating-point library, Horner's method sacrifices some accuracy, however it is nominally 13 times faster (16 times faster when the "canonical signed digit" (CSD) form is used) and uses only 20% of the code space.
Horner's method can be used to convert between different positional numeral systems – in which case x is the base of the number system, and the ai coefficients are the digits of the base-x representation of a given number – and can also be used if x is a matrix, in which case the gain in computational efficiency is even greater. However, for such cases faster methods are known.
Using the long division algorithm in combination with Newton's method, it is possible to approximate the real roots of a polynomial. The algorithm works as follows. Given a polynomial p n ( x ) {\displaystyle p_{n}(x)} of degree n {\displaystyle n} with zeros z n < z n − 1 < ⋯ < z 1 , {\displaystyle z_{n}<z_{n-1}<\cdots <z_{1},} make some initial guess x 0 {\displaystyle x_{0}} such that z 1 < x 0 {\displaystyle z_{1}<x_{0}} . Now iterate the following two steps:
These two steps are repeated until all real zeros are found for the polynomial. If the approximated zeros are not precise enough, the obtained values can be used as initial guesses for Newton's method but using the full polynomial rather than the reduced polynomials.
Consider the polynomial
which can be expanded to
From the above we know that the largest root of this polynomial is 7 so we are able to make an initial guess of 8. Using Newton's method the first zero of 7 is found as shown in black in the figure to the right. Next p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} is divided by ( x − 7 ) {\displaystyle (x-7)} to obtain
which is drawn in red in the figure to the right. Newton's method is used to find the largest zero of this polynomial with an initial guess of 7. The largest zero of this polynomial which corresponds to the second largest zero of the original polynomial is found at 3 and is circled in red. The degree 5 polynomial is now divided by ( x − 3 ) {\displaystyle (x-3)} to obtain
which is shown in yellow. The zero for this polynomial is found at 2 again using Newton's method and is circled in yellow. Horner's method is now used to obtain
which is shown in green and found to have a zero at −3. This polynomial is further reduced to
which is shown in blue and yields a zero of −5. The final root of the original polynomial may be found by either using the final zero as an initial guess for Newton's method, or by reducing p 2 ( x ) {\displaystyle p_{2}(x)} and solving the linear equation. As can be seen, the expected roots of −8, −5, −3, 2, 3, and 7 were found.
Horner's method can be modified to compute the divided difference ( p ( y ) − p ( x ) ) / ( y − x ) . {\displaystyle (p(y)-p(x))/(y-x).} Given the polynomial (as before)
proceed as follows
At completion, we have
This computation of the divided difference is subject to less round-off error than evaluating p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} and p ( y ) {\displaystyle p(y)} separately, particularly when x ≈ y {\displaystyle x\approx y} . Substituting y = x {\displaystyle y=x} in this method gives d 1 = p ′ ( x ) {\displaystyle d_{1}=p'(x)} , the derivative of p ( x ) {\displaystyle p(x)} .
Horner's paper, titled "A new method of solving numerical equations of all orders, by continuous approximation", was read before the Royal Society of London, at its meeting on July 1, 1819, with a sequel in 1823. Horner's paper in Part II of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819 was warmly and expansively welcomed by a reviewer in the issue of The Monthly Review: or, Literary Journal for April, 1820; in comparison, a technical paper by Charles Babbage is dismissed curtly in this review. The sequence of reviews in The Monthly Review for September, 1821, concludes that Holdred was the first person to discover a direct and general practical solution of numerical equations. Fuller showed that the method in Horner's 1819 paper differs from what afterwards became known as "Horner's method" and that in consequence the priority for this method should go to Holdred (1820).
Unlike his English contemporaries, Horner drew on the Continental literature, notably the work of Arbogast. Horner is also known to have made a close reading of John Bonneycastle's book on algebra, though he neglected the work of Paolo Ruffini.
Although Horner is credited with making the method accessible and practical, it was known long before Horner. In reverse chronological order, Horner's method was already known to:
Qin Jiushao, in his Shu Shu Jiu Zhang (Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections; 1247), presents a portfolio of methods of Horner-type for solving polynomial equations, which was based on earlier works of the 11th century Song dynasty mathematician Jia Xian; for example, one method is specifically suited to bi-quintics, of which Qin gives an instance, in keeping with the then Chinese custom of case studies. Yoshio Mikami in Development of Mathematics in China and Japan (Leipzig 1913) wrote:
"... who can deny the fact of Horner's illustrious process being used in China at least nearly six long centuries earlier than in Europe ... We of course don't intend in any way to ascribe Horner's invention to a Chinese origin, but the lapse of time sufficiently makes it not altogether impossible that the Europeans could have known of the Chinese method in a direct or indirect way."
Ulrich Libbrecht concluded: It is obvious that this procedure is a Chinese invention ... the method was not known in India. He said, Fibonacci probably learned of it from Arabs, who perhaps borrowed from the Chinese. The extraction of square and cube roots along similar lines is already discussed by Liu Hui in connection with Problems IV.16 and 22 in Jiu Zhang Suan Shu, while Wang Xiaotong in the 7th century supposes his readers can solve cubics by an approximation method described in his book Jigu Suanjing. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics and computer science, Horner's method (or Horner's scheme) is an algorithm for polynomial evaluation. Although named after William George Horner, this method is much older, as it has been attributed to Joseph-Louis Lagrange by Horner himself, and can be traced back many hundreds of years to Chinese and Persian mathematicians. After the introduction of computers, this algorithm became fundamental for computing efficiently with polynomials.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The algorithm is based on Horner's rule, in which a polynomial is written in nested form: a 0 + a 1 x + a 2 x 2 + a 3 x 3 + ⋯ + a n x n = a 0 + x ( a 1 + x ( a 2 + x ( a 3 + ⋯ + x ( a n − 1 + x a n ) ⋯ ) ) ) . {\\displaystyle {\\begin{aligned}a_{0}&+a_{1}x+a_{2}x^{2}+a_{3}x^{3}+\\cdots +a_{n}x^{n}\\\\&=a_{0}+x{\\bigg (}a_{1}+x{\\Big (}a_{2}+x{\\big (}a_{3}+\\cdots +x(a_{n-1}+x\\,a_{n})\\cdots {\\big )}{\\Big )}{\\bigg )}.\\end{aligned}}}",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This allows the evaluation of a polynomial of degree n with only n {\\displaystyle n} multiplications and n {\\displaystyle n} additions. This is optimal, since there are polynomials of degree n that cannot be evaluated with fewer arithmetic operations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Alternatively, Horner's method also refers to a method for approximating the roots of polynomials, described by Horner in 1819. It is a variant of the Newton–Raphson method made more efficient for hand calculation by the application of Horner's rule. It was widely used until computers came into general use around 1970.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Given the polynomial",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "where a 0 , … , a n {\\displaystyle a_{0},\\ldots ,a_{n}} are constant coefficients, the problem is to evaluate the polynomial at a specific value x 0 {\\displaystyle x_{0}} of x . {\\displaystyle x.}",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For this, a new sequence of constants is defined recursively as follows:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Then b 0 {\\displaystyle b_{0}} is the value of p ( x 0 ) {\\displaystyle p(x_{0})} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "To see why this works, the polynomial can be written in the form",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Thus, by iteratively substituting the b i {\\displaystyle b_{i}} into the expression,",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Now, it can be proven that;",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "This expression constitutes Horner's practical application, as it offers a very quick way of determining the outcome of;",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "with b 0 {\\displaystyle b_{0}} (which is equal to p ( x 0 ) {\\displaystyle p(x_{0})} ) being the division's remainder, as is demonstrated by the examples below. If x 0 {\\displaystyle x_{0}} is a root of p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} , then b 0 = 0 {\\displaystyle b_{0}=0} (meaning the remainder is 0 {\\displaystyle 0} ), which means you can factor p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} as x − x 0 {\\displaystyle x-x_{0}} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "To finding the consecutive b {\\displaystyle b} -values, you start with determining b n {\\displaystyle b_{n}} , which is simply equal to a n {\\displaystyle a_{n}} . Then you then work recursively using the formula;",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "till you arrive at b 0 {\\displaystyle b_{0}} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Evaluate f ( x ) = 2 x 3 − 6 x 2 + 2 x − 1 {\\displaystyle f(x)=2x^{3}-6x^{2}+2x-1} for x = 3 {\\displaystyle x=3} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "We use synthetic division as follows:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The entries in the third row are the sum of those in the first two. Each entry in the second row is the product of the x-value (3 in this example) with the third-row entry immediately to the left. The entries in the first row are the coefficients of the polynomial to be evaluated. Then the remainder of f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} on division by x − 3 {\\displaystyle x-3} is 5.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "But by the polynomial remainder theorem, we know that the remainder is f ( 3 ) {\\displaystyle f(3)} . Thus, f ( 3 ) = 5 {\\displaystyle f(3)=5} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In this example, if a 3 = 2 , a 2 = − 6 , a 1 = 2 , a 0 = − 1 {\\displaystyle a_{3}=2,a_{2}=-6,a_{1}=2,a_{0}=-1} we can see that b 3 = 2 , b 2 = 0 , b 1 = 2 , b 0 = 5 {\\displaystyle b_{3}=2,b_{2}=0,b_{1}=2,b_{0}=5} , the entries in the third row. So, synthetic division is based on Horner's method.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "As a consequence of the polynomial remainder theorem, the entries in the third row are the coefficients of the second-degree polynomial, the quotient of f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} on division by x − 3 {\\displaystyle x-3} . The remainder is 5. This makes Horner's method useful for polynomial long division.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Divide x 3 − 6 x 2 + 11 x − 6 {\\displaystyle x^{3}-6x^{2}+11x-6} by x − 2 {\\displaystyle x-2} :",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The quotient is x 2 − 4 x + 3 {\\displaystyle x^{2}-4x+3} .",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Let f 1 ( x ) = 4 x 4 − 6 x 3 + 3 x − 5 {\\displaystyle f_{1}(x)=4x^{4}-6x^{3}+3x-5} and f 2 ( x ) = 2 x − 1 {\\displaystyle f_{2}(x)=2x-1} . Divide f 1 ( x ) {\\displaystyle f_{1}(x)} by f 2 ( x ) {\\displaystyle f_{2}\\,(x)} using Horner's method.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The third row is the sum of the first two rows, divided by 2. Each entry in the second row is the product of 1 with the third-row entry to the left. The answer is",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Evaluation using the monomial form of a degree n {\\displaystyle n} polynomial requires at most n {\\displaystyle n} additions and ( n 2 + n ) / 2 {\\displaystyle (n^{2}+n)/2} multiplications, if powers are calculated by repeated multiplication and each monomial is evaluated individually. The cost can be reduced to n {\\displaystyle n} additions and 2 n − 1 {\\displaystyle 2n-1} multiplications by evaluating the powers of x {\\displaystyle x} by iteration.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "If numerical data are represented in terms of digits (or bits), then the naive algorithm also entails storing approximately 2 n {\\displaystyle 2n} times the number of bits of x {\\displaystyle x} : the evaluated polynomial has approximate magnitude x n {\\displaystyle x^{n}} , and one must also store x n {\\displaystyle x^{n}} itself. By contrast, Horner's method requires only n {\\displaystyle n} additions and n {\\displaystyle n} multiplications, and its storage requirements are only n {\\displaystyle n} times the number of bits of x {\\displaystyle x} . Alternatively, Horner's method can be computed with n {\\displaystyle n} fused multiply–adds. Horner's method can also be extended to evaluate the first k {\\displaystyle k} derivatives of the polynomial with k n {\\displaystyle kn} additions and multiplications.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Horner's method is optimal, in the sense that any algorithm to evaluate an arbitrary polynomial must use at least as many operations. Alexander Ostrowski proved in 1954 that the number of additions required is minimal. Victor Pan proved in 1966 that the number of multiplications is minimal. However, when x {\\displaystyle x} is a matrix, Horner's method is not optimal.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "This assumes that the polynomial is evaluated in monomial form and no preconditioning of the representation is allowed, which makes sense if the polynomial is evaluated only once. However, if preconditioning is allowed and the polynomial is to be evaluated many times, then faster algorithms are possible. They involve a transformation of the representation of the polynomial. In general, a degree- n {\\displaystyle n} polynomial can be evaluated using only ⌊n/2⌋+2 multiplications and n {\\displaystyle n} additions.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A disadvantage of Horner's rule is that all of the operations are sequentially dependent, so it is not possible to take advantage of instruction level parallelism on modern computers. In most applications where the efficiency of polynomial evaluation matters, many low-order polynomials are evaluated simultaneously (for each pixel or polygon in computer graphics, or for each grid square in a numerical simulation), so it is not necessary to find parallelism within a single polynomial evaluation.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "If, however, one is evaluating a single polynomial of very high order, it may be useful to break it up as follows:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "More generally, the summation can be broken into k parts:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "where the inner summations may be evaluated using separate parallel instances of Horner's method. This requires slightly more operations than the basic Horner's method, but allows k-way SIMD execution of most of them. Modern compilers generally evaluate polynomials this way when advantageous, although for floating-point calculations this requires enabling (unsafe) reassociative math.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Horner's method is a fast, code-efficient method for multiplication and division of binary numbers on a microcontroller with no hardware multiplier. One of the binary numbers to be multiplied is represented as a trivial polynomial, where (using the above notation) a i = 1 {\\displaystyle a_{i}=1} , and x = 2 {\\displaystyle x=2} . Then, x (or x to some power) is repeatedly factored out. In this binary numeral system (base 2), x = 2 {\\displaystyle x=2} , so powers of 2 are repeatedly factored out.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "For example, to find the product of two numbers (0.15625) and m:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "To find the product of two binary numbers d and m:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In general, for a binary number with bit values ( d 3 d 2 d 1 d 0 {\\displaystyle d_{3}d_{2}d_{1}d_{0}} ) the product is",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "At this stage in the algorithm, it is required that terms with zero-valued coefficients are dropped, so that only binary coefficients equal to one are counted, thus the problem of multiplication or division by zero is not an issue, despite this implication in the factored equation:",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The denominators all equal one (or the term is absent), so this reduces to",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "or equivalently (as consistent with the \"method\" described above)",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In binary (base-2) math, multiplication by a power of 2 is merely a register shift operation. Thus, multiplying by 2 is calculated in base-2 by an arithmetic shift. The factor (2) is a right arithmetic shift, a (0) results in no operation (since 2 = 1 is the multiplicative identity element), and a (2) results in a left arithmetic shift. The multiplication product can now be quickly calculated using only arithmetic shift operations, addition and subtraction.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The method is particularly fast on processors supporting a single-instruction shift-and-addition-accumulate. Compared to a C floating-point library, Horner's method sacrifices some accuracy, however it is nominally 13 times faster (16 times faster when the \"canonical signed digit\" (CSD) form is used) and uses only 20% of the code space.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Horner's method can be used to convert between different positional numeral systems – in which case x is the base of the number system, and the ai coefficients are the digits of the base-x representation of a given number – and can also be used if x is a matrix, in which case the gain in computational efficiency is even greater. However, for such cases faster methods are known.",
"title": "Polynomial evaluation and long division"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Using the long division algorithm in combination with Newton's method, it is possible to approximate the real roots of a polynomial. The algorithm works as follows. Given a polynomial p n ( x ) {\\displaystyle p_{n}(x)} of degree n {\\displaystyle n} with zeros z n < z n − 1 < ⋯ < z 1 , {\\displaystyle z_{n}<z_{n-1}<\\cdots <z_{1},} make some initial guess x 0 {\\displaystyle x_{0}} such that z 1 < x 0 {\\displaystyle z_{1}<x_{0}} . Now iterate the following two steps:",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "These two steps are repeated until all real zeros are found for the polynomial. If the approximated zeros are not precise enough, the obtained values can be used as initial guesses for Newton's method but using the full polynomial rather than the reduced polynomials.",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Consider the polynomial",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "which can be expanded to",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "From the above we know that the largest root of this polynomial is 7 so we are able to make an initial guess of 8. Using Newton's method the first zero of 7 is found as shown in black in the figure to the right. Next p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} is divided by ( x − 7 ) {\\displaystyle (x-7)} to obtain",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "which is drawn in red in the figure to the right. Newton's method is used to find the largest zero of this polynomial with an initial guess of 7. The largest zero of this polynomial which corresponds to the second largest zero of the original polynomial is found at 3 and is circled in red. The degree 5 polynomial is now divided by ( x − 3 ) {\\displaystyle (x-3)} to obtain",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "which is shown in yellow. The zero for this polynomial is found at 2 again using Newton's method and is circled in yellow. Horner's method is now used to obtain",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "which is shown in green and found to have a zero at −3. This polynomial is further reduced to",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "which is shown in blue and yields a zero of −5. The final root of the original polynomial may be found by either using the final zero as an initial guess for Newton's method, or by reducing p 2 ( x ) {\\displaystyle p_{2}(x)} and solving the linear equation. As can be seen, the expected roots of −8, −5, −3, 2, 3, and 7 were found.",
"title": "Polynomial root finding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Horner's method can be modified to compute the divided difference ( p ( y ) − p ( x ) ) / ( y − x ) . {\\displaystyle (p(y)-p(x))/(y-x).} Given the polynomial (as before)",
"title": "Divided difference of a polynomial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "proceed as follows",
"title": "Divided difference of a polynomial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "At completion, we have",
"title": "Divided difference of a polynomial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "This computation of the divided difference is subject to less round-off error than evaluating p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} and p ( y ) {\\displaystyle p(y)} separately, particularly when x ≈ y {\\displaystyle x\\approx y} . Substituting y = x {\\displaystyle y=x} in this method gives d 1 = p ′ ( x ) {\\displaystyle d_{1}=p'(x)} , the derivative of p ( x ) {\\displaystyle p(x)} .",
"title": "Divided difference of a polynomial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Horner's paper, titled \"A new method of solving numerical equations of all orders, by continuous approximation\", was read before the Royal Society of London, at its meeting on July 1, 1819, with a sequel in 1823. Horner's paper in Part II of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819 was warmly and expansively welcomed by a reviewer in the issue of The Monthly Review: or, Literary Journal for April, 1820; in comparison, a technical paper by Charles Babbage is dismissed curtly in this review. The sequence of reviews in The Monthly Review for September, 1821, concludes that Holdred was the first person to discover a direct and general practical solution of numerical equations. Fuller showed that the method in Horner's 1819 paper differs from what afterwards became known as \"Horner's method\" and that in consequence the priority for this method should go to Holdred (1820).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Unlike his English contemporaries, Horner drew on the Continental literature, notably the work of Arbogast. Horner is also known to have made a close reading of John Bonneycastle's book on algebra, though he neglected the work of Paolo Ruffini.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Although Horner is credited with making the method accessible and practical, it was known long before Horner. In reverse chronological order, Horner's method was already known to:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Qin Jiushao, in his Shu Shu Jiu Zhang (Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections; 1247), presents a portfolio of methods of Horner-type for solving polynomial equations, which was based on earlier works of the 11th century Song dynasty mathematician Jia Xian; for example, one method is specifically suited to bi-quintics, of which Qin gives an instance, in keeping with the then Chinese custom of case studies. Yoshio Mikami in Development of Mathematics in China and Japan (Leipzig 1913) wrote:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "\"... who can deny the fact of Horner's illustrious process being used in China at least nearly six long centuries earlier than in Europe ... We of course don't intend in any way to ascribe Horner's invention to a Chinese origin, but the lapse of time sufficiently makes it not altogether impossible that the Europeans could have known of the Chinese method in a direct or indirect way.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Ulrich Libbrecht concluded: It is obvious that this procedure is a Chinese invention ... the method was not known in India. He said, Fibonacci probably learned of it from Arabs, who perhaps borrowed from the Chinese. The extraction of square and cube roots along similar lines is already discussed by Liu Hui in connection with Problems IV.16 and 22 in Jiu Zhang Suan Shu, while Wang Xiaotong in the 7th century supposes his readers can solve cubics by an approximation method described in his book Jigu Suanjing.",
"title": "History"
}
]
| In mathematics and computer science, Horner's method is an algorithm for polynomial evaluation. Although named after William George Horner, this method is much older, as it has been attributed to Joseph-Louis Lagrange by Horner himself, and can be traced back many hundreds of years to Chinese and Persian mathematicians. After the introduction of computers, this algorithm became fundamental for computing efficiently with polynomials. The algorithm is based on Horner's rule, in which a polynomial is written in nested form: a 0 + a 1 x + a 2 x 2 + a 3 x 3 + ⋯ + a n x n = a 0 + x . This allows the evaluation of a polynomial of degree n with only n multiplications and n additions. This is optimal, since there are polynomials of degree n that cannot be evaluated with fewer arithmetic operations. Alternatively, Horner's method also refers to a method for approximating the roots of polynomials, described by Horner in 1819. It is a variant of the Newton–Raphson method made more efficient for hand calculation by the application of Horner's rule. It was widely used until computers came into general use around 1970. | 2001-12-09T17:10:09Z | 2023-12-24T15:45:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horner%27s_method |
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